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- a thing that exists here because everything else does not and
can be noticed because other things are absent.
- Mass hypnosis. In a very orthodox form known as education.
- The world has no existence whatsoever outside the human
imagination. It's all a ghost, and in antiquity was so recognized as a ghost,
the whole blessed world we live in. It's run by ghosts. We see what we see
because these ghosts show it to us, ghosts of Moses and Christ and the Buddha,
and Plato, and Descartes, and Rousseau and Jefferson and Lincoln, on and on and
on. Isaac Newton is a very good ghost. One of the best. Your common sense is
nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from
the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the
living.''
- Unusual behavior tends to produce estrangement in others which
tends to further the unusual behavior and thus the estrangement in self-stoking
cycles until some sort of climax is reached.
- And when you look directly at an insane man all you see is a
reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at
all.
- Perhaps his aloneness was the result of his intelligence.
Perhaps it was the cause. But the two were always together. An uncanny solitary
intelligence.
- But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or
to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects
rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change
is possible. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the
systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact,
then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government.
- The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth
from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what
science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite.
Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and
hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute
truths to multiple,
indeterminate, relative ones.
He felt that institutions such as schools, churches, governments
and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends
other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the
control of individuals in the service of these functions.
- ``I think maybe it's because every teacher tends to grade up
students who resemble him the most. If your own writing shows neat penmanship
you regard that more important in a student than if it doesn't. If you use big
words you're going to like students who write with big words.''
- You are never dedicated to something you have complete
confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise
tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically
dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or
goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
- To doubt the literal meaning of the words of Jesus or Moses
incurs hostility from most people, but it's just a fact that if Jesus or Moses
were to appear today, unidentified, with the same message he spoke many years
ago, his mental stability would be challenged.
- The student's biggest problem was a slave mentality which
had been built into him by years of
carrot-and- whip grading, a mule mentality which said, ``If you don't whip me,
I won't work.''
- Grades really cover up failure to teach. A bad instructor can go
through an entire quarter leaving absolutely nothing memorable in the minds of
his class, curve out the scores on an irrelevant test, and leave the impression
that some have learned and some have not.
- To live only for some future goal is shallow. It's the sides of
the mountain which sustain life, not the top. Here's where things grow. But of
course, without the top you can't have any sides. It's the top that defines the
sides.
- When you are trained to despise ``just what you like'' then, of
course, you become a much more obedient servant of others...a good slave. When
you learn not to do ``just what you like'' then the System loves you.
- technology is ... not an exploitation of nature, but a fusion of
nature and the human spirit into a new kind of creation that transcends both.
- The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is
based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What's really
demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are
considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat.
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