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...

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....

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...

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...

…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...

…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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...