Owen Benjamin > Quotes

“I saw that all these people, learned, rich, and idle, were occupied with anything you like, only not with the question of life. They talked about everything; about literature, art, politics, the latest science, but never about what life is and what it is for. Among the people of our circle, life was spent in idleness, amusement, disconnect, and suffering. They complained of the emptiness of life and yet continued to live in the same way, talking endless nonsense, playing cards, going to theaters, arranging dinners and balls, and gossiping about one another. I felt that what I had been living was not real life. The conversation with these people was like walking through a lunatic asylum where the patients imagined they were emperors, generals, and archbishops and discussed their imaginary affairs with the greatest seriousness.” A few of those words probably tipped you off that it wasn’t as contemporary as you might have thought. “Balls” is a giveaway. That’s from A Confession by Leo Tolstoy, written in the 1880s. It sounds like it could have been written last Tuesday.”
― Owen Benjamin, How to Slay a Wizard

“I insisted on looking at the solar eclipse myself when told I wasn’t allowed to. Remember what I said about nonsense. Non-sense. They wanted me to not trust my own eyes. I played Beethoven in music class and made the poor teacher feel like I was insulting her lesson. I thought she would be impressed. I thought I would earn her respect.”
― Owen Benjamin, How to Slay a Wizard

“The head of the school board and all the Catholic churches was a little monster named Monsignor Fafaro. He was known for a very public young-boy sex abuse scandal with a horrifying number of victims. Despite mountains of evidence and testimony, he not only kept his job, but much of the town was devoted to him and even defended the fact that he was living with a nineteen-year-old when he was in his seventies, on church property. He was responsible for hiring all the priests and the teachers in Oswego. So with him and his friends on a half-century abuse spree, there was a strong sense of multigenerational anger toward anyone acting remotely, quote unquote, gay. It might well have been as a coping mechanism for what many of them had endured as children.”
― Owen Benjamin, How to Slay a Wizard

“And when every comedian in America made fun of Sally Struthers, she was bewildered. She said: “I could never understand that if you’re trying to help hungry children, you’re fodder for horrible, cruel jokes.” There’s nothing wrong with the world, Sally. You were clearly a hypocrite. Your corporation was stealing. You were overweight while begging people to feed starving kids. You fake-cried on television to emotionally manipulate people into giving you money. That’s why we make fun of you.”
― Owen Benjamin, How to Slay a Wizard

“Not the very publicized pedophile scandal with Monsignor Fafaro, who also happened to be the one who hired the teacher calling me a cancer? No, he was fine. Surely not our mayor, who had just been arrested for statutory rape and smuggling cocaine from Canada. All true stories, by the way. He won the next election, and the Monsignor lived out his days as the head of the school district, choosing which teachers would be hired. That was the cancer in Oswego. Not me.”
― Owen Benjamin, How to Slay a Wizard

“And then the booker called and said they’d looked into who I was, and I wasn’t allowed to perform. Sin City had finally grown a conscience. Not about the donkey shows, the sex trafficking, the gambling, or the zombies walking up and down the sidewalk looking for methamphetamine. No. It was finally ready to fight the real problem. It was finally ready to deplatform comedian Owen Benjamin, a man who had done the unthinkable: mocked anti-gun advocate and rollerblading enthusiast David Hogg for potentially not being old enough to have grown pubes. Apparently Sin City was finally ready to make amends for all those unmarked graves in the desert.”
― Owen Benjamin, How to Slay a Wizard

“During the Industrial Revolution, England got addicted to tea. They loved it. The caffeine got them into the factories. But they couldn’t grow tea because of the climate, so they bought it from China. Problem was, China didn’t want any of England’s goods. China had silk, they didn’t need wool. The only thing China wanted was silver, and England was hemorrhaging silver in a massive trade imbalance. So what did England do? They started pumping opium into China with the industrial efficiency of the revolution. They used the British East India Company and liability shields like the Sassoon family. They got the Chinese addicted. And when the Chinese leadership tried to stop it, England sent its Navy and opened fire on the people trying to keep the drugs out. They did this well into the 1900s. The Chinese call it the Century of Humiliation. That’s what war looks like. It’s about trade imbalance, not ideology.”
― Owen Benjamin, How to Slay a Wizard

“My indifference to unearned titles and positions held by monsters and idiots started way back then, when these perverts and drunks claimed authority they hadn’t earned. I don’t mind authority if it’s earned. If I respect someone, there’s no greater honor than to help them fulfill the mission.”
― Owen Benjamin, How to Slay a Wizard

“In eighth grade, the punishments were dished out in five-day isolation periods. Asking my teacher why she was slurring her words and mispronouncing “rhetoric” got me five days behind some filing cabinets and a map. They told me I was like a cancer that they did not want to spread to the other children.”
― Owen Benjamin, How to Slay a Wizard

“That’s the difference. When the knowledge is available to you, when the master carpenter will show you, when the mechanic will explain it, that’s not the occult. That’s just skill you haven’t acquired yet. The occult is when the initiated intentionally keep it from you, because the trick doesn’t work if you know.”
― Owen Benjamin, How to Slay a Wizard