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Some of the Past Wisdom From
- It cannot be said that the movement known as the Women's Liberation shows any real recognition of the conditions
actually necessary for any sort of genuinely intellectual activity. What appears to be the issue is that it is
recognized that the position of man has not, in the changing social situation, deteriorated as radically as that
of woman, and the solution envisaged appears to be to see that it does.
- Women are the last people to be trusted with children. Those who have repressed their own aspirations will scarcely be tolerant of the aspirations of others.
- Marriage: there are less painful ways to commit suicide.
- Men are children at heart and women are not. Women abandoned themselves to society.
- Women are like sane people in general - you can't imagine how they can bear to be like it but the last thing they want is to be told how to stop.
- The question is whether anyone has ever been in any serious way, not sane. I have examined the history of
the human race with care. Kant gives the impression that he liked the inconceivable, but his books were too long;
Einstein was interested in the Universe, but was bad at psychology; H.G Wells saw that research consisted of taking
risks, but declined into sociology.
- The most distinctive expression of Nietzsche's thought is contained in "Thus spake Zarathustra", and in the first few pages of it at that. Nietzsche sometimes confused his psychological ideas with social or political ones, particularly in books other than Zarathustra. This kind of mistake is easily made by a person who has been brought up in a sane world.
- "Love thy neighbour as thyself": In fact, everyone loves their neighbour as themselves. They desire that he shall accept second-best as they have done; that he, too, shall be made to realize his limitations and "come to terms with himself".
- The human race is so megalomaniac; they think you're being conceited if you say you're better than everybody else.
- A human relationship is what happens when you know you can rely on the other person to be as dishonest as you are.
- The object of the educational system is to make the child feel guilty for the harm that has been done to him.
- I decided to postulate infinitely many dimensions on grounds of economy of hypotheses.
- The human race's favourite method for being in control of the facts is to ignore them.
- The human race knows enough about thinking to prevent it.
- The human race expresses great concern that everyone should express their abilities to the full, and never more so than when those abilities are non-existent.
- One of the greatest superstitions of our time is the belief that it has none.
- Science arose by accident in the brief space when one great orthodoxy was loosening its hold and the new great orthodoxy had not yet reached its full strength. The first orthodoxy was that of religion which dominated the dark ages. The second orthodoxy is that of the belief in society, which is dominating the dark age now beginning.
- Earning a living is regarded as moral. This is because a person who is answerable only to himself may or may not be wasting his time; an employed person is certain to be.
- Job satisfaction consists of knowing that you are not actually doing anything to increase any one elses freedom.
- Only the impossible is worth attempting. One is sure to fail at anything else.
- The object of modern science is to make all aspects of reality equally boring, so that no one will be tempted to think about them.
- If you stand up to the human race you lose something called their "goodwill"; if you kowtow to them you gain . . . their permission to continue kowtowing.
- Society expresses its sympathy for the geniuses of the past to distract attention from the fact that it has no intention of being sympathetic to the geniuses of the present.
- Equality: It is easier to make people appear equally stupid than to make them appear equally clever.
- Democracy: everyone should have an equal opportunity to obstruct everybody else.
- In an autocracy, one person has his way; in an aristocracy, a few people have their way; in a democracy, no one has his way.
- With communism you can indulge your desire for power over other peoples' lives more directly than if you became
a witch doctor or a social worker.
- I cannot write long books; I leave that for those people who have nothing to say.
- Humility means (to the human race) to desire only what you can easily have.
- Society, they say, exists to safeguard the rights of the individual. If this is so, the primary right of a human being is evidently to live unrealistically.
- In the world there is nothing but prose and dishonesty.
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