Quotes

I height Don Quixote, I live on Peyote
marihuana, morphine and cocaine.
I never knew sadness but only madness
that burn at the heart and the brain.
I see each charwoman ecstatic, inhuman,
angelic, demonic, divine,
Each wagon a dragon, each beer a mug a flagon
that brims with ambrosial wine….
The mountains are palaces, women are chalices
meant to be supped and not sold,
The desert a banquet hall set for a festival,
ripe for the free and the bold;
The wind and the sky are ours, heaven and all of it’s scars,
waken, and do what you will;
Break with this demon spawn’d hell-inspired nightmare
bond-Magick lies over the hill.
They said I was crazy, ambiguous, lazy,
disgusting, fantastic, obscene;
So I hied my sagebrush and cactus and corn mush,
To see if the air was still clean.
I height Don Quixote, I live on Peyote
marihuana, morphine and cocaine,
And may I be thrice damned for a bank clerk or store hand
if I visit the city again.

In the canonical bible the apostle Judas betrays Jesus in exchange for money by using a kiss to identify him leading to Jesus’ arrest. This apocryphal tale explains that the reason Judas used a kiss, specifically, is because Jesus had the ability to change shape. “Then the Jews said to Judas: How shall we arrest him [Jesus], for he does not have a single shape but his appearance changes. Sometimes he is ruddy, sometimes he is white, sometimes he is red, sometimes he is wheat coloured, sometimes he is pallid like ascetics, sometimes he is a youth, sometimes an old man …” This leads Judas to suggest using a kiss as a means to identify him. If Judas had given the arresters a description of Jesus he could have changed shape. By kissing Jesus Judas tells the people exactly who he is.

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

The true Wonderland was not like that, he knew. It was as much shadow as sunlight, and its mysteries could only be unveiled when your wits were about used up and your mind close to cracking.

Although I am a typical loner in my daily life, my awareness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice has prevented me from feelings of isolation.

To turn Apocalypse into Jubilee in the early 21st century, three things are required:

We have to understand the necessity for total system change. Only by linking different campaigns, protests, and struggles together in a general assault on the system that is at the root of humanity’s problems can we hope to solve them.
We have to understand the centrality of the working class to any serious strategy for system change. Only by mobilising the majority of ordinary working people can we find the power to confront and defeat corporate capital and the nation-states.
We have to organise the revolutionaries into networks of activists able to lead and organise mass resistance from below, fanning anti-austerity anger into a wave of working-class struggle that eventually swells into a new world-revolutionary movement comparable with, but greater than, those of 1789, 1848, 1917, 1968, and 1989.

Another world has become an absolute historical necessity. Another world is possible. The revolution is, in this sense, an ‘actuality’.

But it is not a certainty. It has to be fought for. Its achievement depends on what all of us do. And the historical stakes have never been higher.

Most witches don’t believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don’t believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.

If you’re going to be crazy, you have to get paid for it or else you’re going to be locked up.

What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

The greatest mania of all is passion. And I am a natural slave to passion. The balance between my brain and my soul and my body is as wild and delicate as the skin of a Ming vase.