People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

It had the taste of an apple peeled with a steel knife. (Sebastian Barnack assessing a Roederer 1916 champagne in Time Must Have a Stop)

Why should human females become sterile in their forties, while female crocodiles continue to lay eggs into their third century?

We cannot reason ourselves out of our basic irrationality. All we can do is to learn the art of being irrational in a reasonable way.

Results only come to those who master the paradoxical art of doing and not doing, of letting go as a person in order that the immanent and transcendent unknown quantity may take hold. We cannot make ourselves understand; the most we can do is to foster a state of mind in which understanding may come to us.

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. It is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we must pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world wholly indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two thirds of all sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.