"...many people feel weak if they are in love, and to a certain degree they are right. If we are in love we must be tender, and our interest in another human being leaves us vulnerable. Only individuals whose goal of superiority is never to be weak or exposed will avoid the mutual dependence of love. Such people shy away from love and are ill-prepared for it. Often you will find that if they feel in danger of falling in love, they turn the situation to ridicule. They laugh and make jokes and tease the person by whom they feel threatened. In this way they try to rid themselves of their feelings of weakness."

Jean Baudrillard, America:

"Anorexic culture: a culture of disgust, of expulsion, of anthropoemia, of rejection. Characteristic of a period of obesity, saturation, overabundance. The anorexic prefigures this culture in rather a poetic fashion by trying to keep it at bay. He refuses lack. He says: I lack nothing, therefore I shall not eat. With the overweight person, it is the opposite: he refuses fullness, repletion. He says: I lack everything, so I will eat anything at all. The anorexic staves off lack by emptiness, the overweight person staves off fullness by excess. Both are homeopathic final solutions, solutions by extermination. The jogger has yet another solution. In a sense, he spews himself out; he doesn't merely expend his energy in his running, he vomits it. He has to attain the ecstasy of fatigue, the 'high' of mechanical annihilation, just as the anorexic aims for the 'high' of organic annihilation, the ecstasy of the empty body and the obese individual seeks the high of dimensional annihilation: the ecstasy of the full body."

G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens:

"We are all exact and scientific on the subjects we do not care about. We all immediately detect exaggeration in an exposition of Mormonism or a patriotic speech from Paraguay. We all require sobriety on the subject of the sea serpent. But the moment we begin to believe in a thing ourselves, that moment we begin easily to overstate it; and the moment our souls become serious, our words become a little wild."

Richard Dawkins, UK Interview (August, 1994):

"The virtue of using evidence is precisely that we can come to an agreement about it. But if you listen to two people who are arguing about something, and they each of them have passionate faith that they're right, but they believe different things -- they belong to different religions, different faiths, there is nothing they can do to settle their disagreement short of shooting each other, which is what they very often actually do."

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy In America:

"I know no country in which there is so little true independence of mind and freedom of discussion as in America...In America, the majority arises very formidable barriers to the liberty of opinion: within these barriers an author may write whatever he pleases, but he will repent it if he ever step beyond them. Not that he is exposed to the terrors of an auto-da-fe, but he is tormented by the slights and persecutions of daily obloquy...Before he published his opinions, he imagined that he held them in common with many others; but no sooner has he declared them openly than he is loudly censured by his overbearing opponents, whilst those who think, without having the courage to speak, like him, abandon him in silence. He yields at length, oppressed by the daily efforts he has been making, and he subsides into silence as if he was tormented by remorse for having spoken the truth."

Murray Edelman, Constructing The Political Spectacle:

"Everyday reporting of the political spectacle systematically reinforces the assumption that leaders are critical to the course of governmental action. News accounts highlight the talk and actions of leaders and of aspirants to leadership. They focus upon the election and appointment of high officials and upon policy differences and agreements. Interest groups and governmental agencies feed this kind of news to the media, reinforcing the premise that leadership is central to value allocation and well-being. Only rarely do the media, officials, or interest groups point to historical change in institutions or in material conditions as the explanation of controversial developments...They thrive upon heroes, villains, contests for votes, legislative and judicial victories and defeats, and especially upon the evocation of leaders with whom people can identify or whom they can blame for their discontents."

Arthur Guiterman, "On The Vanity Of Earthly Greatness"

The tusks that clashed in mighty brawls

Of mastodons, are billiard balls.

The sword of Charlemagne the Just

Is ferric oxide, known as rust.

The grizzly bear whose potent hug

Was feared by all, is now a rug.

Great Caesar's bust is on the shelf,

And I don't feel so well myself.

Heraclitus, Fragments:

"To me one man is worth ten thousand if he is first-rate. The best of men choose one thing in preference to all else, immortal glory in preference to mortal goods; whereas the masses simply glut themselves like cattle."

Hermann Hesse, Demian:

"If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose. But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world's phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every man's story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross."

David Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, And Literary:

"Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, and the implicit submission with which men resign their own sentiments and passions to those of the rulers. When we inquire by what means this wonder is effected, we shall find out that, as Force is always on the side of the governed, the governors have nothing to support them but opinion. It is, therefore, on opinion only that government is founded, and the maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments as well as the most free and popular."

Carl Jung, Man And His Symbols:

"Modern man does not understand how much his "rationalism" (which has destroyed his capacity to respond to numinous symbols and ideas) has put him at the mercy of the psychic "underworld." He has freed himself from "superstition" (or so he believes), but in the process he has lost his spiritual values to a positively dangerous degree. His moral and spiritual tradition has distintegrated, and he is now paying the price for this break-up in worldwide disorientation and dissociation...We have stripped all things of their mystery and numinosity; nothing is holy any longer."

Omar Khayyam, The Ruba'iyat Of Omar Khayyam:

The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

Walter Lippmann, The Public Philosophy:

"If there is a dividing line between liberty and license, it is where freedom of speech is no longer respected as a procedure of the truth and becomes the unrestricted right to exploit the ignorance, and to incite the passions, of the people. Then freedom is such a hullabaloo of sophistry, propaganda, special pleading, lobbying, and salesmanship that it is difficult to remember why freedom of speech is worth the pain and trouble of defending it."

Soren Kierkegaard, The Concept Of Dread:

"[Anxiety] is a desire for what one dreads, a sympathetic antipathy. Anxiety is an alien power which lays hold of an individual, and yet one cannot tear oneself away, nor has a will to do so; for one fears, but what one fears one desires. Anxiety then makes the individual impotent."

R.D. Laing, Knots:

They are playing a game. They are playing at not

playing a game. If I show them I see they are, I

shall break the rules and they will punish me.

I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

John Stuart Mill, "On Liberty":

"In sober truth, whatever homage may be professed, or even paid, to real or supposed mental superiority, the general tendency of things throughout the world is to render mediocrity the ascendant power among mankind...Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric. Eccentricity has always abounded when and where strength of character has abounded; and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor, and moral courage which it contained. That so few now dare to be eccentric, marks the chief danger of the time."

Rene Muller, The Marginal Self:

"We are eager to relinquish ourselves because it is a difficult and painful matter to become a self, and because we long for the rewards that our culture is only too ready to give us in exchange for that self."

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good And Evil:

"It is the profound, suspicious fear of an incurable pessimism that forces whole millennia to bury their teeth in and cling to a religious interpretation of existence: the fear of that instinct which senses that one might get a hold of the truth too soon, before man has become strong enough, hard enough, artist enough."

Blaise Pascal, Pensees:

"On beholding the blindness and misery of man, on seeing all the universe dumb, and man without light, left to himself...astray in this corner of the universe, knowing not who has sent him here, what he is here for, or what will become of him when he dies, incapable of all knowledge, I begin to be afraid, as a man who has been carried while asleep to a fearful desert island, and who will wake not knowing where he is and without any means of quitting the island. And thus I marvel that people are not seized with despair at such a miserable condition."

George Santayana, The Realm Of Spirit:

"...here we come upon a paradox: that spirit, the most inward of things and the most vital, should find its purest affinities in remote and abstract regions, in mathematics, in music, in truth, in the wider aspects of nature and history, and should find its greatest enemies, its worst torments, at home...How does this come about? Under what auspices does a moral dimension, mechanically non-existent and biologically idle, attach itself to physical life?...Everything finite, in the bosom of the infinite, reckons without its host."

Arnold Toynbee, America And The World Revolution:

"America is today the leader of a world-wide anti-revolutionary movement in the defense of vested interests. She now stands for what Rome stood for. Rome consistently supported the rich against the poor in all foreign communities that fell under her sway; and, since the poor, so far, have always and everywhere been far more numerous than the rich, Rome's policy made for inequality, for injustice, and for the least happiness of the greatest number."

Alan Watts, Does It Matter?

"The commonly accepted notion that Americans are materialists is pure bunk. A materialist is one who loves material, a person devoted to the enjoyment of the physical and immediate present. By this definition, most Americans are abstractionists. They hate material, and convert it as swiftly as possible into mountains of junk and clouds of poison gas."

Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass:

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people...re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body..."