Quotes About History

Drest had made a careful study of the Discordian philosophy and realized it was the kind of outlandish nonsense that would appeal to the kind of people who made all the trouble in history-brilliant, intellectual, slightly deranged dope fiends and oddball math-and-technology buffs.

The origin of heroin – and of morphine; and laudanum, Edgar Allan Poe's habit; and pantopon, the drug popular in addict society back in the 1920s; and Demerol, Hermann Goering's happiness pills; and paregoric; and the codeine that Sherlock Holmes used to cool down his cocaine habit – is the opium poppy. This is probably the most accursed and hated plant in the world, and has been creating addicts in both the East and the West since the dawn of civilization.

It all rather reminds me of a remark once made to me by Alan Watts: The great error of academic historians is the belief that the Roman Empire 'fell.' It never 'fell.' It still controls the Western world through the Vatican and the Mafia.

This book, then, is basically an informal history of how certain long-hidden practical secrets of Tantric Buddhism crept into the Western world in the middle ages, were crushed and/or driven underground by the Holy Inquisition, have gradually been rediscovered since around 1900, suddenly emerged as a major social-revolutionary force in the 1960s, and were once again crushed and driven underground.

and their stern Father God demands endless sacrifices, offers no joy on earth but only duty blindly obeyed, and threatens sadistic tortures (for an infinite number of years, according to some theologians) to anyone who crosses him. It almost seems as if history, at least in the Occident, repeats the pattern Freud found in the nursery, from oral bliss to anal anxiety.

It is curious, in passing, that the Women's Liberation Movement, the latest and most revolutionary of these waves, is paradoxically more patrist than much of what preceded it

Worse yet, scientific models, like people and cattle and insect species and mountains and all things known, have a lifespan. Mountains may survive geological eras, but scientific maps, like people and birds, have short lives. None has ever lasted more than a few hundred years, at present. To believe in any such mask with the fervor of Gross and Levitt contradicts all known facts of scientific history. Every theory they worship will someday get junked.

Yeah. I don't believe in monistic conspiracy theories where you pick out one group and blame everything on them, but I do tend to believe that conspiracy plays a larger role in human history than conventional historians admit.

Hitler was a trauma intellectually because of his batty theory of the Elders of Zion plotting to take over Europe; the horrible results of his paranoia created a prejudice about thinking about conspiracies at all. To talk of conspiracy is called the Devil Theory of History and historians make fun of it.

But I tend to agree with the black novelist Ishmael Reed that the history of the world is largely the history of the warfare between secret societies which are conspiratorial in most cases.

And I think it's very stupid behavior, too, because conspiracies decrease human intelligence which is the function of precise and open communication. But I do think conspiracy is a factor. There is a lot of contemporary history that cannot be understood unless you assume a multitude of conspiracies, all somewhat stupid at times.

Wilson emphasizes that this model describes not only many, many infamous criminals, but quite a few of the more infamous statesmen and churchmen of history, who were not called criminals only because they were powerful enough to define what was crime in their society. Since these types have a strong power drive, most of history, as Wilson sees it, is Criminal History, the record of the crimes of one type of male.

Few of our ancestors were perfect ladies or gentlemen; the majority of them were not even mammals.

As we mentioned earlier, knowledge of cannabis goes back to at least the New Stone Age, when our ancestors in the Near East buried their dead with specimens of marijuana – perhaps to keep them happy on the voyage to the "other side," or perhaps to bargain with the denizens upon their arrival. This shows the same religious awe for this plant that, according to U.S. government officials, was only invented in the 1960s as an excuse to smoke it.

Moral: Hang on to your Elmyrs, folks. They, too, may become Historical Curiosities. And remember: a counterfeit dollar, hung in a museum as found art by Andy Warhol, will have a value in the hundreds of thousands, whereas a "real" dollar, blessed by the Wizards in the Federal Reserve, will retain its meager face value until inflation reduces it even further.

And Norma Jeane, the neurotic woman who created and became Marilyn Monroe? She grew up with a typically American adoration of Abraham Lincoln, a perfect father-symbol for orphans everywhere; I suspect that when she climbed into bed with Jack Kennedy she really thought she was climbing into bed with Lincoln and history. Nobody had warned her that History is a blood sport, and the only one in which innocent bystanders are the principal victims.

Most of the world was illiterate until the 1970s. ~•~

This is why Stephen tells the fatuous Englishman, Haines, that the Irish artist is the servant of two masters—the imperial British State and the Roman Catholic Church. In this sense also, the dead live: the Irish writer of Joyce's day made his obedience to the dead invaders and traitors who made Ireland a colony of Rome and of England, or else he was forced to choose Joyce's path of exile: as did Shaw and O'Casey and Beckett and a dozen lesser lights along with Joyce.

To say that religion and priestcraft have played a conservative role in history is an understatement. One might as well say that bubonic plague has killed a few people, or that Hitler was a little bit strange. The chief role of religion has always been reactionary. This is its evolutionary function, in the dialectic of the circuitry of the brain.

Of course, these are genetic/historical generalizations which do not precisely match any specific family. The gracious goddess/hostile giant archetypes are not activated in cases where the mother is cold, rejecting, embittered etc. and the father is the warm, supportive figure. The imprints on the first and second circuits are statistically deviant in such families and anything may result — a shaman, a schizophrenic, a genius, a homosexual, an artist, a psychologist, etc.

So EMIC realities are very powerful. Six million Jews died because of an EMIC realtiy. That reality was as real as the guns and bombs of the war because that reality was believed in.

When transcendence of our personal history takes precedence over intimacy with our personal history, spiritual bypassing is inevitable. To not be intimate with our past—to not be deeply and thoroughly acquainted with our conditioning and its originating factors—keeps it undigested and unintegrated and therefore very much present

I'm entirely fascinated with you," I said. "And what you are is a result of what you were, including the other men.

Colombians have been dealing with cocaine since your ancestors were running around Ireland with their bodies painted blue," Kingsley said.