Having a spine is overrated. If everybody squealed and ran away, there’d be no more wars.

He was harassed, but still he spoke with authority. He was, in fact, characteristic of the best type of dominant male in the world at this time. He was fifty-five years old, tough, shrewd, unburdened by the complicated ethical ambiguities which puzzle intellectuals, and had long ago decided that the world was a mean son-of-a-bitch...

But they can rule by fraud, and by fraud eventually acquire access to the tools they need to finish the job of killing off the Constitution.”What sort of tools?”More stringent security measures. Universal electronic surveillance. No-knock laws. Stop and frisk laws. Government inspection of first-class mail. Automatic fingerprinting, photographing, blood tests, and urinalysis of any...

The individual act of obedience is the cornerstone not only of the strength of authoritarian society but also of its weakness.

These ideas can be made more concrete with a parable, which I borrow from John Fowles’s wonderful novel, The Magus.Conchis, the principle character in the novel, finds himself Mayor of his hometown in Greece when the Nazi occupation begins. One day, three Communistpartisans who recently killed some German soldiers are caught. The Nazi commandant gives...

Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.

The normal is that which nobody quite is. If you listen to seemingly dull people very closely, you’ll see that they’re all mad in different and interesting ways, and are merely struggling to hide it.

belief is the death of intelligence.

Taxation is robbery based on monopoly of weapons

Stupidity is like bumping into a wall all the time. After a while you get tired of it and try to look the situation over and see if there’s a doorway somewhere. I think most people eventually do look for the doorway and stop bumping into the wall

…an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.

The future is up for grabs. It belongs to any and all who will take the risk and accept the responsibility of consciously creating the future they want.

When you’re dealing with these forces or powers in a philosophic and scientific way, contemplating them from an armchair, that rationalistic approach is useful. It is quite profitable then to regard the gods and goddesses and demons as projections of the human mind or as unconscious aspects of ourselves. But every truth is a truth...

…when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases.

To say that one goes on holiday is to speak the language of the working class, for whom the time off appears merry and playful; but to say one goes on vacation is to speak the language of the ruling class. Vacation comes from the same root as vacant and reflects what the owner sees...

There are gods, but there is no God; and all gods become devils eventually.

…reality is always plural and mutable.

You know the difference between right and wrong,’ he repeated finally. ‘Man, why did you need Initiation—by the Golden Dawn, or by anybody else? You are a genius, a sage, a giant among men. You have solved the problem which philosophers have been debating since antiquity—the mystery about which no two nations or tribes have...

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.

We look for the Secret – the Philosopher’s Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, ‘God’ or whatever…and all the time it is carrying us about…It is the human nervous system itself.

We all see only that which we are trained to see.

Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, “My current model” — or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel — “contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised.” In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and...

Mystics are all a bit funny in the head anyway,” the priest added cynically, “which is why the church locks them all up in mental hospitals and euphemistically calls these institutions monasteries.

The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.

We’re living among infinite possibilities. And the prevalent philosophies of post-modernist pessimism that come out of the universities are really a major tragedy. The opportunities for progress and change… are absolutely tremendous. Anybody who tells you that we’re running out of resources or in a terrible mess–they are idiots. We can’t run out of resources....

Whenever people are certain they understand our peculiar situation here on this planet, it is because they have accepted a religious Faith or a secular Ideology (Ideologies are the modern form of Faiths) and just stopped thinking.

The most thoroughly and relentlessly damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignored, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all ‘Damned Things’ is the individual human being. The social engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this ‘Damned Thing’ into carefully prepared...