Quotes from Luke Rhinehart

Part of the philosophy of 'The Dice Man' is that you have got to be laughing at yourself at every moment and be free of yourself at every moment.

The thing the Buddhists and the Sufis have in common is a belief that religious certainties are destructive.

I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis.

Those who believe that they have absolute truth and the only moral system are destructive both to themselves and to those whom they try to convert.

I am George Cockcroft. But when I come to England or Europe, where the name Luke Rhinehart is better known, then I use that name.

When I was a young man, barely 18, I discovered Jesus Christ as my personal saviour, and for six months I told my mother she was damned to hell. That wasn't much fun. I abandoned it.

In 1965, I was teaching a seminar on freedom when I told my students that the ultimate freedom lay in casting a dice to decide what to do. They were so shocked and fascinated that I knew I had to write the book.

'The Dice Man' is an anti-establishment cult novel, and you don't normally make studio films from such dark comedy material.

One desire, my friends, one: to kill yourself. You must desire this. You must feel that a voyage of discovery is more important than all the little trips which the normal consumer self wants to buy.

Every man's personal proverb about himself is: "Whatever is, is right, in the best of all possible people." The

Whenever I look at the Western psychotherapies of the last hundred years,' Dr Rhinehart went on, 'it seems to me incredible that no one acknowledges the almost total failure of these therapies to cure human unhappiness. As Dr Raymond Felt has observed: "The ratio of spontaneous remission of symptoms and the rate of supposed 'cures' by the psychotherapies of the various schools has remained essentially the same throughout the twentieth century.

Il m'arrive de penser que ce serait sympa de trouver des mecs intelligents qui veuillent bien travailler seize heures par jour pour des clopinettes –mais bon, s'ils le voulaient bien, ils ne seraient pas si intelligents.

I am born anew at each green fall of the die, and by die-ing I eliminate my since. The past - paste, pus, piss - is all only illusory events created by a stone mask to justify an illusory stagnant present.

Indecisive? Uncertain? Worried? Let the rolling ivory tumble your burdens away. $2.50 per pair.

Love is one of society's many socially accepted forms of madness.

I tell my life's story for that humble reason which has inspired every user of the form: to prove to the world I am a great man. I shall fail, of course, like the others.

Anyone can be anyone

Give up all hope, all illusion, all desire..I've tried. I've tried and still I desire, I still desire not to desire and hope to be without hope and have the illusion I can be without illusions..Give up, I say. Give up everything, including the desire to be saved.

It's the way a man chooses to limit himself that determines his character. A man without habits, consistency, redundancy - and hence boredom - is not human. He's insane.

From children to men we cage ourselves in patterns to avoid facing new problems and possible failure; after a while men become bored because there are no new problems. Such is life under the fear of failure.

Why did children seem to be so often spontaneous, joy-filled and concentrated while adults seemed controlled, anxiety-filled and diffused? It was the Goddam sense of having a self.

With determination and dice, I am God.

We got married: society's solution to loneliness, lust and laundry.

I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis.