Spending monotonous hours among the common people, the resigned ones, the collaborators, the conformists - isn’t living; it’s a vegetative existence, simply the transport, in ambulatory form, of a mass of flesh and bones. Life needs the exquisite and sublime experience of rebellion in action as well as thought.

Man is alienated from his authentic self and…thus an easy, indeed willing, victim of a vast and efficient collective modeled after mass-production processes and often a brutalized weapon in the arsenal of such a collective in its effort to achieve universality.

There is an inner beauty about a woman who believes in herself, who knows she is capable of anything that she puts her mind to. There is a beauty in the strength and determination of a woman who follows her own path, who isnt thrown off by obstacles along the way. There is a beauty about a woman whose confidence comes from experiences; who knows she can fall, pick herself up, and move on.

Democracy and “generally recognized” morality are not the only victims of imperialism. The third suffering martyr is “universal” common sense. This lowest form of the intellect is not only necessary under all conditions but under certain conditions is also adequate. Common sense’s basic capital consists of the elementary conclusions of universal experience: not to put one’s fingers in fire, whenever possible to proceed along a straight line, not to tease vicious dogs … and so forth and so on. Under a stable social milieu common sense is adequate for bargaining, healing, writing articles, leading trade unions, voting in parliament, marrying and reproducing the race. But when that same common sense attempts to go beyond its valid limits into the arena of more complex generalizations, it is exposed as just a clot of prejudices of a definite class and a definite epoch. No more than a simple capitalist crisis brings common sense to an impasse; and before such catastrophes as revolution, counter-revolution and war, common sense proves a perfect fool. In order to realize the catastrophic transgressions against the “normal” course of events higher qualities of intellect are necessary, philosophically expressed as yet only by dialectic materialism.

The paradox is that God is a fiction, but a fiction which structures our reality. It’s a symbolic fiction—it is efficient in its very inexistence. It doesn’t exist, but it nonetheless works. It is thus not enough to destroy the fiction from outside, to reduce it to reality, to demonstrate how it emerged from reality. This is what vulgar atheists like Dawkins are doing. The fiction has to be destroyed from within. To put it in descriptive terms, it is not enough to prove that God doesn’t exist; the formula of true atheism is that God himself must proclaim his inexsitence, must stop believing in himself. Therein resides the paradox. If we destroy the fiction from outside, just reducing it to reality, the fiction continues to function, to exert its symbolic efficiency—as in the famous joke about the atheist Zionists who do not believe that God exists but nonetheless believe that God gave them the land of Israel.

Why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, rather than as problems of inequality, exploitation, or injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, rather than emancipation, political struggle, or armed struggle?

By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third, by experience, which is the bitterest.

Open your ears, open your hearts. Don’t take yourselves too seriously and take yourself as seriously as death itself. Don’t worry. Worry your ass off. Have iron clad confidence. But doubt! It keeps you awake and alert. Believe you are the baddest ass in town and you suck. It keeps you honest. Be able to keep two completely contradictory ideas alive and well in your heart and head at all times. If it does not drive you crazy it will make you strong. Stay hard, stay hungry and stay alive.