The Bible is not man's word about God, but God's word about man.

Nothing is intrinsically valuable; the value of everything is attributed to it, assigned to it from outside the thing itself, by people.

Yet everyone begins in the same place; how is it that most go along without difficulty but a few lose their way?

All men are loyal, but their objects of allegiance are at best approximate.

More history is made by secret handshakes than by battles, bills and proclamations.

Finally you begin to make your mistakes on the highest level-let's say the upper slopes of slippery Parnassus-and it's at that point you need coaching.

The Genie declared that in his time and place there were scientists of the passions who maintained that language itself, on the one hand, originated in 'infantile pregenital erotic exuberance, polymorphously perverse,' and that conscious attention, on the other, was a 'libidinal hypercathexis' - by which magic phrases they seemed to mean that writing and reading, or telling and listening, were literally ways of making love.