Quotes

Don’t forget – no one else sees the world the way you do, so no one else can tell the stories that you have to tell.

Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Now I am a whip coiling across your naked buttocks
Your flesh writhes under my caress, and your voice
Is shrill with pain and passion
I am a flame that crawls slowly about you
I have found the soles of your feet, and seek
each nerve center.

It is said, paradoxically, that we are in a knowledge-based economy but we have never taught less. We have never put such an amount of emphasis on institutions though we haven’t trained or educated less. Now I’ll explain the paradox, the nonsense. The paradox and the nonsense are in fact almost anywhere, particularly in North America; the school is becoming an institution for servants of the system. In other words, an institution of “thinking bipeds” that should only focus on maintaining the free market, self-regulating market and on maintaining this mechanics of production and multiplication of money.

This is what is called “employability”, to form the employable people; it is called ‘to reform the education from primary school to university’, to train young people to find their place in the labor market. That’s horrible!

Would be Victor Hugo employable nowadays? Would be Socrates employable? Would be Paul Verlaine or Rimbaud employable? No! So, they wouldn’t exist. But what would the mankind be with no Socrates, no Aristotles, no Rimbauds, no Verlaines, no Victor Hugos? What would mankind be without them? We would be animals!

Angels have a thousand jobs. For each job, a shape. For each task, celestial engineering in the factories of the gods. Not many of us are made according to such most minute & intricate blueprints.
In an angel’s philosophy, it was once said, two times two equals thirteen. This is not slander. Angels are not crazy, could not be further from madness. They have, insofar as any theologian understands, absolute purity of purpose. A stiletto-sharp fidelity to the task of keeping Heaven clean.
To messy-minded humans, to Homo Vorago Aperientis, so glass-clear & precise a drive makes no sense at all. It is considerably less comprehensible than the ravings of those we call insane.
Angels, unremittingly & absolutely sane, cannot but seem to poor humanity relentlessly & madly murderous.

Maybe books won’t survive the transition to digital devices, any more than scrolls survived the transition to movable type… what the internet portends is not the end of the paper container of the book, but rather the way paper organized our assumptions about writing altogether.

The government is the only power structure that’s even partially accountable to the population, so naturally the business sectors want to make that the enemy — not the corporate system, which is totally unaccountable. After decades of intensive business propaganda, people feel that the government is some kind of enemy and that they have to defend themselves from it.

Fascism is a term from the political domain, so it doesn’t apply strictly to corporations, but if you look at them, power goes strictly top-down, from the board of directors to managers and ultimately to the people on the shop floor, typists, etc. There’s no flow of power or planning from the bottom up. Ultimate power resides in the hands of investors, owners, banks, etc. People can disrupt, make suggestions, but the same is true of a slave society. People who aren’t owners and investors don’t have much to say about it. They can choose to rent their labor to the corporation, or to purchase the commodities or services that it produces, or to find a place in the chain of command, but that’s it. That’s the totality of their control over the corporation…there is some limited degree of public control…corporations are more totalitarian than most institutions we call totalitarian in the political arena.

But when you’re in front of an audience and you make them laugh at a new idea, you’re guiding the whole being for the moment. No one is ever more him/herself than when they really laugh. Their defenses are down. It’s very Zen-like, that moment. They are completely open, completely themselves when that message hits the brain and the laugh begins. That’s when new ideas can be implanted. If a new idea slips in at that moment, it has a chance to grow.