Aleister Crowley Quotes

“But the odd thing is that, while researching this material on the Internet, I was struck by the similarity between the “satanic” Web sites and the fundamentalist ones. Both used striking imagery, both exaggerated the power and importance of “the occult,” and both pandered to a taste for sensationalism, a kind of “spiritual pornography,” aimed at titillating base emotions: fear, greed, egoism, power.”
― Gary Lachman, Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World

“Crowley exemplified on a grand scale what the psychologist Ernest Becker in The Denial of Death called our adolescent need to be seen as “an object of primary value in the universe,”
― Gary Lachman, Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World

“All human evil comes from a single cause, man’s inability to sit still in a room.”
― Gary Lachman, Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World

“Crowley is in danger of becoming just another English eccentric, which is how the British public usually neutralizes some challenge to its complacency.”
― Gary Lachman, Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World

“He is, I believe, a kind of “test case” for a philosophy of life that has become the default alternative to the bland “normality” he did everything he could to outrage. It is a philosophy and ethic that, for sake of a better term, I call “liberationist.” Its message is that if we can only rid ourselves of all repression, all inhibitions, all hang-ups, all authority, then the Golden Age will miraculously appear. It is an antinomian philosophy (“against the norms”) that reaches for some ethos “beyond good and evil.”
― Gary Lachman, Aleister Crowley: Magick, Rock and Roll, and the Wickedest Man in the World