The novels that get praised in the NY Review of Books aren’t worth reading. Ninety-seven percent of science fiction is adolescent rubbish, but good science fiction is the best and only literature of our times.
I regard morality and ideology as the chief cause of human misery.
Artistic judgments are silly if expressed as dogmas, at least until we get an “artometer” which can measure objectively how many micro-michelangelos or kilo-homers of genius a given artifact has in it.
Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot.
To work for libertarianism – to oppose the growth of government and aid the liberation of the individual – used to be an idealistic choice taken for purely idealistic reasons. Now it is an act of intelligent and almost desperate self-defense.
Reality is the temporary resultant of continuous struggles between rival gangs of programmers.
A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of monopoly in the means of production.
I regard belief as a form of brain damage.
Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different.
If one can only see things according to one’s own belief system, one is destined to become virtually deaf, dumb, and blind.
Existence is larger than any model that is not itself the exact size of existence...
Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame.
Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.
When the rose and the cross are united the alchemical marriage is complete and the drama ends. Then we wake from history and enter eternity.
Belief is the death of intelligence.
Animals outline their territories with their excretions, humans outline their territories by ink excretions on paper.
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.
What the thinker thinks, the prover proves.
The longer one is alone, the easier it is to hear the song of the earth.
Editors always amputate the brain first and preserve a good-looking corpse.