Tofu and futons. The adepts of Orientalism seem to spend most of their lives reclining. They can’t quite summon the energy to crawl up onto a chair. Even their Yogic exercises are carried out in a prone or sitting position.
The New Age orgy: The flesh was willing but the spirit’s weak.
The world of employer and employee, like that of master and slave, debases both.
In social institutions, the whole is always less than the sum of its parts. There will never be a state as good as its people, or a church worthy of its congregation, or a university equal to its faculty and students.
Terrorism: deadly violence against humans and other living things, usually conducted by government against its own people.
Only a fool would leave the enjoyment of rainbows to the opticians. Or give the science of optics the last word on the matter.
This world may be only illusion – but it’s the only illusion we’ve got.
There never was a good war or a bad revolution.
There has never yet been a human society worthy of the name of civilization. Civilization remains a remote ideal.
The tragic sense of life: our heroic acceptance of the suffering of others.
There has never been an ‘original’ sin: each is quite banal.
Reply to Plato: I seen horses I seen cows I haint never yet seen horsiness nor that there bovinity neither.
The earth is real. Only a fool, milking his cow, denies the cow’s reality.
Humility is a virtue when you have no other.
The most striking thing about the rich is the gracious democracy of their manners – and the crude vulgarity of their way of life.
Of all bores, the worst is the sparkling bore.
If, as some say, evil lies in the hearts and not the institutions of men, then there’s hardly a distinction worth making between, say, Hitler’s Germany and Rebecca’s Sunnybrook Farm.
Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and the powerful.
King Arthur and his armored goons of the Round Table functioned as the Politburo of a slave state: Camelot. Of all who have written on the Matter of Arthur, from Malory to White, only Mark Twain understood this. But Mark Twain was a great writer.
One can imagine a sane, healthy, cheerful human society based on no more than the principles of common sense, as validated each day by work, play, and living experience. But this remains the most utopian and fantastic of ideals.