Food For Thought

There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.

Beauty's but skin deep.

Beauty in things exists in the mind which contemplates them.

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic
orders? And even if one of them pressed me
suddenly to his heart; I'd be consumed
in his stronger existence. For beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror, which we can just barely endure
and we stand in awe of it as it cooly disdains
to destroy us. Each angel is terrifying.

I'm tired of all this nonsense about beauty being only skin-deep. That's deep enough. What do you want - an adorable pancreas?

The beauty myth moves for men as a mirage; its power lies in its ever-receding nature. When the gap is closed, the lover embraces only his own disillusion.

[see also: ALCOHOL, WINE, HASH HOUSE HARRIERS]

The mouth of a perfectly happy man is filled with beer.

I have fed purely upon ale; I have eat my ale, drank my ale, and I always sleep upon ale.

Beer makes you feel as you ought to feel without beer.

Between 2001 and 2004, staff and volunteers for the nonprofit Sky Island Alliance counted and identified beer cans and bottles found on wild lands in the Sky Island region of Arizona and New Mexico, in conjunction with their work mapping roads and roadless areas. Cans and bottles were only counted if spotted within ten meters of an assigned transect. Items were removed to avoid double counting them on future transects. During approximately 65 two-day volunteer field weekends, roughly 240 people documented a total of 7,563 containers, of which 7,426 (98 percent) were cans and 137 (2 percent) were bottles. Analysis of brands shows that of the 7,563 total containers found, 7,298 (96.5 percent) were Bud Light, 151 (2 percent) were Natural Light, 76 (1 percent) were Coors Light, and 30 (less than 0.5 percent) were Budweiser containers. One Fat Tire Amber Ale bottle was found in the Chiricahua Mountains, and seven Tecate cans were found in a camp in the Huachuca Mountains.

The brewery is the best drugstore.

Many an old timer laments about the disappearance of this ale or that lager, and becomes nostalgic about the glories of some fondly-remembered brew, when he is really mourning the passing of his youth.

Our lager,
which art in barrels,
Hallowed be thy drink.
Thy will be drunk,
(I will be drunk),
At home as in the tavern.
Give us this day our foamy head,
and forgive us our spillages,
As we forgive those who spill against us.
And lead us not to incarceration,
But deliver us from hangovers.
For thine is the beer, the ale and the lager,
Forever and ever,
Barmen.

[see also: CERTAINTY, FAITH, OPINION, SKEPTICISM, SUPERSTITION]

Nothing is so firmly believed as what is least known.

For what a man would like to to be true, that he more readily believes.

Earthly minds, like mud walls, resist the strongest batteries: and though, perhaps, sometimes the force of a clear argument may make some impression, yet they nevertheless stand firm, and keep out the enemy, truth, that would captivate or disturb them. Tell a man passionately in love that he is jilted; bring a score of witnesses of the falsehood of his mistress, it is ten to one but three kind words of hers shall invalidate all their testimonies.

...the man scarce lives who is not more credulous than he ought to be, and who does not, upon many occasions, give credit to tales, which not only turn out to be perfectly false, but which a very moderate degree of reflection and attention might have taught him could not well be true. The natural disposition is always to believe. It is acquired wisdom and experience only that teach incredulity, and they very seldom teach it enough. The wisest and most cautious of us all frequently gives credit to stories which he himself is afterwards both ashamed and astonished that he could possibly think of believing.

One is never deceived; one deceives oneself.

The struggle between faith and knowledge had not yet become the order of the day, but the two words and the ideas connected with them were brought forward from time to time, and true cynics maintained that one was as little to be relied on as the other. So I took delight in declaring in favor of both, yet even then failed to win my friends' assent. In matters of Faith, I said, everything depends on believing; the nature of the belief is perfectly indifferent. Faith is a profound sense of security for the present and the future, and this assurance springs from confidence in a limitless, all-powerful, and inscutable Being. The firmness of this confidence is the one great point; but our conception of this Being depends on our othe faculties, or even on circumstances, and is a question of perfect indifference. Faith is a sacred vessel into which everyone is ready to pour his feelings, his understanding, his imagination, making the sacrifice as entire as he can. With Knowledge the exact opposite is the case. There the point is not whether we know, but what we know, how much we know, and how well we know it. Hence, Knowledge is open to dispute because it can be corrected, widened, and restricted. Knowledge begins with the particular, it is endless and irreducible in forms of sense, can never be apprehended in its entirety, or at least only as in a dream, and thus remains the exact opposite of faith.

Belief is not the beginning, but the end of all knowledge.

Credulity is the man's weakness, but the child's strength.

If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

We are born believing. A man bears beliefs, as a tree bears beauty.

The practical effect of a belief is the real test of its soundness. Where we find a heroic life appearing as the uniform fruit of a particular mode of opinion, it is childish to argue in the face of fact that the result ought to have been different.

Irrationally held truths may be more harmful than reasoned errors.

I know that most men, including those at ease with problems of the greatest complexity, can seldom accept even the simplest and most obvious truth if it be such as would oblige them to admit the falsity of conclusions which they have delighted in explaining to colleagues, which they have proudly taught to others, and which they have woven, thread by thread, into the fabric of their lives.

"There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Today the intelligence of the world denies the miraculous. Ignorance is the soil of the supernatural. The foundation of Christianity has crumbled, has disappeared, and the entire fabric must fall. The natural is true. The miraculous is false.

Cursed is he that does not know when to shut his mind. An open mind is all very well in its way, but it ought not to be so open that there is no keeping anything in or out of it. It should be capable of shutting its doors sometimes, or may be found a little draughty.

We all live in the protection of certain cowardices which we call our principles.

It is always easier to believe than to deny. Our minds are naturally affirmative.

Il y a quelque impertinence à se faire brûler pour une opinion. (There is a certain impertinence in allowing oneself to be burned for an opinion.)

To die for an idea is to place a pretty high price upon conjectures.

Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions!!!

In science the credit goes to the man who convinces the world, not to the man to whom the idea first occurs.

To doubt everything or to believe everything are two equally convenient solutions; both dispense with the necessity of reflection.

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.

People talk so much to me about the beauty of confidence. They seem to entirely ignore the much more subtle beauty of doubt. To believe is very dull. To doubt is intensely engrossing. The Apostle Thomas was artistic up to a certain point. He appreciated the value of shadows in a picture. To be on the alert is to live. To be lulled into security is to die.

Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.

It is always easier to fight for one's principles than to live up to them.

What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the wish to find out, which is the exact opposite.

The word "belief" is a difficult thing for me. I don't believe. I must have a reason for a certain hypothesis. Either I know a thing, and then I know it -- I don't need to believe it.

Conceptions without experience are void; experience without conceptions is blind.

We have only to believe. And the more threatening and irreducible reality appears, the more firmly and desperately must we believe. Then, little by little, we shall see the universal horror unbend, and then smile upon us, and then take us in its more than human arms.

Martyrdom has always been a proof of the intensity, never of the correctness of a belief.

Man is ready to die for an idea, provided that idea is not quite clear to him.

At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded.

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.

La dernière illusion est de croire qu'on les a toutes perdues. (The final illusion is the belief that one has lost all illusions."

You can always pick up your needle and move to another groove.

...And no philosophy, sadly, has all the answers. No matter how assured we may be about certain aspects of our belief, there are always painful inconsistencies, exceptions, and contradictions. This is true in religion as it is in politics, and is self-evident to all except fanatics and the naive. As for the fanatics, whose number is legion in our own time, we might be advised to leave them to heaven. They will not, unfortunately, do us the same courtesy. They attack us and each other, and whatever their protestations to peaceful intent, the bloody record of history makes clear that they are easily disposed to restore to the sword. My own belief in God, then, is just that -- a matter of belief, not knowledge. My respect for Jesus Christ arises from the fact that He seems to have been the most virtuous inhabitant of Planet Earth. But even well-educated Christians are frustrated in their thirst for certainty about the beloved figure of Jesus because of the undeniable ambiguity of the scriptural record. Such ambiguity is not apparent to children or fanatics, but every recognized Bible scholar is perfectly aware of it. Some Christians, alas, resort to formal lying to obscure such reality.

Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.

Men love their ideas more than their lives. And the more preposterous the idea, the more eager they are to die for it. And to kill for it.

If a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live.

One of my favorite philosophical tenets is that people will agree with you only if they already agree with you. You do not change people's minds.

Fact of the matter is, there is no hip world, there is no straight world. There's a world, you see, which has people in it who believe in a variety of different things. Everybody believes in something and everybody, by virtue of the fact that they believe in something, use that something to support their own existence.

The believer is happy; the doubter is wise.

If you resist reading what you disagree with, how will you ever acquire deeper insights into what you believe? The things most worth reading are precisely those that challenge our convictions.

Theory: when you have ideas. Ideology: when ideas have you.

[see also: DEATH]

Excess of grief for the deceased is madness; for it is an injury to the living, and the dead know it not.

For certain is death for the born
And certain is birth for the dead;
Therefore over the inevitable
Thou shouldst not grieve.

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep --
He hath awakened from the dream of life --
'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife.

The bitterest tears shed over graves are for words left unsaid and for deeds left undone.

Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? Is it because we are not the person involved?

What we call mourning for our dead is perhaps not so much grief at not being able to call them back as it is grief at not being able to want to do so.

Tears are sometimes an inappropriate response to death. When a life has been lived completely honestly, completely successfully, or just completely, the correct response to death's perfect punctuation mark is a smile.

Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.

"Never forget, gentlemen," he said, to his astonished hearers, as he held up a copy of the "Authorized Version" of the Bible, "never forget that this is not the Bible," then, after a moment's pause, he continued, "This, gentlemen, is only a translation of the Bible."

The Bible is not my book, and Christianity is not my religion. I could never give assent to the long, complicated statements of Christian dogma.

It ain't those parts of the Bible that I can't understand that bother me, it is the parts that I do understand.

All Bibles are man-made.

The total absence of humour from the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

The Good Book -- one of the most remarkable euphemisms ever coined.

And it came to pass that in the hands of the ignorant, the words of the Bible were used to beat plowshares into swords.

It says in the Book:
Burn 'n destroy...
'N repent, 'n redeem
'N revenge, 'n deploy
'N rumble thee forth
To the land of the unbelieving scum on the other side
'Cause they don't go for what's in the book
'N that makes 'em BAD
So verily we must choppeth them up
And stompeth them down
Or rent a nice French bomb
To poof them out of existence
While leaving their real estate just where we need it
To use again
For temples in which to praise
OUR GOD
("'Cause he can really take care of business")

The best of all things for earthly men is not to be born and not to see the beams of the bright sun; but if born, then as quickly as possible to pass the gates of Hades, and to lie deep buried.

Not to be born surpasses thought and speech.
The second best is to have seen the light
And then to go back quickly whence we came.

I should like to abolish funerals; the time to mourn a person is at his birth, not his death.

"Yes, certainly," cried the mother stork. "I have thought upon the best way to be revenged. I know the pond in which all the little children lie, waiting till the storks come to take them to their parents. The prettiest little babies lie there dreaming more sweetly than they will ever dream in the time to come. All parents are glad to have a little child, and children are so pleased with a little brother or sister. Now we will fly to the pond and fetch a little baby for each of the children who did not sing that naughty song to make game of the storks."

"But the naughty boy, who began the song first, what shall we do to him?" cried the young storks.

"There lies in the pond a little dead baby who has dreamed itself to death," said the mother. "We will take it to the naughty boy, and he will cry because we have brought him a little dead brother. But you have not forgotten the good boy who said it was a shame to laugh at animals: we will take him a little brother and sister too, because he was good.

SERPENT: I can talk of many things. I am very wise. It was I who whispered the word to you that you did not know. Dead. Death. Die.

EVE: [shuddering] Why do you remind me of it? I forgot it when I saw your beautiful hood. You must not remind me of unhappy things.

SERPENT: Death is not an unhappy thing when you have learnt how to conquer it.

EVE: How can I conquer it?

SERPENT: By another thing, called birth.

EVE: [Trying to pronounce it] B-birth?

SERPENT: Yes, birth.

EVE: What is birth?

SERPENT: The serpent never dies. Some day you shall see me come out of this beautiful skin, a new snake with a new and lovelier skin. This is birth.

EVE: I have seen that. It is wonderful.

SERPENT: If I can do that, what can I not do? I tell you I am very subtle. When you and Adam talk, I hear you say 'Why?' Always 'Why?' You see things; and you say 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?' I made the word dead to describe my old skin that I cast off when I am renewed. I call that renewal being born.

It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.

Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protest against extermination do so by a biological act.

I will not give to a woman a pessary to cause abortion.

Prevention of birth is premature murder, and it makes no difference whether it is a life already born that one snatches away or a life that is coming to birth.

However we may pity the mother whose health and even life is imperiled by the performance of her natural duty, there yet remains no sufficient reason for condoning the direct murder of the innocent.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.

I'll put an end to the idea that a woman's body belongs to her...the practice of abortion shall be exterminated with a strong hand.

If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.

You can't stop abortion without fighting contraception: it is the gateway to abortion. Not one of the 81 countries I've worked in has 'clean' contraception without abortion -- not one. Once there's contraception -- separating sexual activity from procreation and teaching people to use each other's bodies for selfish pleasure -- abortion is always used as a backup.

What masquerades as sex education is not education at all. It is selective propaganda which artificially encourages children to participate in adult sex, while it censors out the facts of life about the unhappy consequences. It is robbing children of their childhood.

It's very healthy for a young girl to be deterred from promiscuity by fear of contracting a painful, incurable disease, or cervical cancer, or sterility, or the likelihood of giving birth to a dead, blind, or brain-damage [sic] baby even ten years later when she may be happily married.

Sex education classes are like in-home sales parties for abortions.

Abolition of a woman's right to abortion, when and if she wants it, amounts to compulsory maternity: form of rape by the State.

For instance, several years ago we tracked down a twelve-year-old girl who was going to have an abortion so that we could talk her out of it. Talking a woman out of having an abortion is not news. But tracking her down using a private detective is.

...the Pro-Life Action League opposes all forms of contraception....

I think contraception is disgusting -- people using each other for pleasure.

Griswold v. Connecticut first established and guaranteed the `right of privacy' in the conjugal act. Sexual love, however, in a most profound way is anything but `private.' Its very purpose is to break the bonds of privacy by physical consummation of an unreserved gift of self. The contraceptive, however, denies the meaning of marital love by falsifying its bodily expression. Love is no longer unreserved; something is held back. `I cannot love all of you,' the contraceptive says, `because I cannot love all that might be created by you.'

I would never give artificial birth control to an unmarried person...

Oh yes, the sentimentality for "unborn babies," but apparent lack of concern for "born babies." What are you once you are born? Pre-dead?

I don't think Christians should use birth control. You consummate your marriage as often as you like and if you have babies, you have babies.

To be against abortion and not against contraception -- it makes no sense because both of them are the same mentality.

Once contraception is accepted and the purposes of sex are separated from procreation and marriage, sterilization and abortion become acceptable, and then infanticide, the precursor of outright euthanasia. Furthermore, homosexuality and unnatural sexual activities become `natural and normal,' the venereal diseases get out of control, divorce and illegitimacy rates mount, and the family swiftly disintegrates.

I don't think we should punish the criminal [a rapist] by killing his child.

Men blaspheme what they do not know.

We are bound to our bodies like an oyster is to its shell.

The brain may be regarded as a kind of parasite of the organism, a pensioner, as it were, who dwells with the body.

Addiction, obesity, starvation (anorexia nervosa) are political problems, not psychiatric: each condenses and expresses a contest between the individual and some other person or persons in his environment over the control of the individual's body.

[see also: LITERATURE]

A room without books is like a body without a soul.

Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books may also be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others.

To read without reflecting, is like eating without digesting.

Books and marriage go ill together.

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

But beware you be not swallowed up in books! An ounce of love is worth a pound of knowledge.

A man ought to read just as inclination leads him; for what he reads as a task will do him little good.

There are a hundred faults in this Thing, and a hundred things might be said to prove them beauties: but it is needless. A book may be amusing with numerous errors, or it may be very dull without a single absurdity.

I cannot live without books.

Readers may be divided into four classes: 1. Sponges, who absorb all that they read and return it in nearly the same state, only a little dirtied. 2. Sand-glasses, who retain nothing and are content to get through a book for the sake of getting through the time. 3. Strain-bags, who retain merely the dregs of what they read. 4. Mogul diamonds, equally rare and valuable, who profit by what they read, and enable others to profit by it also.

If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition. But, in this respect, every author is a Spartan, being more ashamed of the discovery, than of the depredation. Yes, the offence itself may not be so heinous as the manner of committing it; for some, as Voltaire, not only steal, but, like the harpies, befoul and bespatter those whom they have plundered. Others, again, give us the mere carcass of another man's thoughts, but deprived of all their life and spirit, and this is to add murder to robbery. I have somewhere seen it observed, that we should make the same use of a book, that the bee does of a flower; she steals sweets from it, but does not injure it; and those sweets she herself improves and concocts into honey. But most plagarists, like the drone, have neither taste to select, nor industry to acquire, nor skill to improve, but impudently pilfer the honey ready prepared from the hive.

It is remarked by anatomists that the nutritive quality is not the only requisite in food, -- that a certain degree of distension of the stomach is required to enable it to act with its full powers, -- and that it is for this reason hay or straw must be given to horses as well as corn, in order to supply the necessary bulk. Something analogous to this takes place with respect to the generality of minds, -- which are incapable of thoroughly digesting and assimilating what is presented to them in a very small compass. Many a one is capable of deriving that instruction from a moderate-sized volume, which he could not receive from a very small pamphlet, even more perspicuously written, and containing every thing that is to the purpose. It is necessary that the attention should be detained for a certain time on the subject; and persons of unphilosophical mind, though they can attend to what they read or hear, are unapt to dwell upon it in the way of subsequent meditation.

Buying books would be a good thing if one could also buy the time to read them in: but as a rule the purchase of books is mistaken for the appropriation of their contents.

What havoc has been made of books through every century of the Christian era? Where are fifty gospels, condemned as spurious by the bull of Pope Gelasius? Where are the forty wagon-loads of Hebrew manuscripts burned in France, by order of another pope, because suspected of heresy? Remember the index expurgatorius, the inquisition, the stake, the axe, the halter, and the guillotine; and, oh! horrible, the rack!

Dort, wo man Bucher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen. (Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.)

'Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.

Some books leave us free and some books make us free.

Many readers judge of the power of a book by the shock it gives their feelings -- as some savage tribes determine the power of muskets by their recoil; that being considered best which fairly prostrates the purchaser.

Books, not which afford us a cowering enjoyment, but in which each thought is of unusual daring; such as an idle man cannot read, and a timid one would not be entertained by, which even make us dangerous to existing institution -- such I call good books.

Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them all.

Reading is a great pleasure; but it is solitary. Byron says:

They who true joy would win \
Must share it; happiness is born twin.

True as this generally is, it is doubly true of literary enjoyment. The fullest instruction and the fullest enjoyment are never derived from books, till we have ventilated the ideas thus obtained in free and easy chat with others.

The mental faculties demand exercise as truly as the bodily, and enjoy it as keenly. The mind that is healthy delights in the glow of movement and contest. It loves to meet with a congenial spirit, -- one that has sucked the sweetness of the same authors, and enjoyed them with the same gust, -- which has brought away the quintessence, and treats it to the juice of the grape without thrusting upon it the stalks and husks. Talking is a digestive process which is absolutely essential to the mental constitution of the man who devours many books. A full mind must have talk, or it will grow dyspeptic.

Life being very short, and the quiet hours of it few, we ought to waste none of them in reading valueless books.

...I'm no longer prepared to accept what people say and what's written in books. I must think things out for myself, and try to find my own answer.

There are some books which cannot be adequately reviewed for twenty or thirty years after they come out.

Handle a book as a bee does a flower, extract its sweetness but do not injure it.

Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life.

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

St. Columba had borrowed from the monk a fine manuscript of the Gospels, and Columba had made a copy of the borrowed book, before returning it. The monk claimed the copy also as his; the saint disputed this. His argument in defence reads not unlike the defence made by modern infringers of copyright: "I confess that the book in question was copied from the manuscript of Finnen. But it was with my own industry and toil and burning of the midnight oil. And it was copied with such care that Finnen's manuscript is in no way injured by the act of copying. Moreover, my object was to preserve more surely the best parts of the book and employ them for the greater glory of God. Hence I do not admit that I have done any injury to Finnen; nor am liable for restitution, nor am at fault in any way." But Dermot, the judge, as manuscripts were then new in Ireland, had no exact precedent, and he cast about for the nearest analogy. He found the Brehon maxim, "With every cow goes its calf", "Le cach boin a boinin"; and so his judgment was in favor of the monk, because "Le cach lebar a lebran", "With every book goes the young of the book". (But the saint, it is recorded, was very angry at this judgment, invoked the power of a rival chieftain against Dermot, and thrashed him well in battle.)

They buried him, but all through the night of mourning, in the lighted windows, his books arranged three by three kept watch like angels with outspread wings and seemed, for him who was no more, the symbol of his resurrection.

I suggest that the only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us.... We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

Outside a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside a dog, it's too dark to read.

There are books so alive that you're always afraid that while you weren't reading, the book has gone and changed, has shifted like a river; while you went on living, it went on living too, and like a river moved on and moved away. No one has stepped twice into the same river. But did anyone ever step twice into the same book?

This novel is not to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.

To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.

...Samuel rode lightly on top of a book and he balanced happily among ideas the way a man rides white rapids in a canoe. But Tom got into a book, crawled and groveled between the covers, tunneled like a mole among the thoughts, and came up with the book all over his face and hands.

A truly great book should be read in youth, again in maturity and once more in old age, as a fine building should be seen by morning light, at noon and by moonlight.

Book lovers are thought by unbookish people to be gentle and unworldly, and perhaps a few of them are so. But there are others who will lie and scheme and steal to get books as wildly and unconscionably as the dope-taker in pursuit of his drug. They may not want the books to read immediately, or at all; they want them to possess, to range on their shelves, to have at command. They want books as a Turk is thought to want concubines -- not to be hastily deflowered, but to be kept at their master's call, and enjoyed more often in thought than in reality.

Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.

The present era grabs everything that was ever written in order to transform it into films, TV programs, or cartoons. What is essential in a novel is precisely what can only be expressed in a novel, and so every adaptation contains nothing but the nonessential. If a person is still crazy enough to write novels nowadays and wants to protect them, he has to write them in such a way that they cannot be adapted, in other words, in such a way that they cannot be retold.

A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let's not kid ourselves -- all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences.

Never judge a book by its movie.

[see also: MIND]

If little else, the brain is an educational toy. While it may be a frustrating plaything -- one whose finer points recede just when you think you are mastering them -- it is nonetheless perpetually fascinating, frequently surprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled; you don't have to put it together on Christmas morning.

The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometimes they'd rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner than they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don't play some people's game, they say that you have "lost your marbles," not recognizing that, while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain.

[see also: CRAP, SHIT]

Bullshit is a rare and valuable commodity. The great masters have all been bullshitters. Horseshit, on the other hand, in the common parlance, refers to downright crap. The free, playful entertaining flight of ideas is bullshit; and more often than not will be found afterwards to accord perfectly with universal truth. Horseshit is contrived; derivative, superstitious, ignorant.

There is no passion like that of a functionary for his function.

...the best definition that I heard of that is that a bureaucrat is a Democrat who has a job that a Republican wants.

It is not easy nowadays to remember anything so contrary to all appearances as that officials are the servants of the public; and the official must try not to foster the illusion that it is the other way round.

It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume...that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him.

No tyranny is so irksome as petty tyranny: the officious demands of policemen, government clerks, and electromechanical gadgets.

Corporations have neither bodies to be punished, nor souls to be condemned, they therefore do as they like.