Nothing of any importance can be taught. It can only be learned, and with blood and sweat.

Every war results from the struggle for markets and spheres of influence, and every war is sold to the public by professional liars and totally sincere religious maniacs, as a Holy Crusade to save God and Goodness from Satan and Evil.

Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.

You are precisely as big as what you love and precisely as small as what you allow to annoy you.

Cynics regarded everybody as equally corrupt... Idealists regarded everybody as equally corrupt, except themselves.

The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.

There are gods, but there is no God; and all gods become devils eventually.

When the rose and the cross are united the alchemical marriage is complete and the drama ends. Then we wake from history and enter eternity.

Animals outline their territories with their excretions, humans outline their territories by ink excretions on paper.

The totally convinced and the totally stupid have too much in common for the resemblance to be accidental.

The Grail is the womb of the beloved.

Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren't even mammals.

Humans live through their myths and only endure their realities.

Everyone look around and see if you can spot the NARCS. They're the ones who look like hippies.

Once something becomes discernible, or understandable, we no longer need to repeat it. We can destroy it.

The path up is the path down. The way forward is the way back. The universe inside is outside but the universe outside is inside.

History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce's view of Everyman as victim.

A monopoly on the means of communication may define a ruling elite more precisely than the celebrated Marxian formula of monopoly in the means of production.

Size is not a reality, but a construct of the mind; and space a construct to contain constructs.

The Right's view of government and the Left's view of big business are both correct.

All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.

Nothing of any importance can be taught. It can only be learned, and with blood and sweat.

I think I got off on the wrong planet. Beam me up Scotty, there's no rational life here.

Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only own one encyclopedia.

Groups are grammatical fictions; only individuals exist, and each individual is different.

The web of life is a beautiful and meaningless dance. The web of life is a process with a moving goal. The web of life is a perfectly finished work of art right where I am sitting now.

Philadelphia merely seems dull because it's next to exciting Camden, New Jersey.

A true initiation never ends.

Nobody sees the obvious, nobody observes the ordinary. There are more miracles in a square yard of earth than in all the fables of the Church.

An Enlightened Master is ideal only if your goal is to become a Benighted Slave.

Ego is a social fiction for which one person at a time gets all the blame.

Only the madman is absolutely sure.

It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.

Of course I'm crazy, but that doesn't mean I'm wrong.

The longer one is alone, the easier it is to hear the song of the earth.

Belief is the death of intelligence.

Pregnancy is a kind of miracle. Especially so in that it proves that a man and woman can conspire to force God to create a new soul.

We live in our fantasies and endure our realities.

The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.

There is one universal sex law: Sex shall not be unregulated.

There is no complete theory of anything.

The average is that which no person quite ever is.

Most people live in a myth and grow violently angry if anyone dares to tell them the truth about themselves.

The function of Theology? The recitation of the incomprehensible by the unspeakable to pick the pockets of the unthinking.

I have never experienced another human being. I have experienced my impressions of them.

Beyond a certain point, the whole universe becomes a continuous process of initiation.

The abandoned infant's cry is rage, not fear.

Consciousness itself is an infinite regress. This explains coincidences.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.