Not To Know The Past Is To

Religion Restricts The Play Of Choice And Adaptation, Since It Imposes Equally On Everyone Its Own Path To The Acquisition Of Happiness And Protection From Suffering. Its Technique Consists In Depressing The Value Of Life And Distorting The Picture Of The Real World In A Delusional Manner - Which Presupposes An Intimidation Of The Intelligence. At This Price, By Forcibly Fixing Them In A State Of Psychical Infantilism And By Drawing Them Into A Mass-delusion, Religion Succeeds In Sparing Many People An Individual Neurosis. But Hardly Anything More.

The Fateful Question For The Human Species Seems To Me To Be Whether And To What Extent Their Cultural Development Will Succeed In Mastering The Disturbance Of Their Communal Life By The Human Instinct Of Aggression And Self-destruction ... One Thing Only Do I Know For Certain And That Is That Man's Judgements Of Value Follow Directly From His Wihes For Happiness-that, Accordingly, They Are An Attempt To Support His Illusions With Arguments.

Life, As We Find It, Is Too Hard For Us; It Brings Us Too Many Pains, Disappointments And Impossible Tasks. In Order To Bear It We Cannot Dispense With Palliative Measures... There Are Perhaps Three Such Measures: Powerful Deflections, Which Cause Us To Make Light Of Our Misery; Substitutive Satisfactions, Which Diminish It; And Intoxicating Substances, Which Make Us Insensible To It.

We Must Love Or We Grow Ill.

There Is An Intellectual Function In Us Which Demands Unity, Connection And Intelligibility From Any Material, Whether Of Perception Or Thought, That Comes Within Its Grasp; And If, As A Result Of Special Circumstances, It Is Unable To Establish A True Connection, It Does Not Hesitate To Fabricate A False One.