The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one.
Skullcrack City messes with your mind the way William Burroughs or a bellyful of hallucinogens will do. I'm a longtime fan of Johnson. A master of derangement, he's been bringing it for years. This time, though, it's different. He's burst into the clear and is taking seven-league strides across the literary landscape.
The worst derangement of the spirit is to believe things because we want them to be so, not because we have seen them for what they are.
To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. . . . Whoever defeats the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus.
My case is a species of madness, only that it is a derangement of the Volition, and not of the intellectual faculties.
Public postures have the configuration of private derangement.
Art is the reasoned derangement of the senses.
. . . it is highly unlikely that a structural derangement could produce pain equal in severity to acute muscle spasm.
Preconceived ideas are like searchlights which illumine the path of the experimenter and serve him as a guide to interrogate nature. They become a danger only if he transforms them into fixed ideas-this is why I should like to see these profound words inscribed on the threshold of all the temples of science: 'The greatest derangement of the mind is to believe in something because one wishes it to be so. '
