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Everyone laughs and cries in the same language. When you give food to the poor, they call you a saint. When you ask why the poor have no food, they call you a communist. I saw a human skull the other day. There was an inscription below it: ‘Look long and hard at me, for I was once as you are and you will soon be as I am.’ I read about an Eskimo hunter who asked the local missionary priest, ‘If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?’ ‘No,’ said the priest, ‘not if you did not know.’ ‘Then why,’ asked the Eskimo earnestly, ‘did you tell me?’ Missionaries are perfect nuisances and leave every place worse than they found it. I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord's work. What do the nationalists say about killers punishing murderers and thieves sentencing looters? The most heinous and the cruelest crimes of which history has record have been committed under the cover of religion or equally noble motives. Now, my good man, this is no time for making enemies. Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too? I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability. If English was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for them Mexicans. The first clergyman was the first rascal who met the first fool. Democracy is four wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. No one rules if no one obeys. Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it. None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. All Bibles are man-made. In nature, there are neither rewards nor punishments; there are consequences. We always obeyed the law. Isn't that what you do in America? Even if you don't agree with a law personally, you still obey it. Otherwise life would be chaos. I hit him to get his attention. I shot him to calm him down. I killed him to reason with him. Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes. The moral effect should be good and it would spread a lively terror. How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy! The crimes of the U.S. throughout the world have been systematic, constant, clinical, remorseless, and fully documented but nobody cares to talk about them. How long would authority ... exist, if not for the willingness of the mass to become soldiers, policemen, jailers, and hangmen. You get what anyone gets; you get a lifetime. To be wronged is nothing unless you continue to remember it. The truth is that there is nothing noble in being superior to somebody else. The only real nobility is in being superior to your former self. If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, let 'em go, because, man, they're gone. All our lauded technological progress, our very civilization, is like the axe in the hand of the pathological criminal. Invisible Pink Unicorns are beings of awesome mystical power. We know this because they manage to be invisible and pink at the same time. Like all religions, the Faith of the Invisible Pink Unicorns is based upon both logic and faith. We have faith that they are pink; we logically know that they are invisible because we can't see them. We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office. In the 1980s capitalism triumphed over communism. In the 1990s it triumphed over democracy. The corporation is a true Frankenstein's monster, an artificial person run amok, responsible only to its own soulless self. We, on our side, are praying to Him to give us victory, because we believe we are right; but those on the other side pray to Him, too, for victory, believing they are right. What must He think of us? Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies. Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side? And ain't that a big enough majority in any town? In matters of conscience, the law of majority has no place. Why tell me that a man is a fine speaker, if it is not the truth that he is speaking? I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own; a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms… In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism. I am amazed how many people on this planet are happy and free and never even saw the US constitution. Authoritarian government required to speak, is silent. Representative government required to speak, lies with impunity. There is always a certain meanness in the argument of conservatism, joined with a certain superiority in its fact. I have the greatest admiration for your propaganda. Propaganda in the West is carried out by experts who have had the best training in the world, in the field of advertising, and have mastered the techniques with exceptional proficiency. Yours are subtle and persuasive; ours are crude and obvious. I think that the fundamental difference between our worlds, with respect to propaganda, is quite simple. You tend to believe yours and we tend to disbelieve ours. When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong you cannot be too conservative. ... The CIA has overthrown functioning democracies in over twenty countries. When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? It is because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind. Like all dreamers, I mistook disenchantment for truth. If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them; but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? If you speak the truth, have one foot in the stirrup. ... Somehow we find it hard to sell our values, namely that the rich should plunder the poor. To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men. Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. As a child I understood how to give; I have forgotten this grace since I became civilized. Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite. The target suffered a terminal illness before a firing squad in Baghdad. Those who hate and fight must stop themselves; otherwise it is not stopped. Can anything be stupider than that a man has the right to kill me because he lives on the other side of a river and his ruler has a quarrel with mine, though I have not quarreled with him? I was asked to memorize what I did not understand; and, my memory being so good, it refused to be insulted in that manner. The greatest artists of this world are never puritans, and seldom even ordinarily respectable. It is hard to free fools from chains they revere. There is no real wealth but the labor of man. Where the mountains are of gold and the valleys of silver, the world would not be one grain of corn the richer; not one comfort would be added to the human race. Foreign aid is when the poor people of a rich country give money to the rich people of a poor country. I don’t really miss God, but I sure miss Santa Claus! Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful. Man is the religious animal. He is the only religious animal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion, several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself and cuts his throat, if his theology isn’t straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother’s path to happiness and heaven. The keenest sorrow is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities. The truth is more important than the facts. Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority. The world is divided into people who think they are right. Faith is belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel. My opinions may have changed, but not the fact that I am right. Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal. Pity the warrior that kills all his foe. Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel. Every day people are straying away from the church and going back to God. My final point about alcohol, about drugs, about pornography; what business is it of yours what I do, read, buy, see, fuck or take into my body as long as I don't harm another human being whilst on this planet? And for those of you having a little moral dilemma on how to answer this, I'll answer for you. None of your fucking business! Take that to the bank, cash it and take it on a vacation outta my fucking life. A tyrant is always stirring up some war or other, in order that the people may require a leader. War is an instrument entirely insufficient toward redressing wrong; and multiplies, instead of indemnifying losses. I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. The wise man will love; all others will desire. Christianity makes suffering contagious. May your fondest wish be granted. Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; truth isn't. The exact contrary of what is generally believed is often the truth. Life is too short to waste in critical peep or cynic bark, quarrel or reprimand: It will soon be dark. Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. Believe those who are seeking the truth; doubt those who find it. That's not a lie, it's a terminological inexactitude. If one acknowledges a group or a nation willing to commit atrocities, then one must also acknowledges the existence of a nation willing to commit atrocities to blame on the first nation. He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. For if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both. Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally. I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs. So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence. When encountering a new philosophy or religion, do not convert, but rather assimilate. You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence. At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. The citizen who sees his society’s democratic clothes being worn out and does not cry it out, is not a patriot, but a traitor. The Christian resolution to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad. The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing. If the doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I'd type a little faster. The modern conservative is engaged in one man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives. I have examined all of the known superstitions of the world and I do not find in our superstitions of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all founded on fables and mythology. Christianity has made one-half the world fools and the other half hypocrites. It may be that our role on this planet is not to worship God, but to create him. In order to learn, one must change one's mind. Every anarchist is a baffled dictator. Everyone's values are defined by what they will tolerate when it is done to others. Patriotism is the virtue of the vicious. Do not do an immoral thing for moral reasons. If fifty million people believe a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing. There must be more to life than having everything. Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. |
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