Food For Thought

[see also: CONSUMERISM, ECONOMY, PROPERTY, SOCIALISM, WEALTH]

Confucius said, "The superior man understands righteousness; the inferior man understands profit."

Make money, money by fair means if you can, if not, by any means money.

Free trade, one of the greatest blessings which a government can confer on a people, is in almost every country unpopular.

Capitalism will kill competition.

But owing to our wage system, this increase of wealth -- due to the combined efforts of men of science, of managers, and workmen as well -- has resulted only in an unprecedented accumulation of wealth in the hands of the owners of capital; while an increase of misery for the great numbers, and an insecurity of life for all, have been the lot of the workmen; the unskilled labourers, in continuous search for labour, are falling into an unheard-of destitution. And even the best paid artisans and skilled workmen labour under the permanent menace of being thrown, in their turn, into the same conditions as the unskilled paupers, in consequence of some of the continuous and unavoidable fluctuations of industry and caprices of capital.

The commercial prostitution of love is the last outcome of our whole social system, and its most clear condemnation. It flaunts in our streets, it hides itself in the garment of respectability under the name of matrimony, it eats in actual physical disease and death rigt through our midst; it is fed by the oppression and the ignorance of women, by their poverty and denied means of livelihood, and by the hypocritical puritanism which forbids them by millions not only to gratify but even to speak of their natural desires; and it is encouraged by the callousness of an age which has accustomed men to buy and sell for money every most precious thing -- even the life-long labor of their brothers, therefore why not also the very bodies of their sisters?

...Capitalism has destroyed our belief in any effective power but that of self-interest backed by force.

Capital as such is not evil; it is its wrong use that is evil. Capital in some form or other will always be needed.

The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.

The fundamental idea of modern capitalism is not the right of the individual to possess and enjoy what he has earned, but the thesis that the exercise of this right redounds to the general good.

Let us suppose it is possible, while preserving the capitalist system, to reduce unemployment to a certain minimum. But surely, no capitalist would ever agree to the complete abolition of unemployment, to the abolition of the reserve army of unemployed, the purpose of which is to bring pressure on the labor market, to ensure a supply of cheap labor.

Normally speaking, it may be said that the forces of a capitalist society, if left unchecked, tend to make the rich richer and the poor poorer, and thus increase the gap between them.

Capitalism did not arise because capitalists stole the land...but because it was more efficient than feudalism. It will perish because it is not merely less efficient than socialism, but actually self-destructive.

Only in time of peace can the wastes of capitalism be tolerated.

Capitalism in the United States has undergone profound modification, not just under the New Deal but through a consensus that continued to grow after the New Deal and that is now beyond major political debate. Government in the United States today is a senior partner in every business in the country. It has done this through its power to tax, which has become as important as management's power to operate.

Capitalism, it is said, is a system wherein man exploits man. And communism -- is vice versa.

Free enterprise ended in the United States a good many years ago. Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and drive out the small entrepreneur. In their conglomerate forms, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the legitimacy of the state.

Slavery in one form or another is typical of all large-scale economic activities. The pyramids are a monument to the power of the slave teams that built them; wage-slavery laid the foundations of the industrial advances of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The slavery of earliest times was relatively stable. Revolts were uncommon. But its eventual supersedence by capitalist forms of slavery was inevitable, for all men were not equally slaves. Under capitalism, the idea of slavery was denied while the practice of it was extended to every level of society.

Politics is the entertainment branch of industry.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to....

We don't call a man mad who believes that he eats God, but we do the one who says he is Jesus Christ.

Many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God, than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant.

Even when she was a Presbyterian and I was a Catholic, I remember that she was horrified by the Eucharist: Eating the body of Christ. That's pagan and barbaric, she said. What she meant and what horrified her was the mixing up of body and spirit, Catholic trafficking in bread, wine, oil, salt, water, body, blood, spit -- things. What does the Holy Spirit need with things? Body does body things. Spirit does spirit things.

If you're going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you're going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic.

[see also: ANIMALS]

When I play with my cat, who knows if I am not a pastime to her more than she is to me?

Scalded Cats fear even cold Water.

The thing that astonished him was that cats should have two holes cut in their coats exactly at the place where their eyes were.

Mrs. Crupp had indignantly assured him that there wasn't room to swing a cat there; but, as Mr. Dick justly observed to me, sitting down on the foot of the bed, nursing his leg, "You know, Trotwood, I don't want to swing a cat. I never do swing a cat. Therefore, what does that signify to me!"

...the person that had took a bull by the tail once had learnt sixty or seventy times as much as a person that hadn't, and said a person that started in to carry a cat home by the tail was getting knowledge that was always going to be useful to him, and warn't ever going to grow dim or doubtful. Chances are, he isn't likely to carry the cat that way again, either. But if he wants to, I say let him!

Of all God's creatures there is only one that cannot be made the slave of the lash. That one is the cat. If man could be crossed with a cat it would improve man, but it would deteriorate the cat.

A cat is more intelligent than people believe, and can be taught any crime.

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it -- and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again -- and that is well; but also she will never sit down on a cold one any more.

By what right has the dog come to be regarded as a "noble" animal? The more brutal and cruel and unjust you are to him the more your fawning and adoring slave he becomes; whereas, if you shamefully misuse a cat once she will always maintain a dignified reserve toward you afterward - you will never get her full confidence again.

Cats are packed full of music -- just as full as they can hold; and when they die, people remove it from them and sell it to the fiddle-makers.

Cats are loose in their morals, but not consciously so. Man, in his descent from the cat, has brought the cat's looseness with him but has left the unconsciousness behind -- the saving grace which excuses the cat. The cat is innocent, man is not.

Confront a child, a puppy, and a kitten with a sudden danger; the child will turn instinctively for assistance, the puppy will grovel in abject submission to the impending visitation, the kitten will brace its tiny body for a frantic resistance.

...But nature does not say that cats are more valuable than mice; nature makes no remark on the subject. She does not even say that the cat is enviable or the mouse pitiable. We think the cat superior because we have (or most of us have) a particular philosophy to the effect that life is better than death. But if the mouse were a German pessimist mouse, he might not think that the cat had beaten him at all. He might think he had beaten the cat by getting to the grave first.

You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.

The only mystery about the cat is why it ever decided to become a domesticated animal.

Cats seem to go on the principle that it never does any harm to ask for what you want.

It is not liberty not to bury the mess one makes.... No animal has more liberty than the cat, but it buries the mess it makes. The cat is the best anarchist.

He remembered uneasily someone saying what a blessing it was cats did not have hands....

If a fish is the movement of water embodied, given shape, then cat is a diagram and pattern of subtle air.

Curiosity is the very basis of education and if you tell me that curiosity killed the cat, I say only the cat died nobly.

Cat lovers don't know cats. You can't love all cats if you know cats, and the ones you can love if you know them are the ones the cat lovers don't even like.

Owning a cat is a lot like being an American tourist in a fancy French restaurant - you will be overcharged, you will likely be insulted, but, to you, it's worth it.

I don't know what the cat can have eaten. Usually I know exactly what the cat has eaten. Not only have I fed it to the cat, at the cat's keen insistence, but the cat has thrown it up on the rug and someone has tracked it all the way over on to the other rug. I don't know why cats are such habitual vomitors. They don't seem to enjoy it, judging by the sounds they make while doing it. It's in their nature. A dog is going to bark. A cat is going to vomit.

Curiosity killed the cat, but for awhile I was a suspect.

They smell, they snarl and they scratch; they have a singular aptitude for shredding rugs, drapes and upholstery; they're sneaky, selfish and not at all smart; they are disloyal, condescending and totally useless in any rodent-free environment.

Cats are like Baptists. They raise hell but you can't catch them at it.

[see also: FREE SPEECH, OBSCENITY, PORNOGRAPHY]

Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorized ones only.

As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God's image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were in the eye.

They have a Right to censure, that have a Heart to help: The rest is Cruelty, not Justice.

To endeavor to work upon the vulgar with fine sense, is like attempting to hew blocks with a razor.

It is the very nature of violent censure to give credibility to the opinions it attacks.

I am really mortified to be told that, in the United States of America, a fact like this can become a subject of inquiry, and of criminal inquiry too, as an offense against religion; that a question about the sale of a book can be carried before the civil magistrate. Is this then our freedom of religion? Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule for what we are to read and what we must believe? It is an insult to our citizens to question whether they are rational beings or not, and blasphemy against religion to suppose it cannot stand the test of truth and reason.

They keep telling us that in war truth is the first casualty, which is nonsense since it implies that in times of peace truth stays out of the sick bay or the graveyard.

Every burned book or house enlightens the world; every suppressed or expunged word reverberates through the earth from side to side.

Damn the expurgated books! I say damn 'em.... In a day and month and year of weakness I yielded to the idea that the English reader could not stand a dose of Walt Whitman. It was an evil decision growing out of the best intentions.

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

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers.... Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted faggots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.

Let no one mistake it for comedy, farcical though it may be in all its details. It serves notice on the country that Neanderthal man is organizing in these forlorn backwaters of the land, led by a fanatic, rid of sense and devoid of conscience. Tennessee, challenging him too timorously and too late, now sees its courts converted into camp meetings and its Bill of Rights made a mock of by its sworn officers of the law.

Ah, good taste, what a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness.

Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.

Don't think you're going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don't be afraid to go in your library and read every book, as long as any document does not offend our own ideas of decency. That should be the only censorship.

How will we defeat communism unless we know what it is, what it teaches, and why does it have such an appeal for men, why are so many people swearing allegiance to it? It's almost a religion, albeit one of the nether regions.

And we have got to fight it with something better, not try to conceal the thinking of our own people. They are part of America. And even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, their right to say them, their right to record them, and their right to have them at places where they're accessible to others is unquestioned, or it's not America.

When truth is no longer free, freedom is no longer real: the truths of the police are the truths of today.

Censorship always defeats its own purpose, for it creates, in the end, the kind of society that is incapable of exercising real discretion. In the long run it will create a generation incapable of appreciating the difference between independence of thought and subservience.

Censorship, like charity, should begin at home, but unlike charity, it should end there.

Purity is the ability to contemplate defilement.

We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasent facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.

At least one way of measuring the freedom of any society is the amount of comedy that is permitted, and clearly a healthy society permits more satirical comment than a repressive, so that if comedy is to function in some way as a safety release then it must obviously deal with these taboo areas. This is part of the responsibility we accord our licensed jesters, that nothing be excused the searching light of comedy. If anything can survive the probe of humour it is clearly of value, and conversely all groups who claim immunity from laughter are claiming special privileges which should not be granted.

I'm disturbed by the portrayal of women and the graphic violence on MTV. An older person or a teenager can look at this and see the humor in it, but an eight- or ten-year-old isn't anesthetized yet.

The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.

There is no law that vulgarity and literary excellence cannot coexist.

Although Poles suffer official censorship, a pervasive secret police and laws similar to those in the USSR, there are thousands of underground publications, a legal independent Church, private agriculture, and the East bloc's first and only independent trade union federation, NSZZ Solidarnosc, which is an affiliate of both the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions and the World Confederation of Labor. There is literally a world of difference between Poland - even in its present state of collapse - and Soviet society at the peak of its "glasnost." This difference has been maintained at great cost by the Poles since 1944.

[see also: BELIEF, OPINION]

So as this only point among the rest remaineth sure and certain, namely, that nothing is certain....

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is absurd.

In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.

Fame is a vapor; popularity an accident; the only earthly certainty is oblivion.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

The public demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.

Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on "I am not too sure."

When the answer cannot be put into words, neither can the question be put into words. The riddle does not exist. If a question can be framed at all, it is also possible to answer it.

You see, I can live with doubt, and uncertainty, and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live nor knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. I have approximate answers, and possible beliefs, and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything. There are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask "Why are we here?" I might think about it a little bit, and if I can't figure it out then I'll go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in a mysterious universe without having any purpose -- which is the way it is, so far as I can tell. Possibly. It doesn't frighten me.

[see also: PROGRESS]

They must often change who would be constant in happiness or wisdom.

All is flux, nothing stays still.

Nothing endures but change.

You could not step twice into the same rivers; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do.

Change is inevitable in a progressive country. Change is constant.

The more things change, the more they remain the same.

It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence, to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away." How much it expresses! How chastening in the hour of pride! How consoling in the depths of affliction.

Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.

Consistency requires you to be as ignorant today as you were a year ago.

No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated.

Most of the change we think we see in life
Is due to truths being in and out of favor.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists.

Even while I protest the assembly-line production of our food, our songs, our language, and eventually our souls, I know that it was a rare home that baked good bread in the old days. Mother's cooking was with rare exceptions poor, that good unpasteurized milk touched only by flies and bits of manure crawled with bacteria, the healthy old-time life was riddled with aches, sudden death from unknown causes, and that sweet local speech I mourn was the child of illiteracy and ignorance. It is the nature of a man as he grows older, a small bridge in time, to protest against change, particularly change for the better. But it is true that we have exchanged corpulence for starvation, and either one will kill us. The lines of change are down. We, or at least I, can have no conception of human life and human thought in a hundred years or fifty years. Perhaps my greatest wisdom is the knowledge that I do not know. The sad ones are those who waste their energy in trying to hold it back, for they can only feel bitterness in loss and no joy in gain.

The tendency to believe that things never change, the inertia of daily existence, is a staple of living. It has always been a delusion.

[see also: IDENTITY]

Character is long-standing habit.

If a person were to try stripping the disguises from actors while they play a scene upon stage, showing to the audience their real looks and the faces they were born with, would not such a one spoil the whole play? And would not the spectators think he deserved to be driven out of the theatre with brickbats, as a drunken disturber? ... Now what else is the whole life of mortals but a sort of comedy, in which the various actors, disguised by various costumes and masks, walk on and play each one his part, until the manager waves them off the stage? Moreover, this manager frequently bids the same actor to go back in a different costume, so that he who has but lately played the king in scarlet now acts the flunkey in patched clothes. Thus all things are presented by shadows.

The discipline of desire is the background of character.

Be civil to all; sociable to many; familiar with few; friend to one; enemy to none.

If you wish to appear agreeable in society, you must consent to be taught many things which you know already.

If all else fails, the character of a man can be recognized by nothing so surely as by a jest which he takes badly.

A talent is formed in stillness, a character in the world's torrent.

The intoxication of anger, like that of the grape, shows us to others, but hides us from ourselves; and we injure our own cause, in the opinion of the world, when we too passionately and eagerly defend it; like the father of Virginia, who murdered his daughter to prevent her violation. Neither will all men be disposed to view our quarrels precisely in the same light that we do; and a man's blindness to his own defects will ever increase, in proportion as he is angry with others, or pleased with himself.

The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out.

Let us treat the men and women well: treat them as if they were real: perhaps they are.

...Though no man hates himself, the coldest among us having too much self-love for that, yet most men unconsciously judge the world from themselves, and it will be very generally found that those who sneer habitually at human nature, and affect to despise it, are among its worst and least pleasant samples.

...there is no man that lives who does not need to be drilled, disciplined, and broken into something higher and nobler and better than he is by nature.

Character is determined more by the lack of certain experiences than by those one has had.

The tests of character come to us silently, unawares, by slow and inauduble approaches. We hardly know they are there, till lo! the hour has struck, and the choice has been made, well or ill, but whether well or ill, a choice. The heroic hours of life do not announce their presence by drum and trumpet, challenging us to be true to ourselves by appeals to the martial spirit that keeps the blood at heat. Some little, unassuming, unobtrusive choice presents itself before us slyly and craftily, glib and insinuating, in the modest garb of innocence. To yield to its blandishments is so easy. The wrong, it seems, is venial. Only hyper-sensitiveness, we assure ourselves, would call it a wrong at all. These are the moments when you will need to remember the game that you are playing. Then it is that you will be summoned to show the courage of adventurous youth.

What lies behind us
And what lies before us
Are tiny matters
Compared to what lies within us.

[see also: REFORM]

Help a man against his will and you do the same as murder him.

Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it.

Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which is sufficiently appreciated by mankind.

Almsgiving tends to perpetuate poverty; aid does away with it once and for all. Almsgiving leaves a man just where he was before. Aid restores him to society as an individual worthy of all respect and not as a man with a grievance. Almsgiving is the generosity of the rich; social aid levels up social inequalities. Charity separates the rich from the poor; aid raises the needy and sets him on the same level with the rich.

Think that you will help others in the proper ways, and if that is not possible, at least you will refrain from harming them.

[see also: SEX]

Give me chastity and continence, but not just now.

It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it's a pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their colour.

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

The best way to recommend anyone to him is to talk ill of that person. He applies the same specious varnish to women who enjoy his favour. He suspects the innocent among them. Virtue, in the fair sex, is an infirmity. He is always in a hurry over his idylls. Modesty is only found in the badly made. Chastity exists perhaps in the torpid who have no temperament. It ought to be treated, like anaemia or tuberculosis.

Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.

Of all sexual aberrations perhaps the most peculiar is chastity.

We might as well make up our minds that chastity is no more a virtue than malnutrition.

[see also: YOUTH]

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child, well nursed, is at a Year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a Fricassee, or a Ragout.

[see also: JESUS CHRIST, RELIGION]

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.

The idea of an Incarnation of God is absurd: why should the human race think itself so superior to bees, ants and elephants as to be put in this unique relation to its maker? And why should God choose to come to men as a Jew? The Christian idea of a special providence is nonsense, an insult to the deity. Christians are like a council of frogs in a marsh or a synod of worms on a dunghill, croaking and squeaking, "For our sakes was the world created."

You desire to know something of my religion. It is the first time I have been questioned upon it. But I cannot take your curiosity amiss, and shall endeavor in a few words to gratify it. Here is my creed. I believe in one God, the creator of the universe. That he governs by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound religion, and I regard them as you do in whatever sect I meet with them.

As to Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with it now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequences, as probably it has, of making his doctrines more respected and more observed; especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the unbelievers in his government of the world with any peculiar marks of his displeasure.

Sir, I think all Christians, whether Papists or Protestants, agree in the essential articles, and that their differences are trivial, and rather political than religious.

Twenty times, in the course of my late Reading, have I been upon the point of breaking out, "This would be the best of all possible Worlds, if there were no Religion in it." ! ! ! But in this exclamati[on] I should have been as fanatical as Bryant or Cleverly. Without Religion this World would be Something not fit to be mentioned in polite Company, I mean Hell. So far from believing in the total and universal depravity of human Nature; I believe there is no Individual totally depraved. The most abandoned Scoundrel that ever existed, never Yet Wholly extinguished his Conscience, and while Conscience remains there is some Religion. Popes, Jesuits and Sorbonists and Inquisitors have some Conscience and some Religion. So had Marius and Sylla, Caesar Cataline and Anthony, an Augustus had not much more, let Virgil and Horace say what they will.

What shall We think of Virgil and Horace, Sallust Quintillian, Plin and even Tacitus? and even Cicero, Brutus and Seneca? Pompey I leave out of the question, as a mere politician and Soldier. Every One of the great Creatures has left indelible marks of Conscience and consequent of Religion, tho' every one of them has left abundant proofs of profligate violations of their Consciences by their little and great Passions and paltry Interests.

Where do we find a praecept in the Gospell, requiring Ecclesiastical Synods, Convocations, Councils, Decrees, Creeds, Confessions, Oaths, Subscriptions and whole Cartloads of other trumpery, that we find Religion incumbered with in these Days?

...the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. But we may hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with all this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this the most venerated reformer of human errors.

I have recently been examining all the known superstitions of the world, and do not find in our particular superstition (Christianity) one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology.

...there is one single fact that one may oppose to all the wit and argument of infidelity, that no man ever repented of Christianity on his deathbed.

As the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion, -- as it has in itself no character or enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Musselmen, -- and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

I have found no churches suitable for my own form of worship. I could not give assent without mental reservations to the long, complicated statements of Christian doctrine which characterize their Articles of Belief and Confessions of Faith.

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.

Many men are lamenting their misfortunes, and wishing that their place was changed that they might the more easily live Christianly. If a man cannot be a Christian in the place where he is, he cannot be a Christian any where.

There is no wild beast so ferocious as Christians who differ concerning their faith.

By the confession of all parties, the Christian religion was designed to be a religion of philanthropy, and love was represented as the distinctive test or characteristic of its true members. As a matter of fact, it has probably done more to quicken the affections of mankind, to promote pity, to create a pure and merciful ideal, than any other influence that has ever acted on the world. But while the marvellous influence of Christianity in this respect has been acknowledged by all who have mastered the teachings of history, while the religious minds of every land and of every opinion have recognised in its Founder the highest conceivable ideal and embodiment of compassion as of purity, it is a no less incontestable truth that for many centuries the Christian priesthood pursued a policy, at least towards those who differed from their opinions, implying a callousness and absence of the emotional part of humanity which has seldom been paralleled, and perhaps never surpassed. From Julian, who observed that no wild beasts were so ferocious as angry theologians, to Montesquieu, who discussed as a psychological phenomenon the inhumanity of monks, the fact has been constantly recognised. The monks, the Inquisitors, and in general the mediæval clergy, present a type that is singularly well defined, and is in many respects exceedingly noble, but which is continually marked by a total absence of mere natural affection. In zeal, in courage, in perseverance, in self-sacrifice, they towered far above the average of mankind; but they were always as ready to inflict as to endure suffering. These were the men who chanted their Te Deums over the massacre of the Albigenses or of St. Bartholomew, who fanned and stimulated the Crusades and the religious wars, who exulted over the carnage, and strained every nerve to prolong the struggle, -- and, when the zeal of the warrior had begun to flag, mourned over the languor of faith, and contemplated the sufferings they had caused with a satisfaction that was as pitiless as it was unselfish. These were the men who were at once the instigators and the agents of that horrible detailed persecution that stained almost every province of Europe with the blood of Jews and heretics, and which exhibits an amount of cold, passionless, studied, and deliberate barbarity unrivalled in the history of mankind.

The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad.

Jesus died too soon. If he had lived to my age he would have repudiated his doctrine.

Christianity is called the religion of pity.-- Pity stands in opposition to all the tonic passions that augment the energy of the feeling of aliveness: it is a depressant. A man loses power when he pities. Through pity that drain upon strength which suffering works is multiplied a thousandfold. Suffering is made contagious by pity....

Under Christianity neither morality nor religion has any point of contact with actuality. It offers purely imaginary causes ("God," "soul," "ego," "spirit," "free will," -- or even ""unfree"), and purely imaginary effects ("sin," "salvation," "grace," "punishment," "forgiveness of sins").

I call Christianity the one great curse, the one enormous and innermost perversion, the one great instinct of revenge, for which no means are too venomous, too underhand, too underground and too petty -- I call it the one immortal blemish of mankind.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.

Tertullian was born in Carthage somewhere about 160 AD. He was a pagan, and he abandoned himself to the lascivious life of his city until about his 35th year, when he became a Christian.... To him is ascribed the sublime confession: Credo quia absurdum est (I believe because it is absurd). This does not altogether accord with historical fact, for he merely said:

And the Son of God died, which is immediately credible because it is absurd. And buried he rose again, which is certain because it is impossible.

One Christian is no Christian.

Any ordinary city is in fact two cities, one the city of the poor, the other of the rich, each at war with the other; and in either division there are smaller ones -- you would make a great mistake if you treated them as single states.

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said, "This is mine," and found people naive enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society.

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

The crimes of extreme civilization are certainly more atrocious than those of extreme barbarism.

In a theatre it happened that a fire started off stage. The clown came out to tell the audience. They thought it was a joke and applauded. He told them again, and they became still more hilarious. This is the way, I suppose, that the world will be destroyed -- amid the universal hilarity of wits and wags who think it is all a joke.

The savage in man is never quite eradicated.

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him.

Theory of the true civilization. It is not to be found in gas or steam or table turning. It consists in the diminution of the traces of original sin.

The degree of civilization in a society is revealed by entering its prisons.

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

What is a civilization, rightly considered? Morally, it is the evil passions repressed, the level of conduct raised; spiritually, idols cast down, God enthroned; materially, bread and fair treatment for the greatest number. This is the common formula, the common definition; everybody accepts it and is satisfied with it.

Our civilization is wonderful, in certain spectacular and meretricious ways; wonderful in scientific marvels and inventive miracles; wonderful in material inflation, which it calls advancement, progress, and other pet names; wonderful in its spying-out of the deep secrets of Nature and its vanquishment of her stubborn laws; wonderful in its extraordinary financial and commercial achievements; wonderful in its hunger for money, and in its indifference as to how it is acquired; wonderful in the hitherto undreamed-of magnitude of its private fortunes and the prodigal fashion in which they are given away to institutions devoted to the public culture; wonderful in its exhibitions of poverty; wonderful in the surprises which it gets out of that great new birth, Organization, the latest and most potent creation and miracle-worker of the commercialized intellect, as applied in transportation systems, in manufactures, in systems of communication, in news-gathering, book-publishing, journalism; in protecting labor; in oppressing labor; in herding the national parties and keeping the sheep docile and usable; in closing the public service against brains and character; in electing purchasable legislatures, blatherskike Congresses, and city governments which rob the town and sell municipal protection to gamblers, thieves, prostitutes, and professional seducers for cash. It is a civilization which has destroyed the simplicity and repose of life; replaced its contentment, its poetry, its soft romance-dreams and visions with the money-fever, sordid ideals, vulgar ambitions, and the sleep which does not refresh; it has invented a thousand useless luxuries, and turned them into necessities; it has created a thousand vicious appetites and satisfies none of them; it has dethroned God and set up a shekel in His place.

Civilization is a limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessaries.

America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

Civilization is the process of reducing the infinite to the finite.

Inventor, n. A person who makes an ingenious arrangement of wheels, levers and springs, and believes it civilization.

Civilization is paralysis.

The slum is the measure of civilization.

What a pitiable thing it is that our civilization can do no better for us than to make us slaves to indoor life, so that we have to go and take artificial exercise in order to preserve our health.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle - they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.

Does the thoughtful man suppose that...the present experiment in civilization is the last world we will see?

I think it would be a good idea.

Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

Civilization, that great fraud of our times, has promised man that by complicating his existence it would multiply his pleasures.... Civilization has promised man freedom, at the cost of giving up everything dear to him, which it arrogantly treated as lies and fantasies.... Hour by hour needs increase and are nearly always unsatisfied, peopling the earth with discontented rebels. The superfluous has become a necessity and luxuries indispensable.

what man calls civilization always results in deserts

I believe that the horrifying deterioration in the ethical conduct of people today stems primarily from the mechanization and dehumanization of our lives -- a disastrous byproduct of the development of the scientific and technical mentality. Nostra culpa! I don't see any way to tackle this disastrous short-coming. Man grows cold faster than the planet he inhabits.

You can't say that civilization don't advance...for in every war they kill you a new way.

A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.

When man learns to understand and control his own behavior as well as he is learning to understand and control the behavior of crop plants and domestic animals, he may be justified in believing that he has become civilized.

It is so stupid of modern civilization to have given up believing in the devil when he is the only explanation of it.

Civilization is a movement and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor.

Civilization is drugs, alcohol, engines of war, prostitution, machines and machine slaves, low wages, bad food, bad taste, prisons, reformatories, lunatic asylums, divorce, perversion, brutal sports, suicides, infanticide, cinema, quackery, demagogy, strikes, lockouts, revolutions, putsches, colonization, electric chairs, guillotines, sabotage, floods, famine, disease, gangsters, money barons, horse racing, fashion shows, poodle dogs, chow dogs, Siamese cats, condoms, pessaries, syphilis, gonorrhea, insanity, neuroses, etc., etc.

To know only one thing well is to have a barbaric mind: civilization implies the graceful relation of all varieties of experience to a central humane system of thought. The present age is peculiarly barbaric: introduce, say, a Hebrew scholar to an ichthyologist or an authority on Danish place names and the pair of them would have no single topic in common but the weather or the war (if there happened to be a war in progress, which is usual in this barbaric age).

A sentimental misanthropist coined the often cited aphorism "The more I see of human beings, the more I like animals". I maintain the contrary: only the person who knows animals, including the highest and most nearly related to ourselves, and who has gained insight into evolution, will be able to apprehend the unique position of man. We are the highest achievement reached so far by the great constructors of evolution. We are their 'latest' but certainly not their last word. The scientist must not regard anything as absolute, not even the laws of pure reason. He must remain aware of the great fact, discovered by Heraclitus, that nothing whatever really remains the same even for one moment, but that everything is perpetually changing. To regard man, the most ephemeral and rapidly evolving of all species, as the final and unsurpassable achievement of creation, especially at his present-day particularly dangerous and disagreeable stage of development, is certainly the most arrogant and dangerous of all untenable doctrines. If I thought of man as the final image of God, I should not know what to think of God. But when I consider that our ancestors, at a time fairly recent in relation to the earth's history, were perfectly ordinary apes, closely related to chimpanzees, I see a glimmer of hope. It does not require very great optimism to assume that from us human beings something better and higher may evolve. Far from seeing in man the irrevocable and unsurpassable image of God, I assert - more modestly and, I believe, in greater awe of the Creation and its infinite possibilities - that the long-sought missing link between animals and the really humane being is ourselves!

Modern social practices have done four things to the household. First, by converting the village into a city, they have replaced the personalized village neighborhood by an agglomeration of human beings, most of whose relations are as impersonal as those between passers-by on a busy street or fellow passengers in a bus or subway car. Second, they have stripped the household of many of its old-time tasks: the barnyard, the woodpile, food preservation, cooking, the workshop, construction, the making of implements and utensils, the making of cloth and clothing, laundering, and transferred these and other activities to factories and stores. Third, they have taken adults out of the household into factories, stores, and offices and children into schools and playgrounds. Fourth, through organizing an extensive amusement industry, they have induced both adult and juvenile members of the household to spend a great deal of their spare time away from home. Such changes have gone a long way toward destroying the villages of households and have done much to break up the family.

Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage's whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.

Unfortunately, there are nearly twice as many people in the poor countries as in the rich. Further, there will -- nothing can stop it -- be an extra billion people added to the world population in the next ten years. Of those, rather more than three-quarters will be added to the poor. All these statements, as Mr McNamara remarked with great force, are cliches. A lot of us -- and most urgently of all, American demographers and food scientists -- have been uttering them for years past. Here is another. The gap between the rich and poor countries is growing. Take the average daily income in a large slice of the poor countries. It is something like thity-five cents a day. The average daily income in the US is about eight dollars a day. Twenty times greater. In ten years it is likely to be thirty times greater.

Yes, those statements are cliches, all right. Some of them are dreadful cliches: and I am using dreadful in its first meaning, that is full of dread. The most dreadful of all -- again, men of sober judgment have been saying it for years -- is that many millions of people in the poor countries are going to starve to death before our eyes -- or, to complete the domestic picture, we shall see them doing so upon our television sets.

The chief product of an automated society is a widespread and deepening sense of boredom.

We are born princes and the civilizing process turns us into frogs.

...teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy: 1492.

The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

Civilization is the art of living in towns of such size the everyone does not know everyone else.

The first position (I'm not O.K., you're O.K.) [Tom] Harris maintains, in the face of much criticism, in the universal position occupied by the child, who is small, dirty, and clumsy in a world controlled by tall, clean, and deft adults. (Or so it seems to the child.) Here lies a critical theoretical difference between Harris and Eric Berne; for as Harris described it to me, Berne believed that we are born princes and the civilizing process turns us into frogs, while he himself believes that we are all born frogs.

...civilization is reckoned as the distance man has placed between himself and his excreta.

I believe humanity made a serious mistake when our ancestors gave up the hunting and gathering life for agriculture and towns. That's when they invented the slave, the serf, the master, the commissar, the bureaucrat, the capitalist, and the five-star general. Wasn't it farming made a murderer out of Cain? Nothing but trouble and grief ever since, with a few comforts thrown in here and there, now and then, like bourbon and ice cubes and free beer on the Fourth of July, mainly to stretch out the misery.

The desire to impose upon the disorder of nature some orderly pattern or arrangement makes men into poets, painters and gardeners; it also makes them prey to the illusion that a highly organized state will be civilized and preferable to a disorganized and muddled one.

When the vultures watching your civilization begin dropping dead...it is time to pause and wonder.

The living arrangement Americans now think of as normal is bankrupting us economically, socially, ecologically, and spiritually. The physical setting itself - the cartoon landscape of car-clogged highways, strip malls, tract houses, franchise fry pits, parking lots, junked cities and ravaged countryside - is not merely a symptom of our troubled culture but in many ways a primary cause of our troubles.

Just like the body of man, the body of civilization has its own balances -- right and wrong, good and ill, inane and meaningful. I don't know why, but all the opposites need to be present in order for the balance to work.

The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases.

For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question 'How can we eat?' the second by the question 'Why do we eat?' and the third by the question 'Where shall we have lunch?'

The man who first abused his fellows with swear-words instead of bashing their brains out with a club should be counted among those who laid the foundations of civilization.

The flush toilet is the basis of Western civilization.

The difficulty with this is, of course, that Modern Man does not see, hear, or most importantly believe anything which does not take place before the glassy stare of the television camera. How inconvenient, then, that millions of starving children and fallen heroes lack the foresight to die in the right places for the right causes.

Develop your own set of cliches.

Some people are quick to criticize cliches, but what is a cliche? It is a truth that has retained its validity through time. Mankind would lose half its hard-earned wisdom, built up patiently over the ages, if it ever lost its cliches.

Clowns are best in their own Company; but Gentlemen are best every where.

All literary style, especially national style, is made up of such coincidences, which are a spiritual sort of puns. That is why style is untranslatable....

Coincidences are spiritual puns.

[see also: ELOQUENCE, LANGUAGE, SPEECH, WORDS]

I have often repented speaking, but never of holding my tongue.

There is no pleasure to me without communication: there is not so much as a sprightly thought comes into my mind that it does not grieve me to have produced alone, and that I have no one to tell it to.

When you fall into a man's conversation, the first thing you should consider is, whether he has a greater inclination to hear you, or that you should hear him.

When the speaker and he to whom he speaks do not understand, that is metaphysics.

No one would talk much in company if he realized how often he himself misunderstands others.

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving in words evidence of the fact.

There is, indeed, no wild beast more to be dreaded than a communicative man having nothing to communicate.

The little girl had the making of a poet in her who, being told to be sure of her meaning before she spoke, said, "How can I know what I think till I see what I say?"

After the expression of negative emotions one notices in oneself or in other people another curious mechanical feature. This is talking. There is no harm in talking by itself. But with some people, especially with those who notice it least, it really becomes a vice. They talk all the time, everywhere they happen to be, while working, while traveling, even while sleeping. They never stop talking to someone if there is someone to talk to, and if there is no one, they talk to themselves.

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

...the fantastic advances in the field of electronic communication constitute a great danger to the privacy of the individual; that indiscriminate use of such devices in law enforcement raises grave constitutional questions under the Fourth and Fifth Amendments; and that these considerations impose a heavier responsibility on this Court in its supervision of the fairness of procedures in the federal court system.

Eschew obfuscation.

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media with which men communicate than by the content of the communication.

When people have trouble communicating, the least they can do is to shut up.

While people are fairly young and the musical composition of their lives is still in its opening bars, they can go about writing it together and exchange motifs..., but if they meet when they are older...their musical compositions are more or less complete, and every motif, every object, every word means something different to each of them.

If I don't have something stupid to say, I don't say anything at all.

It contributes greatly toward a man's moral and intellectual health, to be brought into habits of companionship with individuals unlike himself, who care little for his pursuits, and whose sphere and abilities he must go out of himself to appreciate.

[see also: INDIVIDUALITY]

On applause: They named it Ovation from the Latin ovis, a sheep.

How much time he gains who does not look to see what his neighbor says or does or thinks, but only at what he does himself, to make it just and holy.

Singularity in the right, hath ruined many: Happy those who are convinced of the general Opinion.

The rewards...in this life are esteem and admiration of others - the punishments are neglect and contempt - nor may anyone imagine that these are not as real as the others. The desire of the esteem of others is as real a want of nature as hunger - and the neglect and contempt of the world as severe a pain as the gout or stone. It sooner and oftener produces despair, and a detestation of existence....

To do the opposite of something is also a form of imitation.

Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it bee goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself and you shall have the suffrage of the world.

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

A thought is often original, though you have uttered it a hundred times.

If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.

The thing is, you see, that the strongest man in the world is the man who stands alone.

With the exception of the instinct of self-preservation, the propensity for emulation is probably the strongest and most alert and persistent of the economic motives proper.

In America, through pressure of conformity, there is freedom of choice, but nothing to choose from.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

How is it that the American, once he has attained his majority, appears to us as the perfect conformist. It is, perhaps, because he has exhausted during his childhood and adolescence practically all his indiscipline and anarchy, so that he has no difficulty later in life in integrating himself into a collective society, which he himself fully accepts.

Originality consists in thinking for yourself, not in thinking differently from other people.

On March 28, 1957, Christopher Morley died at age 66 in Roslyn Heights, New York. After his death, the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune published a message he had written for his fans and friends:

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

To be nobody-but-yourself in a world which is doing its best to, night and day, to make you everybody else -- means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other. A society which gives unlimited freedom to the individual, more often than not attains a disconcerting sameness. On the other hand, where communal discipline is strict but not ruthless...originality is likely to thrive.

Woe to him inside a nonconformist clique who does not conform with nonconformity.

There is a level of cowardice lower than that of the conformist: the "fashionable non-conformist".

If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity.

Men never do evil so fully and cheerfully as when we do it out of conscience.

I take it that conscience is the guardian in the individual of the rules which the community has evolved for its own preservation.

Conscience is the inner voice which warns us somebody may be looking.

I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions.

Conscience...is merely instinct socialized into guilt.

[see also: MIND, REASON, THOUGHT]

Man is but a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.

Our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.

Most people live, whether physically, intellectually or morally, in a very restricted circle of their potential being. They make use of a very small portion of their possible consciousness, and of their soul's resources in general, much like a man who, out of his whole bodily organism, should get into a habit of using and moving only his little finger. Great emergencies and crises show us how much greater our vital resources are than we had supposed.

It is by undermining the idea of reason, of order, of harmony, that we gain consciousness of ourselves.

Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.

...the value of the constitution depends on the good will of government itself. If the Supreme Court rules that the Bill of Rights should not interfere with the important business of government (which they have done on at least two occasions), then the constitution is meaningless.

The U.S. Constitution isn't perfect -- but it's a hell of a lot better than what we have now....

[see also: CAPITALISM, ECONOMY, PROPERTY, WEALTH]

Corporation, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.

Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slavedriver.

No one in this world, so far as I know...has ever lost money by under-estimating the intelligence of the great masses of plain people.

I was now definitely a part of that strange race of people, aptly described in an editorial in the Herald Tribune, as spending their lives doing work they detest to make money they don't want to buy things they don't need in order to impress people they dislike.

I do not without a certain inner resistance and resentment accept a system of marketing in which all the decisions have been taken out of both the shopkeeper and the customer and put under the remote control of the market researcher and the packaging expert, the advertising agency and the wholesale distributor. Those who have grown up in this packaged world accept such external controls and compulsions as normal. Their loss of choice, their loss of taste; they do not even notice for they have never known anything different.

American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash - all of them - surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index. Driving along I thought how in France or Italy every item of these throw-out things would have been saved and used for something. This is not said in criticism of one system or the other but I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness - chemical wastes in the rivers, metal wastes everywhere, and atomic wastes buried deep in the earth or sunk in the sea. When an Indian village became too deep in its own filth, the inhabitants moved. And we have no place to which to move.

Junk is the ideal product...the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy.... The junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to the product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.

The car, the furniture, the wife, the children -- everything has to be disposable. Because you see the main thing today is -- shopping.