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[Memory] is, as it were, the corpse of an experience, from which the life has vanished.

The task in psychotherapy [is] to make, using Jaspers's expression, an appeal to the freedom of the patient.

The fact that the other person in his own actuality is not me, is set against the equally real fact that my attachment to him is a part of me. If he dies or goes away, he has gone, but my attachment to him persists. But in the last resort I cannot die another person's death for him, nor can he die my death. In short, he cannot be me, and I cannot be him.

The clinical psychiatrist, wishing to be more 'scientific' or 'objective', may propose to confine himself to the 'objectively' observable behaviour of the patient before him. The simplest reply to this is that it is impossible. To see 'signs' of 'disease' is not to see neutrally.

It is an attribute of any major body of work that it gives rise to this kind of opposition between repetition/commemoration and reinvention, between veneration and creative criticism.

On ne tombe jamais deux fois dans le même monde.

The human being is not the eternal basis of human history and human culture but a historical and cultural artifact.

Considered from this point of view, to be a self is not to be a certain kind of being but to be in possession of a certain kind of theory (Harré,1985).

Finally a book I can't put down (but I need to sleep).

Once and for all, the benevolent mystic gives his shirt when he is asked for his coat, by anybody who accidentally happens to come his way—and merely because he happens to come his way.

Some of us may think that [creationists] are all Republicans, but we would be wrong. According to the Gallup polling organization, while 58% of Republicans agreed with the statement that “God created humans in their present form, within the last 10,000 years,” so did 39% of independents and 41% of Democrats.

Stem cell advocacy is not a political movement. It is a consumer movement! [Man, so gross.]

Twenge found that by 2006, two-thirds of American college students scored above what had been the average narcissism score in 1982. The recognition that what we have seen is the rise of an insecure narcissism – particularly among young people – rather than a rise in genuine self-esteem now seems widely accepted.

The ‘diseases of affluence’ became the diseases of the poor in affluent societies. Diseases like heart disease, stroke and obesity used to be more common among the rich. Heart disease was regarded as a businessman’s disease and it used to be the rich who were fat and the poor who were thin. But from about the 1950s onwards, in one developed country after another, these patterns reversed.

In short, religion provides the theodicy of good fortune for those who are fortunate.

What, then, is the truth of venture science, as opposed to the truth of Merton’s conception of science? It is that the truth lies somewhere, ‘‘lying’’ here meaning both existing and being the thing that is not the truth.

I am not crazy. Part I is a total and complete mess.

Hating this. Hae-ting-this.

In fixating almost exclusively on what poor people and their communities lack—good jobs, a strong safety net, role models—we have neglected the critical ways that exploitation contributes to the persistence of poverty. We have overlooked a fact that landlords never have: there is a lot of money to be made off the poor. The ’hood is good.

The majority of poor families aren't so lucky, and their children are not getting enough food because the rent eats first.

A group of psychiatrists published a letter in Psychiatric Services, identifying eviction as a “significant precursor of suicide.” None of the patients were facing homelessness, leading the psychiatrists to attribute the suicides to eviction itself. “Eviction must be considered a traumatic rejection,” they wrote, “a denial of one’s most basic human needs, and an exquisitely shameful experience.”

« Toute vie est Wakan » ; et par ce mot de vie il faut entendre tout ce qui agit et réagit, tout ce qui meut ou est mû, aussi bien dans le règne minéral que dans le règne biologique (totémisme qui offre le premier principe newtonien de l'explication universelle).

Ce qui est caractéristique du phénomène religieux, c’est qu’il suppose toujours une division bipartite de l’univers connu et connaissable en deux genres qui comprennent tout ce qui existe, mais qui s’excluent radicalement. Les choses sacrées sont celles que les interdits protègent et isolent ; les choses profanes, celles auxquelles ces interdits s’appliquent et qui doivent rester à distance des premières.

D’ailleurs, s’il est vrai que l’homme dépend de ses dieux, la dépendance est réciproque. Les dieux, eux aussi, ont besoin de l’homme ; sans les offrandes et les sacrifices, ils mourraient.

Il n’y a pas jusqu’à la distinction de la droite et de la gauche qui, loin d’être impliquée dans la nature de l’homme en général, ne soit très vraisemblablement le produit de représentations religieuses, partant collectives.

Entre un délire systématisé et les impressions premières qui lui ont donné naissance, la distance est souvent considérable. Il en est de même pour la pensée religieuse. À mesure qu’elle progresse dans l’histoire, les causes qui l’ont appelée à l’existence, tout en restant toujours agissantes, ne sont plus aperçues qu’à travers un vaste système d’interprétations qui les déforment.

By itself a given sentence is neither a fact nor a fiction; it is made so by others, later on.

Science has two faces: one that knows, the other that does not know yet.

But not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians.

But extraordinary problems are not to be had for the asking. They emerge only on special occasions prepared by the advance of normal research.