"It may be that after this life we shall perish utterly, but if that is our fate, let us so live that annihilation will be unjust." -- Etienne de Senancour

The Queen of Spades --Alexander Pushkin
Igitur --Stéphane Mallarmé

An Entheogen Chrestomathy

A Modern Perspective on Classical Technologies for Personality Restructuring: Processes of Ecstatic Initiation in Ancient Eleusis and Pompeii

"On the Beach tells a simple story. Some kind of complicated mix-up happened, and nuclear war has devastated the Northern Hemisphere. Who is to blame? The explanations would be hilarious in their complexity, if not for the implied question: who is not to blame? The people of Australia wait the 7 or 8 months for the radioactivity to drift southwards. Then everyone dies. Their dogs die. Their infants die. Either messy deaths due to radioactive poisoning, or swift deaths due to cyanide pills. Radiation approaches, they die, the end..."

"From the day of its foundation, in 1866, the Societé Linguistique de Paris let it be known that it wouldn't accept papers claiming to explain how human language had originated. The savants felt they had a right to be spared the at best ignorant and at worst lunatic theorizing of those who believed they had an answer to this seductively remote question.

Historical linguistics had become a subject reserved for those who dealt in facts, and the extra-historical matter of language's origins could be left aside, exciting for sure when addressed by a Rousseau or a Herder, futile when addressed by madmen or amateurs led on by the new fashion for thinking in evolutionary terms. The situation wasn't promising therefore for the man whose theorizing was, it's safe to say, the most lunatic of all, so strange indeed as to have been cherished now for more than a century, whether as an example of what André Breton called the "humour of reception", which is when we laugh at something that wasn't intended to be funny, or as a crucial resource in the study of linguistic misapprehension. This was Jean-Pierre Brisset..."

"Men are so necessarily mad, that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness." --Blaise Pascal

"Luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow." --Aristotle (paraphrased)

"Character traits are secret psychoses." --Sandor Ferenczi

"Nor wonder how I lost my Wits;
Oh! Caelia, Caelia, Caelia shits!" --Jonathan Swift

"Why are you unhappy?
Because 99.9 per cent
Of everything you think and
Of everything you do
Is for yourself -
And there isn't one." --Wei Wu Wei

The nonduality of Life and death: A Buddhist view of repression

"The Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, means the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants (one in 24 Americans) than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police."