“Desperation is the raw material of drastic change. Only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape.”

The face of evil is always the face of total need.

Whether you like it or not, you are committed to the human endeavor. I cannot ally myself with such a purely negative goal as avoidance of suffering. Suffering is a chance you take by the fact of being alive.

How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.

Society is cancerous and bureaucracy is its cancer.

I project myself out through the glasses and across the street, a ghost in the morning sunlight, torn with disembodied lust.

The simplest questions are the most difficult.

I think anybody incapable of changing his mind is crazy.

After a shooting spree, they always want to take the guns away from the people who didn’t do it.

I don’t care if people hate my guts; I assume most of them do. The important question is whether they are in a position to do anything about it.

Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.

I’m creating an imaginary — it’s always imaginary — world in which I would like to live.

What a horrible loutish planet this is. the dominant species consists of sadistic morons, faces bearing the hideous lineaments of spiritual famine swollen with stupid hate. Hopeless rubbish.

As soon as you know you are in prison, you have a possibility to escape.

Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective.

A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on.

There are no innocent bystanders, What are they doing there in the first place?

The artist is a kind of prison from which the works of art escape.

By the help of microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible world discovered to the understanding.

Nature does not make leaps.

Man seeks to escape himself in myth, and does so by any means at his disposal. Drugs, alcohol, or lies. Unable to withdraw into himself, he disguises himself. Lies and inaccuracy give him a few moments of comfort.

I’m not running, I’m not planning on running, and I’ve got nothing new on that story.

When any calamity is suffered, the first thing to be remembered is, how much has been escaped.

The moral imperative to make big changes is inescapable…that what we take for granted may not be here for our children

Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.