Favorite Quotes
The best political, social, and spiritual work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.
– Carl Jung
Buddhism has the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: it transcends a personal God, avoids dogmas and theology; it covers both the natural & spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity.
– Albert Einstein
When the buttocks wiggles, the whole world giggles.
– Okolewikiono Proverb
I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don’t know the answer.
– Douglas Adams
Mud sometimes gives the illusion of depth.
– Marshall McLuhan
The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, and intolerable.
– H. L. Mencken
No one has a right to obstruct another exercising his faculties innocently for the relief of sensibilities made a part of his nature.
– Thomas Jefferson
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.
– US Bill of Rights, 1st Amendment
I didn’t think it was physically possible, but this both sucks and blows.
– Bart Simpson
You do not let your eyes see nor your ears hear, and that which is outside your daily life is not of account to you. Do you not think that there are things which you cannot understand, and yet which are; that some people see things that others cannot? But there are things old and new which must not be contemplated by men’s eyes, because they know – or think they know – some things which other men have told them. Ah, it is the fault of our science that it wants to explain all; and if it explains not, then it says there is nothing to explain.
– Professor Van Helsing in Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.
– Mark Twain
Corporations gained personhood through aggressive court maneuvers culminating in an 1886 Supreme Court case called Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific. Until then, only We the People were protected by the Bill of Rights, and the governments the people elected could regulate corporations as they wished. But with personhood, corporations steadily gained ways to weaken government restraints on their behavior.
– Tom Stites
I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.
– Galileo Galilei
I’m investing everything I have in love, intelligence and laughter.
– Gliddy Narfass, SMI²LE Agent
There is a river flowing now very fast. It is so great and swift, that there are those who will be afraid. They will try to hold on to the shore. They will feel they are being torn apart and will suffer greatly. Know the river has it`s destination. The elders say we must let go of the shore, push off into the middle of the river, keep our eyes open and our heads above the water.
– Hopi Elder
Yesterday upon the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today.
I wish that man would go away.
– William Hughes Mearns
If the government thinks only of profits, the officers will become corrupt and the people will soon become rebels and bandits. If the government reveres honest people, the officers will love honesty also, and the people will love one another.A government does not profit by profits: its honest people are its treasury.
– Kungfu Tze
Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the Government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil–minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well–meaning but without understanding.
– Justice Louis D. Brandeis
We do not realize what tremendous power the structure of an habitual language has. It is no exaggeration to say that it enslaves us through the mechanism of semantic reactions and that the structure which a language exhibits, and impresses upon us, is automatically projected upon the world around us.
– Alfred Korzybski
All our advances are going very slowly, very painfully and haltingly, because the new work in science, the Einstein and the new quantum theories included, is all of a non–elementalistic structure, while our daily languages are elementalistic and absolutistic and twist pathologically our habits of “thought” and semantic reactions.
– Alfred Korzybski
The existence of the Fifth Circuit and the natural rapture experience has always been a taboo topic proscribed by larval social law because it is instinctively recognised that if the human being discovers a source of pleasure within Hir body, the commitment and dedication to terrestrial social rewards will diminish.
– Timothy Leary, Info–Psychology
Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principle upon which our Government was founded.
– Abraham Lincoln
The only difference between me and a madman is that I am not mad.
– Salvador Dali
Love is metaphysical gravity.
– R. Buckminster Fuller
“In God We Trust.” I don’t believe it would sound any better if it were true.
– Mark Twain
Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.
– Mark Twain
Our Bible reveals to us the character of our god with minute and remorseless exactness . . . It is perhaps the most damnatory biography that exists in print anywhere. It makes Nero an angel of light and leading by contrast.
– Mark Twain
The only way to improve your mind is to improve your style. People will either understand this at once or no force on earth can compel them to understand it.
– Friedrich Nietzsche
In 1565 Nostradamus predicted what will happen to you ten minutes from now.
– Gliddy Narfass
Your Computer Contains Minute Electrically Charged Particles Moving at Velocities in Excess of Five Hundred Million Miles Per Hour.
– Anonymous
So ego, then, is the absence of true knowledge of who we really are, together with its result: a doomed clutching on, at all costs, to a cobbled together and makeshift image of ourselves, an inevitably chameleon charlatan self that keeps changing and has to, to keep alive the fiction of its existence.
– Sogyal Rinpoche
The problem is . . . we learned how to precipitate mass death before we got past the neurological disorder of wishing for it. That’s it. Grow up or die.
– Bill Mahar
Our daily language, and, in most cases, our so–called scientific language together with its logic, originated mostly in a pre–scientific epoch and are largely elementalistic and absolutistic; which must hamper successful reasoning and solutions.
– Alfred Korzybski
Today the tyrant rules not by club or fist, but disguised as a market researcher, he shepherds his flocks in the ways of utility and comfort.
– Marshall McLuhan
If you look into your own heart, and you find nothing wrong there, what is there to worry about? What is there to fear?
– KungfuTse
You are the most complicated thing in the cosmos. You can’t figure you out.
– Alan Watts
Fulgurous exhalation conglobed in a cloud by the circumfused humour.
– Tallius
My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes, the less there is left to think about, and a person sure of everything would never have any need to think about anything and might be considered clinically dead under current medical standards, where absence of brain activity is taken to mean that life has ended.
– Robert Anton Wilson
An optimistic mind–set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.
– Robert Anton Wilson
The wise become Confucian in good times, Buddhist in bad times, and Toaist in old age.
– Chinese proverb
Fear of the unpredictible, which I call infophobia, underlies every movement or ideology that I have satirized.
– Robert Anton Wilson
Dreams of flying appeared in the collective unconscious before the reality of flight existed in technology, and I suspect that if we understood our dreams better we would use our technology more wisely.
– Robert Anton Wilson
The world is non–simultaneously apprehended.
– R. Buckminster Fuller
Remember: we’ve had a war–based economy since 1937, but it’s getting harder and harder to find enemies . . . Terrorists, who can be anywhere or anyone, make the Ideal Platonic Enemy in this Ideal Platonic War. And there ain’t even a urine test for them. My god, how the funding rolls in.
– Robert Anton Wilson
One psychic told me I sometimes channel a medieval Irish bard; another told me I sometimes channel an ancient Chinese Taoist philosopher, an alchemist. I think every writer channels “Entities” and I suspect we all have thousands of “Entities” within each of us that can function as if they were independent spirits. I don’t believe in the single ego. I think we have multiple egos and when one starts communicating we’re likely to think it’s the spirit of the dead or something like that, but it’s just another part of ourselves.
– Robert Anton Wilson
I had given a talk to the Irish Science–Fiction Society and the question period began. “Do you believe in UFOs?” somebody asked. “Yes, of course,” I answered. The questioner, who looked quite young, then burst into a long speech, “proving” at least to his own satisfaction that all UFOs “really are” sun–dogs or heat inversions. When he finally ran down I simply replied, “Well, we both agree that UFOs exist. Our only difference is that you think you know what they are and I’m still puzzled.”
– Robert Anton Wilson
It is not only the juror’s right, but his duty, to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgement and conscience, though in direct opposition to the directions of the court.
– John Adams
There’s nothing special about Enlightenment. You do it every night in your sleep. Zen is just a trick for doing it while awake.
– Yositani Roshi
The dynamism of evolution, we repeat, is the selection of information, coherence, out of a random series of events.
– Robert Anton Wilson
With a few exceptions, literary & art critics tend to annoy me, for the same reason theologians and Ideologists annoy me – they tend to write like Jehovah pronouncing Salvation or Damnation, not like mere humans offering personal opinions. Korzybski called it “noise,” Wittgenstein called it “abuse of language,” Nietzsche called it “swindling,” but whatever you call it, it seems like they belong in Carlin’s “full of shit” category, as distinguished from the truly stupid or the fookin crazy.
– Robert Anton Wilson
In the province of the mind what is believed true is true or becomes true within limits to be learned by experience and experiment. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the province of the mind there are no limits.
– Dr. John Lilly
The illusion of Sin and Guilt, the madness of our species, is the act of cursing the world under the misapprehension that one is cursing only one part of it. To curse the fig tree, as in the funniest and most misunderstood parable of Jesus, is to curse the soil in which it grew, the seed, the rains, the sun; the whole world, eventually – because no part is truly separate from the whole. The fallacy is that one can judge the part in isolation from the whole is “the Lie that all men believe.”
– Robert Anton Wilson
Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame.
– Robert Anton Wilson
Religious controversies are always productive of more acrimony and irreconcilable hatreds than those which spring from any other cause. I had hoped that liberal and enlightened thought would have reconciled the Christians so that their religious fights would not endanger the peace of Society.
– George Washington
I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of… Each of those churches accuse the other of unbelief; and for my own part, I disbelieve them all.
– Thomas Paine
The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.
– John Adams
Lighthouses are more helpful than churches.
– Benjamin Franklin
I am no longer young enough to know everything.
– Oscar Wilde
If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. If any man ever dared to translate all that is in his heart, to put down what is really his experience, what is truly his truth, I think then the world would go to smash, that it would be blown to smithereens and no god, no accident, no will could ever again assemble the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that have gone to make up the world.
– Henry Miller
Behind this longest of all American civil wars, the War on Some Drugs, lies the deep pockets of clever corporations buying exactly the government and media they want, and co–opting a conservative tunnel vision morality to bully anyone who doesn’t just shut up and watch the TV. I was really hoping for more enlightened behavior here in the 21st century.
– Gliddy Narfass
Maybe Philosophy gives everyone a viewpoint, and no one a monopoly. Integral Philosophy recognizes levels of consciousness in the uneven terrain of universal endeavor. Quantum Philosophy posits a holographic world of light created in the moment by our intention as wave forms collapse into “consciousness particles” we naively call Reality.
– Gliddy Narfass
You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely–knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends.
– Robert Anton Wilson
