The individual act of obedience is the cornerstone not only of the strength of authoritarian society but also of its weakness.
Communication is only possible between equals.
You simply cannot invent any conspiracy theory so ridiculous and obviously satirical that some people somewhere don’t already believe it.
Having a spine is overrated. If everybody squealed and ran away, there’d be no more wars.
There is absolutely nothing that can be taken for granted in this world.
Conspiracy is just another name for coalition.
Consciousness itself is an infinite regress. This explains coincidences.
If you want to be happy, practise it every day.
My goal is to try to get people into a state of generalized agnosticism, not agnosticism about God alone, but agnosticism about everything.
The Right’s view of government and the Left’s view of big business are both correct.
It is a great privilege to be conscious in this universe. Those who understand, shine like stars.
You can “prove” anything on the verbal level, just be accepting the necessary axioms at the beginning.
Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia.
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.
Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different.