It is not brains or intelligence that is needed to cope with the problems with Plato and Aristotle and all of their successors to the present have failed to confront. What is needed is a readiness to undervalue the world altogether. This is only poss...
Is magic not enough to live for?" Widget asks. "Magic," the man in the grey suit repeats, turning the word into a laugh. "This is not magic. This is the way the world is, only very few people take the time to stop and note it. Look around you," he sa...
Finally, I had held up examples of Goldhagen's inflammatory language and suggested that he had missed the essence of what Primo Levi once called the 'grey zone' of human affairs, described by the historian Christopher Browning as that foggy universe ...
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liber...
To the man of science, on his unassuming and laborious travels, which must often enough be journeys through the desert, there appear those glittering mirages called 'philosophical systems'; with bewitching deceptive power they show the solution of al...
Right now, we are in a peak cycle. There’s tremendous energy out there, directed against the state. It’s not all focused, but it’s there, and it’s building. Maybe this will be sufficient to accomplish what we must accomplish over the fairly s...
For the first time his senses began to register the exotic, heady atmosphere of Mumbai...the odors most insistently demanded his attention. There were layers upon layers of them, all present at once but individually distinct. They shifted in strength...
How about this?” she retorted, her voice deceptively flirtatious, and in that small, stolen moment in his mind, he quickly spun and grasped her by the small of her back, pulled her close into to him, and made her his. And maybe she resisted at firs...
We want our children to know and believe the one good story. Every other story is a copy or shadow of this one. Some copies of it are quite good and shout the Truth. Others see only the faintest whisper of it, or, in its absence remind us of the Trut...
I had done something wrong. I shouldn't have shown him. But he had known, hadn't he? What had I done? I retreated quickly down the aisle, pushing my way through the double doors into the porch, where I swiped one of my eyes dry. For a long moment I s...
Through this process, wisdom clarifies the way that the mind manufacturers emotion and karma, and finally penetrates the illusion of self. Just as though one were investigating how a magician created his display of illusions, one studies mental event...
For I am—or I was—one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and th...
The real enemy" is the totality of physical and mental constraints by which capital, or class society, or statism, or the society of the spectacle expropriates everyday life, the time of our lives. The real enemy is not an object apart from life. It ...
Sitting there on the heather, on our planetary grain, I shrank from the abysses that opened up on every side, and in the future. The silent darkness, the featureless unknown, were more dread than all the terrors that imagination had mustered. Peering...
There is a law of the natural worlds (the spiritual and the physical) and this is something I have understood: that for every genuine existence, for every real manifestation and occurrence, there are are ten thousand falsities. Before you meet what o...
When I was a teen, I liked to hang out around popular girls, I thought they had some magic, secrets that only they knew and I wanted to learn it... Though pretty soon I realized... popular girls were just like spam... they promised a lot, but only th...
James Reston, Jr.: You know the first and greatest sin of the deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes great, complex ideas, stretches of time; whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot. At first I couldn't understand why ...
Make no mistake, hiding one's true self away in a closet and creating a facade of heterosexuality is not without its consequences. It may appear to have a degree of safety but from my experience they are very unhealthy places and do all kinds of terr...
But in any case, validity, offender self-reports have dubious validity, especially when the offender's self-interest is at stake. The only rule for deception in sex offenders I have ever found is this: If it is in the offender's best interests to lie...
I am glad it cannot happen twice, the fever of first love. For it is a fever, and a burden, too, whatever the poets may say. They are not brave, the days when we are twenty-one. They are full of little cowardices, little fears without foundation, and...
