History is the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma.

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Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

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The urge to transcend self-conscious selfhood is, as I have said, a principal appetite of the soul.

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The urge to escape from selfhood and the environment is in almost everyone almost all the time.

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The more stitches, the less riches.

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Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.

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The end cannot justify the means, for the simple and obvious reason that the means employed determine the nature of the ends produced.

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A man may be a pessimistic determinist before lunch and an optimistic believer in the will's freedom after it.

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When one individual comes into intimate contact with another, she—or he, of course, as the case may be—must almost inevitably receive or inflict suffering.

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All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy.

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