Quotes

It is worth remembering—particularly because it has been so uniformly suppressed—that the U.S is the only country that was condemned for international terrorism by the World Court and that rejected a Security Council resolution calling on states to observe international law

Free institutions certainly exist, but a tradition of passivity and conformism restricts their use — a cynic might say that this is why they continue to exist.

If you find yourself becoming curious about the nature and origins of the magical powers you are slowly and very, very painfully cultivating, remember this famous anecdote about the English philosopher Bertrand Russell.
Russell once gave a public lecture on the structure of the universe. Afterward he was approached by a woman who told him that he was a very clever young man but much mistaken in his thinking, because everyone knew that the world was flat and sat on the back of a turtle.
When Russell asked her what the turtle was standing on, she replied, ‘You’re very clever, young man, very clever. But it’s turtles all the way down!’
The woman was wrong about the world, of course, but she would have been quite right if she’d been talking about magic. Great mages have wasted their lives trying to get at the root of magic. It is a futile pursuit, not much fun and occasionally quite hazardous. Because the farther down you go, the bigger and scalier the turtles get, with sharper and sharper beaks. Until eventually they start looking less like turtles and more like dragons.

Throughout history, there have been a few principles of international affairs that apply quite generally. One is the maxim of Thucydides that the strong do as they wish while the weak suffer as they must.

In U.S. electoral politics, for just one example, the richest one-quarter of one percent of Americans make 80 percent of all individual political contributions and corporations outspend labor by a margin of 10-1.

In any case, it’s ridiculous to talk about freedom in a society dominated by huge corporations. What kind of freedom is there inside a corporation? They’re totalitarian institutions—you take orders from above and maybe give them to people below you. There’s about as much freedom as under Stalinism. Whatever rights workers have are guaranteed by the limited public authority that still exists.
When enormous, private, tyrannical institutions are granted the same rights as—or more rights than—human beings, freedom becomes something of a joke. The solution isn’t to undermine freedom—it’s to undermine the private tyrannies.

Like wine, Dionysus is double: most terrible yet infinitely sweet. His presence, which is a bewildering intrusion of otherness into the human world, may take two forms, be manifested in two different ways. On the one hand it may bring blessed union with the god, in the heart of nature, with every constraint lifted – an escape from the limitations of the everyday world and oneself. That is the experience extolled in the parodos: purity, holiness, joy, sweet felicity. On the other hand, it may precipitate one into chaos in the confusion of a bloodthirsty, murderous madness in which the ‘same’ and the ‘other’ merge and one mistakes one’s nearest and dearest, one’s own child, one’s second self for a wild beast that one tears apart with one’s bare hands: ghastly impurity, inexpiable crime, misfortune without end, without relief.

Psychedelic drugs are feared, basically, for the same reason that mystical experience has been feared, discouraged, and even condemned in the Catholic, Protestant, and Islamic orthodoxies. It leads to disenchantment and apathy toward the approved social rewards of status and success, to chuckles at pretentiousness and pomposity, and, worse, to disbelief in the Church-and-State dogma that we are all God’s adopted orphans or fluky little germs in a mechanical and mindless universe. No authoritarian government, whether ecclesiastical or secular, can tolerate the apprehension that each one of us is God in disguise, and that our real inmost, outmost, and utmost Self cannot be killed.

The general public are not even aware of major decisions that will determine their fate, hence are in no position to influence them

[O]n Saturday the New York Times reported that there had been a drop of 34% in the number of times that police had used stop-and-frisks. It said that from April to June New York police had conducted 133,934 stops, compared to 203,500 in the preceding three months of January to February. The drop coincided with a period of media debate over the role of stop-and-frisks in fighting New York crime, which civil rights groups have repeatedly protested.