Cliff James > Quotes

“One way or another, we spend our whole lives being conditioned into accepting some line or order, some position of domination or subjection. It’s hard to unlearn such hierarchy, to undo such control. It’s implicit.”
― Cliff James, Of Bodies Changed

“A metamorphosis had come over us. It was something internal, an electrical pulse in the brain, some slight variation in the aortic rhythm that had forever altered our states, transformed our external structures. We were not who we had been, nor yet what we would become.”
― Cliff James

“Have you ever wondered why we bury and cremate our dead? Nothing to do with hygiene, it’s just so we don’t have to see the reality of death. You know, the Zoroastrians used to leave their dead in open places for the birds to eat. Now that’s a far more honest way to go, don’t you agree? Everyone can see what happens. It makes us live our lives more potently. That’s how I want to go, at my end: openly. Not ashamed of death, but embracing it.”
― Cliff James, Of Bodies Changed

“I will simply die, as you will simply die, when our hearts stop beating. And instead of the fires of Hell or the clouds of Heaven, there will be a chorus of hungry worms or fish, depending on how we go. Isn’t that what really terrifies you most of all, why you force yourself against all reason to believe in such tales? It’s because you’re afraid of the nothingness at the end. You’re ashamed of it.”
― Cliff James, Of Bodies Changed

“Olympus is still a patriarchy. Zeus heads his royal household as jealously as Jehovah rules his harem of dull, harp-playing angels. Both are templates for order on earth, don’t you think?”
― Cliff James, Of Bodies Changed

“How can we speak to each other like equals when one of us is holding a gun?”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“I begin to see how a post-money society would work in practice. When we are in paid employment, we are exchanging our labour in return for money in order to live within a money-based society, nothing more. Both sides in the labour-salary exchange are motivated by self-interest. But when we volunteer our labour for a cause, for a better world, we are not so much exchanging our labour as investing it directly into the world we want to see. Notes for Utopia: there will be no money when we get there.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“The temples of empires come tumbling down, the names of the mighty forgotten. Here is a parable: power never lasts.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“So, at the turn of the third millennium, you have chosen to base your principles on a collection of contradictory texts – written by various men years after the death of your man Jesus – that have been edited and selected out of hundreds of other documents, and bound together into one hotchpotch volume, under the orders of a political primate, Pope Damasus. And, you’re still content to condemn the living love I feel here and now, because of that dusty accident of bad editing? Why?”
― Cliff James, Of Bodies Changed

“The border of a nationality does not exist ‘in-itself’ in the same way that, say, a mountain, a shell or the moon exists. The border of a nationality is a condition that exists, if it can be said to exist at all, in the mind of the one who passively accepts it as existing. It is a ready-cut cloth, a costume, a fabricated flag, which is used to cover our nothingness.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“It insists on our absolute belief in unverifiable creeds and, in return, promises a reward that can only be verified after we cease to exist. By demanding the unconditional renunciation of our reason in this way, bad-faith prevents us from living an authentic, intentional life: it anaesthetises our integrity.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“It is near time to speak of Peter – not the saint, but the Bishop of Lewes.  Gethsemane was significant to Peter. He made it significant to others.  There is a house in the South Downs of England, between Berwick and Wilmington, a bishop’s house – a former bishop – where the Garden of Gethsemane was made manifest.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“The Prime Minister Theresa May says she knows what you are better than you do. She says that a citizen of the world is a citizen of nowhere - although most scientists and philosophers would argue, on the contrary, that the world is quite definitely somewhere. The fragile contours of our small blue planet are quite easily identifiable to any passing asteroid.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“Power does not simply stop at the locking of a door, even a cell door.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“Jerusalem – Urusalim to the Canaanites – City of Shalem, god of the Evening Star. In Hebrew, Yerushalayim – the City of Peace. In Arabic, al-Quds – simply The Holy.  So many names, so much unresolved. Jerusalem has serious issues.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“Truth is the first casualty of fascism. When the truth can be so easily disregarded, all hell follows.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“Power is the ultimate inauthenticity. It obscures the truth of our common human experience: that we are all equally without essence, that we are all therefore equal.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“When I am asked why I have left England, I say that I am in "Brexile". It goes down well.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“I think there will be war before this generation is through.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“More clowns from the darkness: Donald Trump becomes president.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“England sinks, the waters rise, but exile is not all about weeping by the rivers. There are also insights in the wilderness.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“Look, see: the universe does nothing. Victim or monster, there is no one to help.  God is dead. We should have tried to do our best without him.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“Openly supporting refugees today is like coming out as gay in the 1980s - kindness is in short supply.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“Peter didn’t go quietly to his Gethsemane. He refused to drink from the cup that he had forced so many others to drink.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“Them-and-us nationalism has been done before. We have seen where that leads: it does not end well. Nationality is as vaporous and as insubstantial as a collective dream, no more spiritual than a National Insurance number and no less randomly bestowed: determined by chance, conditioned by prejudice. We have moved beyond the apeman's horizon. We have. Surely we have.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“Actions can be evil: the inversion of truth, power inflicted on the powerless, violence on the full spectrum of psychological to physical, subtle to unsubtle: all these acts, in the right context, can be defined as evil.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“The ripples from a stone thrown in ignorance are gathering pace.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“But until we all realise that power – be it that of gods, of kings or of masters – only exists in our minds, dear Venerable, do not tell me to dispense with the concept of freedom.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“Religion does have a tendency to cling to power. That is the nature of the beast. It lends spiritual credibility to barbaric acts, is given protection and sustenance in return.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite

“Nationalism is ultimately unethical, not merely because it is an inauthentic posture, but because it imposes limitations on the authenticity of others.”
― Cliff James, Life As A Kite