philosophy

"I am looking forward very much to getting back to Cambridge, and being able to say what I think and not to mean what I say: two things which at home are impossible. Cambridge is one of the few places …"

"…the Linux philosophy is "laugh in the face of danger". Oops. Wrong one. "Do it yourself". That's it."

"I'm not pessimistic. It is the world that is terrible. How can we be optimistic in the face of a planet where people live so badly, nature is being destroyed and the dominant empire is money?"

"I have come to believe that this is a mighty continent which was hitherto unknown. I am greatly supported in this view by reason of this great river, and by this sea which is fresh."

"It rots a writer’s brain, it cretinises you. You say the same thing again and again, and when you do that happily you’re well on the way to being a cretin. Or a politician."

"Less than fifteen cents to the province and more than twenty-five cents to Ottawa, this is far from being excessive!"

"There is something to being gay apart from the sodomy."

"Few are the women and maidens who would let themselves think that one could at the same time be joyous and modest. They are all bold and coarse in their speech, in their demeanor wild and lewd. That i…"

"The Hindu feels it his duty to dislike those whom he has been taught to consider the enemy of his religion and his ancestors; the Mussalman, lured into the false belief that he was once a member of a …"

"“Human beings fear difference,” Lilith had told him once. “Oankali crave difference. Humans persecute their different ones, yet they need them to give themselves definition and status. Oankali seek di…"

"In the same manner as we are cautioned by religion to show our faith by our works we may very properly apply the principle to philosophy, and judge of it by its works; accounting that to be futile whi…"

"If I was gay, there would be no closet, you would never see the closet I came out of. Why? I would have burned it for kindling by the time I was 12. Because I know with all certainty in my mind, there…"

"An illness is a failure to solve a mental or psychological problem in the correct manner . . . The energy that would be used to solve the problem instead is spent maintaining the illness. It is theref…"

"Fascism is nothing but capitalist reaction; from the point of view of the proletariat the difference between the types of reaction is meaningless."

"If human beings were or had to be this or that substance, this or that destiny, no ethical experience would be possible... This does not mean, however, that humans are not, and do not have to be, some…"

"…Novello should be extremely grateful that his innubile daughter was being taken off his hands by a Tasca."

"Friends have asked how I came to engender this American antagonism. My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist. Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them."

"We are being sucked into the body of eternity."

"Men are not flattered by being shown that there has been a difference of purpose between the Almighty and them."

"The plea of anger or of drunkenness — as having placed the criminal for the moment beyond the control of his reason — relieves him from the charge of premeditated and malicious intent; but a rational …"