Quotes

The best thing to do is read widely and always skeptically. Remember everyone, including me, has their opinions and their goals and you have to think them through for yourself.

In short, the mass media are interested in attracting audiences with buying power, not audiences per se; it is affluent audiences that spark advertiser interest today, as in the nineteenth century. The idea that the drive for large audiences makes the mass media “democratic” thus suffers from the initial weakness that its political analogue is a voting system weighted by income!

If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad.

The myth is the public dream, the dream is the private myth.

A huge sense of humor is all that stands between the magician and social ostracism or madness.

The corporations that do this are huge totalitarian institutions, and they aren’t governed by market principles—in fact, they promote severe market distortions. For example, a US corporation that has an outlet in Puerto Rico may decide to take its profits in Puerto Rico, because of tax rebates. It shifts its prices around, using what’s called “transfer pricing,” so it doesn’t seem to be making a profit here.

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.

I like to piss off any group that takes itself a little bit too seriously.

The Russian mystic Gurdjieff claimed that we all contain multiple personalities. Many researchers in psychology and neuroscience now share that startling view. as Gurdjieff indicated, the “I” who toils at a job does not seem the same “I” who makes love with joy and passion, and the third “I” who occasionally gets angry for no evident reason seems a third personality, etc. There does not appear anything metaphysical about this; it even appears, measurably, on electroencephalograms. Dr. Frank Putnam of the National Institute of Health found that extreme cases of multiple personality – the only ones that orthodox psychiatry recognizes – show quite distinct brain waves for each “personality” almost as if the researchers had taken the electrodes off of one subject and attached them to another. (O’Regan. op. cit.)

I am a writer, and I will finish the shit that I started.