If not us, who? If not now, when?
Words belong to those who use them only till someone else steals them back.
Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols. . . Art tells gorgeous lies that come true.
The dullard finds even wine tasteless, while the sorcerer is intoxicated by the mere sight of water.
There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin - your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky.
The Universe wants to play. Those who refuse out of dry spiritual greed & choose pure contemplation forfeit their humanity - those who refuse out of dull anguish, those who hesitate, lose their chance at divinity - those who mold themselves blind masks of Ideas & thrash around seeking some proof of their own solidity end by seeing out of dead men's eyes.
Ten minutes in a video store should convince any impartial observer that we live in a police state of consciousness, far more pervasive than the Nazis.
I've been with police on patrol. When you have a gun, you just feel different. There's a protective level and you feel all those feelings. You feel a little bit macho and a little bit frightened.
It's not Big Brother that we now have to be afraid of, but Big Browser.
As a kid I never had the impulse to climb anything. I think that most kids who live in small towns or rural areas outside of the city, that's what they do - climb walls, or trees, or whatever. To me, it was more dance classes and not being very boyish.
People do not care to give alms without some security for their money; and a wooden leg or a withered arm is a sort of draft upon heaven for those who choose to have their money placed to account there.