Tracy Swift > Tracy's Quotes

“belief is the death of intelligence.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: Die letzten Geheimnisse der Illuminaten oder An den Grenzen des erweiterten Bewusstseins

“...an optimistic mind-set finds dozens of possible solutions for every problem that the pessimist regards as incurable.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: Die letzten Geheimnisse der Illuminaten oder An den Grenzen des erweiterten Bewusstseins

“...when dogma enters the brain, all intellectual activity ceases. ”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger - Volume I: Final Secret of the Illuminati

“...reality is always plural and mutable.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger - Volume I: Final Secret of the Illuminati

“We look for the Secret - the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixir of the Wise, Supreme Enlightenment, 'God' or whatever...and all the time it is carrying us about...It is the human nervous system itself.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger - Volume I: Final Secret of the Illuminati

“The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called "model agnosticism" and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski, the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan, "The map is not the territory." Alan Watts, a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy, restated it more vividly as "The menu is not the meal.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: Die letzten Geheimnisse der Illuminaten oder An den Grenzen des erweiterten Bewusstseins

“Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, "My current model" -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- "contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised." In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Cosmic Trigger: Die letzten Geheimnisse der Illuminaten oder An den Grenzen des erweiterten Bewusstseins

“Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.”
― Max Frisch

“You can put anything into words, except your own life”
― Max Frisch

“We live in an age of reproduction. Most of what makes up our personal picture of the world we have never seen with our own eyes--or rather, we've seen it with our own eyes, but not on the spot: our knowledge comes to us from a distance, we are televiewers, telehearers, teleknowers.”
― Max Frisch, I'm Not Stiller

“Freunde müssen einander verstehen um Freunde zu bleiben. Brüder sind immer Brüder.”
― Max Frisch, I'm Not Stiller

“When we travel, we are like a film at the moment of exposure; it is memory that will develop it.”
― Max Frisch

“If you criticize what you’re doing too early you’ll never write the first line.”

[Paris Review, interview with Jodi Daynard, The Art of Fiction No. 113, Winter II 1989]”
― Max Frisch

“Freiheit ist immer die Freiheit des Andersdenkenden

Freedom is always, and exclusively, freedom for the one who thinks differently.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“Being human means throwing your whole life on the scales of destiny when need be, all the while rejoicing in every sunny day and every beautiful cloud.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“Women's freedom is the sign of social freedom.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“The most revolutionary thing one can do is always to proclaim loudly what is happening.”
― Rosa Luxemburg, The Rosa Luxemburg Reader

“Tomorrow the revolution will 'rise up again, clashing its weapons,' and to your horror it will proclaim with trumpets blazing: I was, I am, I shall be!”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“What do you want with these special Jewish pains? I feel as close to the wretched victims of the rubber plantations in Putamayo and the blacks of Africa with whose bodies the Europeans play ball… I have no special corner in my heart for the ghetto: I am at home in the entire world, where there are clouds and birds and human tears.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.”
― Rosa Luxemburg

“Europe, it is true, is a geographical and, within certain limits, an historical cultural conception. But the idea of Europe as an economic unit contradicts capitalist development in two ways. First of all there exist within Europe among the capitalist States – and will so long as these exist – the most violent struggles of competition and antagonisms, and secondly the European States can no longer get along economically without the non-European countries. ... At the present stage of development of the world market and of world economy, the conception of Europe as an isolated economic unit is a sterile concoction of the brain. ...
And if the idea of a European union in the economic sense has long been outstripped, this is no less the case in the political sense.
....
Only were one suddenly to lose sight of all these happenings and manoeuvres, and to transfer oneself back to the blissful times of the European concert of powers, could one say, for instance, that for forty years we have had uninterrupted peace. This conception, which considers only events on the European continent, does not notice that the very reason why we have had no war in Europe for decades is the fact that international antagonisms have grown infinitely beyond the narrow confines of the European continent, and that European problems and interests are now fought out on the world seas and in the by-corners of Europe.”
― Rosa Luxemburg, Rosa Luxemburg Speaks

“An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Peace begins with a smile..”
― Mother Teresa

“You cannot find peace by avoiding life.”
― Michael Cunningham, The Hours

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I'll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
― Rumi

“When I say it's you I like, I'm talking about that part of you that knows that life is far more than anything you can ever see or hear or touch. That deep part of you that allows you to stand for those things without which humankind cannot survive. Love that conquers hate, peace that rises triumphant over war, and justice that proves more powerful than greed.”
― Fred Rogers

“Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Intelligence is the ultimate aphrodisiac”
― Timothy Leary

“If you listen to neurologists and psychiatrists, you'd never fall in love.”
― Timothy Leary

“Just Say Know”
― Timothy Leary