In the 1960s, Robert Venturi and I played a game we called ‘I can like something worse than you can like. ’
One sheds one's sicknesses in books - repeats and presents again one's emotions, to be master of them.
The dead don't die. They look on and help.
This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.
For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive.
Patience! Patience! The world is a vast and ghastly intricacy of mechanism, and one has to be very wary, not to get mangled by it.
In masturbation there is nothing but loss. There is no reciprocity. There is merely the spending away of a certain force, and no return. The body remains, in a sense, a corpse, after the act of self-abuse. There is no change, only deadening. There is what we call dead loss. And this is not the case in any act of sexual intercourse between two people. Two people may destroy one another in sex. But they cannot just produce the null effect of masturbation.
The extreme center is the political expression of the neoliberal state.
There are a lot of things that you don't realize that your parents are going through when you're a kid.
No one entertains the thought that maybe God does not believe in you.
Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature has made them.