In order to be respected, authority has got to be respectable.

Life isn’t stable. Stability is unnatural. The only stable society is the police state. You can have a free society or you can have a stable society. You can’t have both. Take your choice. As...

The ugly may be beautiful, the pretty never.

There are many things worth living for, a few things worth dying for, and nothing worth killing for.

salvation is for the feeble, that’s what I think. I don’t want salvation, I want life, all of life, the miserable as well as the superb.

It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.

In addition, Dr. Dannyboy has suggested a fifth element: positive thinking. Pointing out that their breathing, bathing, dining and screwing brought Alobar and Kudra much physical pleasure, and that an organism steeped in pleasure is...

Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.

Ideas are mallable and unstable; they not only can be misused, they invite misuse—and the better the idea the more volatile it is. That’s because only the better ideas turn into dogma, and it is...

performance” of the Cheerios.Could the Cheerios be in bad voice? Might not they handle well on curves? Do they ejaculate too quickly? Has age affected their timing or are they merely in a mid-season slump?...

I believe in political solutions to political problems. But man’s primary problems aren’t political; they’re philosophical. Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they’re condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over...

They accepted my donation, so they’re aware they’d better serve my interests or I’ll buy some leadership that will.

The trouble with you is that the only way you can communicate is through art. You’ve never learned to communicate your feelings to a man. You don’t even want to communicate in a relationship. You...

…ideas are definitely unstable, they not only CAN be misused, they invite misuse–and the better the idea the more volatile it is. That’s because only the better ideas turn into dogma, and it is this...

For the ethical, political activism was seductive because it seemed to offer the possibility that one could improve society, make things better, without going through the personal ordeal of rearranging one’s perceptions and transforming one’s...

We’re our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.

We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.

It seems like with you everything leads back to the subject of death.””Sure and show me the person’s road that does not lead to death. we try to divert our attention, to pretend ’tisn’t so,...

Hardly a pure science, history is closer to animal husbandry than it is to mathematics in that it involves selective breeding. The principal difference between the husbandryman and the historian is that the former breeds...

Morality depends on culture. Culture depends on climate.

…on a number of occasions this book has made reference to magic, and each time you’ve shaken your head, muttering such criticisms as “What does he mean by ‘magic’ anyhow? It’s embarrassing to find a...

Politics is for people who have a passion for changing life but lack a passion for living it

If it is committed in the name of God or country, there is no crime so heinous that the public will not forgive it.

Our individuality is all, all, that we have. There are those who barter it for security, those who repress it for what they believe is the betterment of the whole society, but blessed in the...

After the monkeys came down from the trees and learned to hurl sharp objects, they had had to move into caves for protection–not only from the big predatory cats but, as they began to lose...

Whenever a state or an individual cited ‘insufficient funds’ as an excuse for neglecting this important thing or that, it was indicative of the extent to which reality had been distorted by the abstract lens...

The enemy is the tyranny of the dull mind.

But why diminish your soul being run-of-the-mill at something? Mediocrity: now there is ugliness for you. Mediocrity’s a hairball coughed up on the Persian carpet of Creation.

The afternoon passed more slowly than a walnut-sized kidney stone.

Those who possess wisdom cannot just ladle it out to every wantwit and jackanapes who comes along and asks for it. A person must be prepared to receive wisdom, or else it will do him...

Mockingbirds are the true artists of the bird kingdom. Which is to say, although they’re born with a song of their own, an innate riff that happens to be one of the most versatile of...

If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it andpush it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before,push it to the wildest edge...

Is that man’s fate: to spend his closest hours to truth longing for a lie?

Gods and men create one another, destroy one another, though by different means.

I believe in nothing, everything is sacred. I believe in everything, nothing is sacred.

The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.

can’t-get-enough-of-you” hot-as-hell-fucks?Think about it. Would Satan get New Orleans, Bangkok, and the French Riviera and God get Salt Lake City? Satan get ice hockey, God get horseshoes? God get bingo, Satan get stud poker? Satan...

If New Orleans is not fully in the mainstream of culture, neither is it fully in the mainstream of time. Lacking a well-defined present, it lives somewhere between its past and its future, as if...

It is questionable, for that matter, whether success is an adequate response to life. Success can eliminate as many options as failure.

They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning.

The narrow, no-nonsense skeptic is every bit as naive as the breezy-brained New Age believer.

It’s been a positive thing for us. I think it’s excellent.

In the haunted house of life, art is the only stair that doesn’t creak.

If desire causes suffering, it may be because we do not desire wisely, or that we are inexpert at obtaining what we desire. Instead of hiding our heads in a prayer cloth and building walls...

Evidently, I’d suffered an epiphany: the subconscious realization that when it comes to coolness, nothing the human race has ever invented is more cool than a book.

To specialize is to brush one tooth. When a person specializes he channels all of his energies through one narrow conduit; he knows one thing extremely well and is ignorant of almost everything else.

There’s no point in saving the world if it means losing the moon.

Human folly does not impede the turning of the stars.

When you’re unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly...

Beauty! Wasn’t that what mattered? Beauty was hardly a popular ideal at that jumpy moment in history. The masses had been desensitized to it, the intelligentsia regarded it with suspicion. To most of her peers,...