Incidentally, why was it that none of all the pious ever discovered psycho-analysis? Why did it have to wait for a completely godl...ess Jew?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The machines that are first invented to perform any particular movement are always the most complex, and succeeding artists genera...lly discover that, with fewer wheels, with fewer principles of motion, than had originally been employed, the same effects may be more easily produced. The first systems, in the same manner, are always the most complex.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The spider-mind acquires a faculty of memory, and, with it, a singular skill of analysis and synthesis, taking apart and putting t...ogether in different relations the meshes of its trap. Man had in the beginning no power of analysis or synthesis approaching that of the spider, or even of the honey-bee; but he had acute sensibility to the higher forces.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Both the Moral Majority, who are recycling medieval language to explain AIDS, and those ultra-leftists who attribute AIDS to some ...sort of conspiracy, have a clearly political analysis of the epidemic. But even if one attributes its cause to a microorganism rather than the wrath of God, or the workings of the CIA, it is clear that the way in which AIDS has been perceived, conceptualized, imagined, researched and financed makes this the most political of diseases.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Our systems, perhaps, are nothing more than an unconscious apology for our faults--a gigantic scaffolding whose object is to hide ...from us our favorite sin.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Reasoning is compared to understanding as movement is to rest, or acquisition to possession.... Since movement always proceeds fro...m something immovable, and ends in something at rest, hence it is that human reasoning, in the order of inquiry and discovery, proceeds from certain things absolutely understood--namely, the first principles; and, again, in the order of judgment, returns by analysis to first principles, in the light of which it examines what it has found. Now it is clear that rest and movement are not to be referred to different powers, but to one and the same.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... the loss of belief in future states is politically, though certainly not spiritually, the most significant distinction between... our present period and the centuries before. And this loss is definite. For no matter how religious our world may turn again, or how much authentic faith still exists in it, or how deeply our moral values may be rooted in our religious systems, the fear of hell is no longer among the motives which would prevent or stimulate the actions of a majority.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No civilization ... would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change.... Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders,... its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. The fault lies with your mouldy systems, your logic of 2 2 = 4. The fault lies with you, Chancellors, caught in the net of syllogisms. You manufacture engineers, magistrates, doctors, who know nothing of the true mysteries of the body or the cosmic laws of existence. False scholars blind outside this world, philosophers who pretend to reconstruct the mind. The least act of spontaneous creation is a more complex and revealing world than any metaphysics.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across ...the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudoevents, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century--sex and paranoia.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »