'After Auschwitz,’ said Theodor Adorno, student of authoritarianism, ‘there should be no poetry.’ He was wrong. But the poetry should be about Auschwitz.
A hurricane is an act of God. But failure to prepare, when the necessity for preparation is well known--that's sin.
All people serve their ambition. In that matter, there are no atheists. There are only people who know, and don’t know, what God they serve.
And, above all, don’t lie. Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to hell.
Artists must be contending with something they do not understand, or they are not artists.
But you can be certain, you want-to-be tyrants, that your slaves will take their revenge where they can, even if that means merely being much less than they could be.
Do not foolishly confuse ‘nice’ with ‘good.’
Do not pretend you are happy with something if you are not, and if a reasonable solution might, in principle, be negotiated. Have the damn fight.
Error necessitates sacrifice to correct it, and serious error necessitates serious sacrifice.
Failing to look under the bed when you strongly suspect a monster is lurking there is not an advisable strategy.
Freud had a point. He was, after all, a genius. You can tell that because people still hate him.
Friendship is a reciprocal arrangement. You are not morally obliged to support someone who is making the world a worse place.
Hating life, despising life--even for the genuine pain that life inflicts--merely serves to make life itself worse, unbearably worse.
I believe it was Jung who developed the most surgically wicked of psychoanalytic dicta: if you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences and infer the motivation.
If you buy the story that everything terrible just happened on its own, with no personal responsibility on the part of the victim, you deny that person all agency…. In this manner, you strip him or her of all power.
If you do not object when the transgressions against your conscience are minor, why presume that you will not willfully participate when the transgressions get truly out of hand?
If you don’t believe in brick walls, you will still be injured when you run headlong into one.
If you want to become invaluable in a workplace--in any community--just do the useful things no one else is doing.
It is by no means a good thing to be the oldest person at the frat party. It is desperation, masquerading as cool rebelliousness….
It is far better to render beings in your care competent than to protect them.
It is not virtuous to be victimized by a bully, even if that bully is oneself.
Many bureaucracies have petty authoritarians within them, generating unnecessary rules and procedures simply to express and cement power.
Only the most cynical, hopeless philosophy insists that reality could be improved through falsification.
The only time ‘no’ ever means ‘no’ in the absence of violence is when it is uttered by one civilized person to another.
The stories we can neither ignore nor forget are unforgettable [because] they speak to something we know, but do not know that we know.
The wisdom of the past was hard-earned, and your dead ancestors may have something useful to tell you.
There are three fundamental states of social being: tyranny (you do what I want), slavery (I do what you want), or negotiation.
There is no shortage of oppressors among the downtrodden, even if, given their lowly positions, many of them are only tyrannical wannabes.
Trust between people who are not naive is a form of courage, because betrayal is always a possibility, and because this is consciously understood.
Tyranny is...not good for the tyrant—because he or she becomes a tyrant, and there is nothing ennobling about that.
Violence, after all, is no mystery. It's peace that's the mystery. Violence is the default. It's easy. It's peace that is difficult: learned, inculcated, earned.
When ignorance destroys culture, monsters will emerge.
When you have something to say, silence is a lie--and tyranny feeds on lies.
You are, on the one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on the other, someone who can't even set the clock on your microwave.
