Meaningless pseudoknowledge has at all times been one of the principal motivators of individual and collective action. And that is one of the reasons why the course of human history has been so tragic and at the same time so strangely grotesque.
There’s always soma to give you a holiday form the facts. And there’s always soma to calm your anger, to reconcile you to your enemies, to make you patient and long-suffering. In the past you could only accomplish these things by making a great effort and after years of hard moral training.
Alas, higher education is not necessarily a guarantee of higher virtue, or higher political wisdom.
God’s best joke, so far as he himself was concerned, was not being there. Simply not there. Neither God nor the devil. For if the devil had been there, God would have been there too. All that was there was the memory of a sordid disgusting stupidity and now an enormous knockabout. First an affair of dust-bins and then a farce. But that was what the devil really was: the spirit of dust-bins. And God? God in that case would be simply the absence of dust-bins.
It’s good to be cynical,” he said. “That is, if you know when to stop. Most of the things that we’re all taught to respect and reverence- they don’t deserve anything but cynicism.
To most people radical change is even more odious than cynicism. The only way between the horns of the dilemma is to persist at all costs in the ignorance which permits one to go on doing wrong in the comforting belief that by doing so one is doing one’s duty- one’s duty to the company, to the shareholders, to the family, the city, the state, the fatherland, the Church.
I looked down by chance, and went on passionately staring by choice, at my own crossed legs,” the writer and philosopher recollected. “Those folds in the trousers – what a labyrinth of endlessly significant complexity! And the texture of the gray flannel – how rich, how deeply, mysteriously sumptuous.
The political merchandisers appeal only to the weaknesses of voters, never to their potential strength. They make no attempt to educate the masses into becoming fit for self-government; they are content merely to manipulate and exploit them. For this purpose all the resources of psychology and the social sciences are mobilized and set.
Other people can’t make you see with their eyes. At the best they can only encourage you to use your own.
The problem of rapidly increasing numbers in relation to natural resources, to social stability and to the well-being of individuals – this is now the central problem of mankind; and it will remain the central problem certainly for another century, and perhaps for several centuries thereafter.
The greatest care is taken to prevent you from loving anyone too much.
Man’s highly developed color sense is a biological luxury – inestimably precious to him as an intellectual and spiritual being, but unnecessary to his survival as an animal.
We protect our minds by an elaborate system of abstractions, ambiguities, metaphors and similes from the reality we do not wish to know too clearly; we lie to ourselves, in order that we may still have the excuse of ignorance, the alibi of stupidity and incomprehension, possessing which we can continue with a good conscience to commit and tolerate the most monstrous crimes.
I’d rather be myself... Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.
The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed.
Mindlessness and moral idiocy are not characteristically human attributes; they are symptoms of herd-poisoning.
That’s the spirit I like,” said the Director.
The Palanese were Buddhists. They knew how misery is related to mind. You cling, you crave, you assert yourself – and you live in a homemade hell. You become detached – and you live in peace. ‘I show you sorrow,’ the Buddha had said, ’and I show you the ending of sorrow.
Nature at the middle distance is familiar – so familiar that we are deluded into believing that we really know what it is all about. See very close at hand, or at a great distance, or from an odd angle, it seems disquietingly strange, wonderful beyond all comprehension.
The harder we try with the conscious will to do something, the less we shall succeed. Proficiency and results come only to those who have learned the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, or combining relaxation with activity.