We achieve active mastery over illness and death by delegating all responsibility for their management to physicians, and by exiling the sick and the dying to hospitals. But hospitals serve the convenience of staff not patients: we cannot be properly ill in a hospital, nor die in one decently; we can do so only among those who love and value us. The result is the institutionalized dehumanization of the ill, characteristic of our age.

How can depression be real if our eyes arent real?

Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.

I favor free trade in drugs for the same reason the Founding Fathers favored free trade in ideas: in a free society it is none of the government's business what ideas a man puts into his mind; likewise, it should be none of its business what drugs he puts into his body.

We should pledge ourselves to the proposition that the irresponsible life is not worth living.

All drugs of any interest to any moderately intelligent person in America are now illegal.

People dream of making the virtuous powerful, so they can depend upon them. Since they cannot do that, people choose to make the powerful virtuous, glorifying in becoming victimized by them.