The new frontiers to be conquered are mainly in the convolutions of the cortex.
We cannot unthink unless we are insane.
History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unerring, she flows towards her goal. At every bend in her course she leaves the mud which she carries and the corpses of the drowned.
Every creative act involves a new innocence or perception, liberated from the cataract of accepted belief.
Men cannot be treated as units in operations of political arithmetic because they behave like the symbols for zero and the infinite, which dislocate all mathematical operations.
Among all forms of mentation, verbal thinking is the most articulate, the most complex, and the most vulnerable to infectious diseases. It is liable to absorb whispered suggestions, and to incorporate them as hidden persuaders into the code.
The fact is: I no longer believe in my own infallibility. That is why I am lost.
A publisher who writes is like a cow in a milk bar.
Woe unto the defeated, whom history treads into the dust.
Language can become a screen which stands between the thinker and reality. This is the reason why true creativity often starts where language ends.
We brought you truth, and in our mouth it sounded a lie. We brought you freedom, and it looks in our hands like a whip. We brought you the living life, and where our voice is heard the trees wither and there is a rustling of dry leaves. We brought you the promise of the future, but our tongue stammered and barked...
Much depends on asking the right question at the right time.
Had not history always been an inhumane, unscrupulous builder, mixing its mortar of lies, blood and mud?
History has taught us that often lies serve her better than the truth; for man is sluggish and has to be led through the desert for forty years before each step in his development. And he has to be driven through the desert with threats and promises, by imaginary terrors and imaginary consolations, so that he should not sit down prematurely to rest and divert himself by worshipping golden calves.
Every jump of technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses a step behind, and thus causes a fall in the political-maturity thermometer. It takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes generations, for a people’s level of understanding gradually to adapt itself to the changed state of affairs, until it has recovered the same capacity for self-government as it had already possessed at a lower stage of civilization.
He found out that those processes wrongly known as “monologues” are really dialogues of a special kind; dialogues in which one partner remains silent while the other against all grammatical rules, addresses him as “I” instead of “you”, in order to creep into his confidence and to fathom his intentions; but the silent partner just remains silent, shuns observation and even refuses to be localized in time and space.
A sadist is a person who is kind to a masochist.
They dreamed of power with the object of abolishing power; of ruling over the people to wean them from the habit of being ruled.
I am trying to stress a point which they do not sufficiently emphasize, or tend to overlook altogether-namely, that the organism is not a mosaic aggregate of elementary physico-chemical processes, but a hierarchy in which each member, from the sub-cellular level upward, is a closely integrated structure, equipped with self-regulatory devices, and enjoys an advanced form of self-government.
The metre of the poet, the metronome of the musician, the centimetre of the mathematician, are all derived from the same root, metron: measure, measurement.