In one of the most brilliant papers in the English language Hume made it clear that what we speak of as 'causality' is nothing more than the phenomenon of repetition. When we mix sulphur with saltpeter and charcoal we always get gunpowder. This is true of every event subsumed by a causal law in other words, everything which can be called scientific knowledge. "It is custom which rules ," Hume said, and in that one sentence undermined both science and philosophy .

A child of today can detect a lie quicker than the wisest adult of two decades ago. When I want to know what is true, I ask my children.

They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed--run over, maimed, destroyed--but they continued to play anyhow.

There was a beauty in the trash of the alleys which I had never noticed before; my vision seemed sharpened, rather than impaired. As I walked along it seemed to me that the flattened beer cans and papers and weeds and junk mail had been arranged by the wind into patterns; these patterns, when I scrutinized them, lay distributed so as to comprise a visual language.

I'd like to see you move up to the goat class, where I think you belong.

We should take mothers in high seas and drown them there, they are as poisonous as lead in the air.

Don't never participate in no bad scenes, he reminded himself; that was his motto in life.