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My dear, I used to think I was serving humanity . . . and I pleasured in the thought. Then I discovered that humanity does not want to be served; on the contrary it resents any attempt to serve it.
Government! Three-fourths parasitic and the rest stupid fumbling—oh,
I’ve never understood how God could expect his creatures to pick the one true religion by faith—it strikes me as a sloppy way to run a universe.
There was one field in which man was unsurpassed; he showed unlimited ingenuity in devising bigger and more efficient ways to kill off, enslave, harass, and in all ways make an unbearable nuisance of himself to himself. Man was his own grimmest joke on himself.
A desire not to butt into other people’s business is eighty percent of all human wisdom.”
Democracy is a poor system; the only thing that can be said for it is that it’s eight times as good as any other method. Its worst fault is that its leaders reflect their constituents—a low level, but what can you expect?
Then suddenly, with grokking so blinding that he trembled, he understood money. These pretty pictures and bright medallions were not “money”; they were symbols for an idea which spread through these people, all through their world. But things were not money, any more than water shared was growing-closer. Money was an idea, as abstract as an Old One’s thoughts—money was a great structured symbol for balancing and healing and growing closer.
I’ve found out why people laugh. They laugh because it hurts . . . because it’s the only thing that’ll make it stop hurting.”
‘Love’ is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.”
No truer words have ever been spoken.
the ethics of sex is a thorny problem. Each of us is forced to grope for a solution he can live with—in the face of a preposterous, unworkable, and evil code of so-called ‘Morals.’
Age does not bring wisdom, Ben, but it does give perspective . . . and the saddest sight of all is to see, far behind you, temptations you’ve resisted.
Man is so built that he cannot imagine his own death. This leads to endless invention of religions.
