We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.
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From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is subjected to these forces of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been, and their parents and their parents before them. These forces are mainly concerned with destroying most of its potentialities. This enterprise is on the whole successful.
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Normality highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal. Normal men have killed perhaps 100, 000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.
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Insanity: a perfectly rational adjustment to the insane world.
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The brotherhood of man is evoked by particular men according to their circumstances. But it seldom extends to all men. In the name of our freedom and our brotherhood we are prepared to blow up the other half of mankind and to be blown up in our turn.
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Life is a sexually transmitted disease.
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We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another, and to the spiritual and material world -- mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt.
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The range of what we think and do is limited by what we fail to notice. And because we fail to notice that we fail to notice, there is little we can do to change; until we notice how failing to notice shapes our thoughts and deeds.
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Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.
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To live in the past or in the future may be less satisfying than to live in the present, but it can never be as disillusioning.
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Perhaps God is not dead; perhaps God is himself mad.
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Children do not give up their innate imagination, curiosity, dreaminess easily. You have to love them to get them to do that.
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