Quotes
Quotes about Wit
The rout is Folly's circle, which she draws With magic wand. So potent is the spell, That none decoy'd into that fatal ring, Unless by Heaven's peculiar grace, escape. There we grow early gray, but never wise.
The noisy and extensive scene of crowds without company, and dissipation without pleasure.
Society drives people crazy with lust and calls it advertising.
The individual is not a killer, but the group is, and by identifying with it the individual is transformed into a killer.
When reality becomes unbearable, the mind must withdraw from it and create a world of artificial perfection. Plato's world of pure Ideas and Forms, which alone is to be considered as real, whereas the world of nature which we perceive is merely its cheap Woolworth copy, is a flight into delusion.
...in the course of the last century science has become so dizzy with its successes, that it has forgotten to ask the pertinent questions- or refused to ask them under the pretext that they are meaningless, and in any case not the scientists concern.
Wherever we find orderly, stable systems in Nature, we find that they are hierarchically structured, for the simple reason that without such structuring of complex systems into sub-assemblies, there could be no order and stability- except the order of a dead universe filled with a uniformly distributed gas.
Some tribes [of monkeys] have taken to washing potatoes in the river before eating them, others have not. Sometimes migrating groups of potato-washers meet non-washers, and the two groups watch each other's strange behavior with apparent bewilderment. But unlike the inhabitants of Lilliput, who fought holy crusades over the question at which end to break the egg, the potato-washing monkeys do not go to war with the non-washers, because the poor creatures have no language which would enable them to declare washing a diving commandment and eating unwashed potatoes a deadly heresy.
Labor is man's greatest function. He is nothing, he can do nothing, he can achieve nothing, he can fulfill nothing, without working.
Cultures contain many cues and inducements to dissuade the individual from approaching ultimate limits, in much the same way that a special warning strip of land around the edge of a baseball field lets a player know that he is about to run into a concrete wall when he is preoccupied with catching the ball. The wider that strip of land and the more sensitive the player is to the changing composition of the ground under his feet as he pursues the ball, the more effective the warning. Romanticizing or lionizing as "individualistic" those people who disregard social cues and inducements increases the danger of head-on collisions with inherent social limits. Decrying various forms of social disapproval is in effect narrowing the warning strip.
The demands of unbounded individualism need to be weighed in the light of inherent social constraints which can only change their form but cannot be eliminated without eliminating civilization.
Disapproval is a very important factor in all progress. There has really never been any progress without it.
The affairs of life embrace a multitude of interests, and he who reasons in any one of them, without consulting the rest, is a visionary unsuited to control the business of the world.
There is no such thing as philosophy-free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination.
Without an element of the obscene there can be no true and deep aesthetic or moral conception of life...It is only the great men who are truly obscene. If they had not dared to be obscene they could never have dared to be great.
The ideal of self-advancement which the civilizing west offers to backward populations brings with it the plague of individual frustration. All the advantages brought by the West are ineffectual substitutes for the sheltering and soothing anonymity of communal existence.
One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputations.
The technique of a mass movement aims to infect people with a malady and then offer the movement as a cure.
Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience.
Nonconformists travel as a rule in bunches. You rarely find a nonconformist who goes it alone. And woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.
The desire to be different from the people we live with is sometimes the result of our rejection- real or imagined- by them.
Any good practical philosophy must start out with the recognition of our having a body.
Fundamentalist religion is the most pervasive vision of central planning, though many fundamentalists may oppose human central planning as a usurpation or "playing God." This is consistent with the fundamentalist vision of an unconstrained God and a highly constrained man.
The thoughts of Plato and Machiavelli... don't seem quite enough armor for a world beset with splitting the atoms, urban guerrillas, nineteen varieties of psychotherapists, amplified guitars, napalm, computers, astronauts, and an atmosphere polluted simultaneously with auto exhaust and TV commercials.
The bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie have armed themselves against the rising proletariat with, among other things, "culture." It's an old ploy of the bourgeoisie. They keep a standing "art" to defend their collapsing culture.
