Mahsa’s Reviews > The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia > Status Update

“No man, earns punishment, no man earns rewards. Free your minds of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.@

“Loyalty, which asserts the continuity of past and future, binding time into a whole, is the root of human strength; there is no good to be done without it.”

“That the social conscience completely dominates the individual conscience, instead of stinking a balance with it. We don’t cooperate-we obey. We fear being outcast, being called lazy, dysfunctional, egoising. We fear our neighbor’s opinion more than we respect our own freedom of choice.”

“He had been in no danger, but he had never in any danger known himself so close to death. Death was in him, under him; the earth itself was uncertain, unreliable. The enduring, the reliable, is a promise made by the human mind.”

“You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”

“The individual cannot bargain with the State.The State recognizes no coinage but power: and it issues the coins itself.”

“No, brother, I’m sane. What drives people crazy is trying to live outside reality. Reality is terrible. It can kill you. Given time, it certainly will kill you. The reality is pain – you said that! But it is the lies, the evasions of reality, that drive you crazy. It is the lies that make you want to kill yourself…”

you can’t crush ideas by suppressing them. You can only crush them by ignoring them. By refusing to think - refusing to change.

So it was with him. His heart yearned towards them, the kindly young souls who called him brother, but he could not reach them, nor they him. He was born to be alone, a damned cold intellectual, an egoist.

“You shall not go down twice to the same river, nor can you go home again.”