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“The function of the artist,” the Navajo answered, “is to provide what life does not.”
“You are by nature a very curious woman,”
“Logic only gives man what he needs,” he stammered. “Magic gives him what he wants.”
“There is no such thing as a weird human being. It's just that some people require more understanding than others.”
“Happiness is a learned condition. And since it is learned and self-generating, it does not depend upon external circumstances for its perpetuation.
Whether a man is a criminal or a public servant is purely a matter of perspective.
Man's peculiarly ambivalent psyche permits him to operate simultaneously according to two opposing codes. There is the code which he professes to live by, and there is the code to whose standards he actually does adhere. The deceit is so ingrained and subtle that most men truly are unaware of it, although to psychologists, philosophers and the like, it is no news at all.
The underworld persists because society needs it, insists upon it, supports it (at the same time that it denies and persecutes it, of course).
Something in his nature has always been intolerant of authority, especially when it is violently imposed upon those who seem neither to need it nor want it—as is usually the case.
Somewhere in the archives of crudest instinct is recorded the truth that it is better to be endangered and free than captive and comfortable.
A creature, human or otherwise, that has had its freedom compromised has been degraded.
You've been close enough to the source to have learned that beings never really go extinct. Their forms may become obsolete but their essential energies are eternal. The only thing that ever disappears is the shape of energy.
Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry that it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds sheep or cows or such and the latter breeds (assumed) facts. The husbandryman uses his skills to enrich the future, the historian uses his to enrich the past. Both are usually up to their ankles in bullshit.
The FBI will report something like 'In Los Angeles today there is 22 per cent more violent crime than there was in 1950.' But it neglects to note that population-wise, Los Angeles is almost twice as large as it was in 1950. If you consider population growth in ratio to crime, then crime has actually decreased. Is the FBI willfully distorting the facts? And if so, to what end?
Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out. Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is—and still not caring.”
“If it is poison you are worried about, you had better stay away from supermarket foods with their preservatives and pesticides.”
The fact is, what I hated in the Church was what I hated in society. Namely, authoritarians. Power freaks. Rigid dogmatists. Those greedy, underloved, undersexed twits who want to run everything.
Now I ask you, when a religion has to make its own priests punch a clock, when it so much as admits that its own oath-bound holy fathers have been sneaking off the job early, coming in late and playing hooky, wouldn't you say that that religion has a soft white underbelly? Can you imagine Jesus punching a clock? If he had, would it have prevented his “early departure"?
The fear of death is the beginning of slavery, Amanda has said. If she is right, then I was enslaved at an early age. It started with a little prayer my mother helped me memorize when I was four or five. Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray thee, Lord, my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray thee, Lord, my soul to take.
How many other Christian children have lost their purchase on life and liberty while on their bunny-suit knees repeating the chilling words of that nursery-room plea for immortality? I wonder.
Our society gives its economy priority over health, love, truth, beauty, sex and salvation; over life itself.
