I think that marijuana makes you stupid but sensual. I've watched many of my friends and loved ones become more erotic and dumber - just going around with a glazed expression on their faces from their last orgasms to the next - and found them really quite boring.

Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.

Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities - the political, the religious, the educational authorities - who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing - forming in our minds - their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself.

To describe externals, you become a scientist. To describe experience, you become an artist.

Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, float downstream.

We are dealing with the best-educated generation in history. They are a hundred times better educated than their grandparents, and ten times more sophisticated. There has never been such an open-minded group. The problem is that no one is giving them anything fresh. They've got a brain dressed up with nowhere to go.

Despite the campaign rhetoric, the bureaucracies-big business and big government-are here to stay. The centralization effort cannot be checked. but it can be rationally directed towards our species goal: Space Migration, which in turn offers the only way to re-attain individual freedom of space-time and the small-group social structures which obviously best suit our nervous systems. It is another paradox of neuro-genetics that only in space habitats can humanity return to the village life and pastoral style for which we all long.