The essential principle of totalitarianism is to make laws that are impossible to obey.
The conventional word that is employed to describe tyranny is systematic. The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it...
Porcophilia can also be used for oppressive and repressive purposes. In medieval Spain, where Jews and Muslims were compelled on pain of death and torture to convert to Christianity, the religious aut...
Kingsley could ‘do’ the sound of a brass band approaching on a foggy day. He could become the Metropolitan line train entering Edgware Road station. He could be four wrecked tramps coughing in a bus s...
It’s no fun to appreciate to the full the truth of the materialist proposition that I don’t have a body, I am a body.
It's probably a merciful thing that pain is impossible to describe from memory
If we stay with animal analogies for a moment, owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are god. Whereas owners of...
As the great Eugene Debs used to tell his socialist voters in the 1912 election campaign, he would not lead them into a Promised Land even if he could, because if they were trusting enough to be led i...
In a state of conflict or a conflicted state.
Bad habits have brought me this far: why change such a tried-and-true formula?
To remember friendship is to recall those conversations that it seemed a sin to break off
For most of my life I let women do the driving and was happy to let them.
I'm not particularly a feminist, but if you get women off the animal cycle of reproduction and give them some say in how many children they'll have, immediately the floor will rise.
My favorite time in the cycles of public life is the time when the Pope is dead and they haven't elected a new one. There's no one in the world who is infallible for those weeks. And you know, I don't...
One of the great questions of philosophy is, do we innately have morality, or do we get it from celestial dictation? A study of the Ten Commandments is a very good way of getting into and resolving th...
Until you have done something for humanity, wrote the great American educator Horace Mann, you should be ashamed to die.
These are the times that try men’s souls: The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country, but he that stands it NOW, deserves the love and tha...
There should be philosophy and knowledge for the elect, religion and sentimentality for the masses
The problem with open-mindedness is that it can become empty-mindedness
The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.