power is not a thing to be owned. But if you believe that it is such a thing, losing it becomes a possibility to fear. That fear, I think, is one reason for the dark projections of a catastrophic future that are so widespread, in our dual society. The present powerful, being committed to polarization, expect that any new deal will overturn the one that set them in authority; that the last shall be first and the first last, role reversal everywhere, men as slaves, women as masters, in a revolution of contradiction.

reaction isn't action - that is, it isn't truly creative.

If one is going to change things, one has to make a fuss and catch the eye of the world.

How can you communicate your thoughts or demonstrate your hypotheses by conventional means when all the values and standards that you want to challenge are built into those means? Science and new technology today like to declare that they encourage 'lateral thinking,' new ways of seeing and putting data together - but all systems have an inbuilt resistance to what has not been programmed into them through the premises on which their rules are based.

it is through the ghost [writer] that the great gift of knowledge which the inarticulate have for the world can be made available.

those who despair of life are not long for it.

I have a problem about being nearly sixty: I keep waking up in the morning and thinking I'm thirty-one.