“Cultures are virtual realities made of language.”

For all we know, we know nothing.

Ego is a structure that is erected by a neurotic individual who is a member of a neurotic culture against the facts of the matter. And culture, which we put on like an overcoat, is the collectivized consensus about what sort of neurotic behaviors are acceptable.

There is an angel within the monkey struggling to get free, and this is what the historical crisis is all about.

This is the message of your life and my life – it’s that nothing lasts. Heraclitus said it: Panta Rhei. All flows, nothing lasts. Not your enemies, not your fortune, not who you sleep with at night, not the books, not the house in Saint-Tropez, not even the children – nothing lasts.

What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other’s shoulders and kicking each other’s teeth in. It’s not a pleasant situation.

If we were to place our power at the service of our imaginations rather than our primate politics we would create a civilization worthy of the name.

You don’t even want to play that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that’s being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.

For talking monkeys to speak of truth is hubris of the highest degree. Where is it writ large that talking monkeys should be able to model the cosmos? If a sea urchin or a racoon were to propose to you that it had a viable truth about the universe.

Anything which must be understood by millions of people is so hopelessly divorced from how it is that it becomes a form of fiction.

Knowledge, or verbal facility, is no proof that you know what you’re talking about.

Science does not deal with subjective experience… Well that’s too bad because that is all any of us ever have.

What we call imagination is actually the universal library of what’s real. You couldn’t imagine it if it weren’t real somewhere, sometime.

The major adventure is to claim your authentic, true being, which is not culturally given to you. The culture will not explain to you how to be a real human being. It will tell you how to be banker, politician, Indian chief, masseuses, actress, whatever, but it will not give you true being.

I see the psychedelic experience as a birthright, and we can’t have a free society until people are free to explore their own mind.

Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood.

How can we know who is the other until we know who is the self?

It doesn’t matter what their music is, you can find something that you can play together, with what their culture is.

I found a greater identity with my own emotions in the Armenian culture as I grew older.

Scripture is so counter culture. Christ was counter culture. It’s not like we’re supposed to be weird or anything, but as we grow closer to Christ.

In the real world, equal respect for all cultures doesn’t translate into a rich mosaic of colorful and proud peoples interacting peacefully while maintaining a delightful diversity of food and craftwork. It translates into closed pockets of oppression, ignorance, and abuse.

It just seems to me that it’s hypocritical for us as a culture to say, “Bullying is a terrible thing,” when really, they are just reflecting what the society is doing.

I believe that the dysfunctional Muslim family constitutes a real threat to the very fabric of western life. It is in the family that children are groomed to practise, promote and pass on the norms of their parents’ culture.

I can’t pretend that I don’t subscribe to Internet music culture in that I discover new music and old music simultaneously.

We do have, I’m sad to say, a fifth column that is living within our own countries that is utterly opposed to our values, we’re going to have to be a lot braver… in standing up for our Judaeo-Christian culture.