“Human beings feel an obligation to have a definate opinion on issues they can never truly know. They need to learn to be satisfied with I don t know .”
“what we are we potray that in our deeds.....”
“Of course he despised the world as a whole; every thoughtful man should; it is almost a test of refinement.”
“I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant.”
“The twins were too young to know that these were only history’s henchmen. Sent to square the books and collect the dues from those who broke its laws. Impelled by feelings that were primal yet paradoxically wholly impersonal. Feelings of contempt born of inchoate, unacknowledged fear—civilization’s fear of nature, men’s fear of women, power’s fear of powerlessness. Man’s subliminal urge to destroy what he could neither subdue nor deify.”
“Fancy thinking the Beast was something you could hunt and kill!”
“schade dass die Natur nur einen Mensch aus dir schuf / denn zum wurdigen Mann war und zum Schelmen der Stoff (loose translation: nature, alas, made only one being out of you although there was material for a good man & a rogue)”
“Trust a crowd to look at the wrong end of a miracle every time.”
“The human soul is an abyss”
“For there is not a single human being, not even the primitive Negro, not even the idiot, who is so conveniently simple that his being can be explained as the sum of two or three principal elements; and to explain so complex a man as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a hopelessly childish attempt. Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone s does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands.”
“No group-living nonhuman primate is monogamous, and adultery has been documented in every human culture studied- including those in which fornicators are routinely stoned to death. In light of all of this bloody retribution, it s hard to see how monogamy comes naturally to our species. Why would so many risk their reputations, families, careers- even presidential legacies- for something that runs against human nature? Were monogamy an ancient, evolved trait characteristic of our species, as the standard narrative insists, these ubiquitous transgressions would be infrequent and such horrible enforcement unnecessary. No creature needs to be threatened with death to act in accord with its own nature.”
“What she craved and really felt herself entitled to was a situation in which the noblest attitude should also be the easiest.”
“There’s something about taking the cart back instead of leaving it in the parking lot…It’s significant…Because somebody has to take them in…And if you know that, and you do it for that one guy, you do something else. You join the world…You move out of your isolation and become universal.”
“Everybody s weird, fundamentally everybody is a snap. Sometimes it s a sexual thing and sometimes it s a different kind of weirdness, but one way or another everybody s nuts.”
“They had done nothing but wait, and had become poetical. How easy to the smallest building; how impossible to most men.”
“Like enthusiasts in general, he made no inquiries into details of procedure.”
“[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades ... Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet”