The real essence, the internal qualities, and constitution of even the meanest object, is hid from our view; something there is in... every drop of water, every grain of sand, which it is beyond the power of human understanding to fathom or comprehend. But it is evident ... that we are influenced by false principles to that degree as to mistrust our senses, and think we know nothing of those things which we perfectly comprehend.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
My general theory since 1971 has been that the word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognised as such because it h...as achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the word virus (the Other Half) has established itself so firmly as an accepted part of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There's not one part of his physical being that's like that of human beings. From his warped brain down to the tiniest argumentati...ve cell of his huge carcass, he's unearthly.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Despite many assertions to the contrary, the brain is not "like a computer." Yes, the brain has many electrical connections, just ...like a computer. But at each point in a computer only a binary decision can be made--yes or no, on or off, 0 or 1. Each point in the brain, each brain cell, contains all the genetic information necessary to reproduce the entire organism. A brain cell is not a switch. It has a memory; it can be subtle. Each brain cell is like a computer. The brain is like a hundred billion computers all connected together. It is impossible to understand because it is too complex. As Emerson Pugh wrote, "If the human brain was so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Slumism is the pent-up anger of people living on the outside of affluence. Slumism is decay of structure and deterioration of the ...human spirit. Slumism is a virus which spreads through the body politic. As other "isms," it breeds disorder and demagoguery and hate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am more and more convinced that the ant colony is not so much composed of separate individuals as that the colony is a sort of i...ndividual, and each ant like a loose cell in it. Our own blood stream, for instance, contains hosts of white corpuscles which differ little from free-swimming amoebae. When bacteria invade the blood stream, the white corpuscles, like the ants defending the nest, are drawn mechanically to the infected spot, and will die defending the human cell colony. I admit that the comparison is imperfect, but the attempt to liken the individual human warrior to the individual ant in battle is even more inaccurate and misleading. The colony of ants with its component numbers stands half way, as a mechanical, intuitive, and psychical phenomenon, between our bodies as a collection of cells with separate functions and our armies made up of obedient privates. Until one learns both to deny real individual initiative to the single ant, and at the same time to divorce one's mind from the persuasion that the colony has a headquarters which directs activity ... one can make nothing but pretty fallacies out of the polity of the ant heap.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The family is the basic cell of government: it is where we are trained to believe that we are human beings or that we are chattel,... it is where we are trained to see the sex and race divisions and become callous to injustice even if it is done to ourselves, to accept as biological a full system of authoritarian government.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are... the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the "easy life of the gods" would be a lifeless life.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »