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It is only from the perspective of the outlaw … that we are able to see that mythically informed normality is a form of mass hypnosis.
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A society that trains us to specialize in making, doing, performing, and producing neglects to educate us in wonder and appreciation.
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Pleasers … make up what Earl Shorris has called 'the oppressed middle,' the middle-managers who enjoy 'the comforts of fearful people' and pay by submitting to their superiors’ definitions of happiness and success.
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Being impotent because they have never dared to assert themselves, they continually play the blame game. They are innocent and powerless and, therefore, others are always to blame when things go wrong. … They have yet to bite the apple of consciousness.
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Secular culture, with the aid of psychoanalysis, has continued the old Christian habit of observing the self only to criticize it.
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The path that leads from the persona to the self, from the adult to the outlaw, consists of learning to distinguish between false desire and true desire, or superficial desire and profound desire, or obsessive desire and free passion, … or illusory needs and real needs.
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Where authority represses freedom, rebellion becomes the hard work of love, which is necessary because love, freedom, and spirit are inseparable.
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In the presence of our addictions, we are not free to ask what we really desire. Eros is silent. The addiction floods us with the noise of its demands, the plans for its satisfaction. There is no interval for deliberation.
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Hero tales suggest the price of courage is beyond the ordinary budget. They tempt us to disown the common capacity of the human spirit to transcend normality.
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The decision to become an individual, to allow oneself to be moved by the deepest impulses of the self rather than the social consensus, can only be made with fear and trembling.
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Overstimulation of the adrenal glands (with consequent exhaustion of the spirit) is the price of our incorporation within the male womb of the modern corporate society.