Quotes from Allen Wheelis

One can often recognize herd animals by their tendency to carry bibles.

Certainty is not to be had. But as we learn this we become not more moral but more resigned. We become nihilists.

The sequence is suffering, insight, will, action, change.

Desire is endless and unappeasable, is most intense where most forbidden, and is never far from despair.

Nothing guarantees our freedom. Deny it often enough and one day it will be gone, and we'll not know how or when.

To know the good is a dangerous thing; to know it for sure is usually fatal for somebody.

A man in chains need not be a slave. If he has pride and self-respect he is a free man though a prisoner, and a constant danger to his jailers. Conversely, a slave who escapes is not a free man, but a runaway slave who may be caught and returned to servitude. A slave is one who accepts the identity ascribed to him by a master: "You are an inferior and unworthy person and so will remain, and therefore must serve me with obedience and humility.

We must affirm freedom and responsibility without denying that we are the product of circumstance, and must affirm that we are the product of circumstance without denying that we have the freedom to transcend that causality to become something which could not even have been provisioned from the circumstances which shaped us.

Dirty old men are dirty because they are hanging on to life. Sex is the life force, and the nearer they come to death, the more urgent their desire. Thus it comes about that the drive becomes most insistent at the time when the ability to gratify it is disappearing. So they augment a waning potency by reaching down into the dirt, adding lust and aggression to hold aloft an impulse that once soared effortlessly on wings of love alone.

As no designation of good and evil can be absolute, neither can it be fixed; no law which is just now will be forever just, and no political institution designed to secure the good can remain the best means to that good.

Freedom is the awareness of alternatives and of the ability to choose. It is contingent upon consciousness, and so may be gained or lost, extended or diminished.