“The transhumanist movement is less a theory about the advancement of humanity than a simple evacuation plan. Techno-utopians like to think of themselves as orchestrating a complete break from civilization—a leap into outer space, cyberspace, machine consciousness, or artificial life.”

“The Romans built roads to access the vast areas they had conquered. But, in the end, these same roads led to Rome’s downfall, for they allowed the invaders to march right up to the city gates.”

‪If tripping balls is a kind of civil war, this is its Gettysburg Address. This may be the best description of a mushroom trip I’ve yet to hear.

“The objections we liberals can offer always feel as feeble as a dad telling a teenage girl that she should be very careful riding in cars with other teens who drink.”

“Frederick Douglass fascinates us because he embodies all the contradictions not just of the black experience in America but more broadly of the radical experience in liberal democracies.”

“The Assyrians were often cast, especially by their neighbors, as the equivalent of the Nazis in the biblical era.”

“We are far from the utility-maximizers that standard economics assumes.”—Russell Turpin

“Each new media revolution appears to offer people a new opportunity to wrest . . . control from an elite few and reestablish the social bonds that media has compromised. But, so far anyway, the people—the masses—have always remained one entire media revolution behind those who would dominate them.”

“A humane civilization learns to conduct its competitive activities within the greater context of the commons. Our courts, democracy, markets, and science are all characterized by competition, but this competition takes place on highly regulated playing fields. The free market is not a free-for-all, at all, but a managed game with rules, banks, tokens, patents, and stock shares.”

I was not caught
Though many tried
I live among you
Well disguised

“Insisting on the origins of an idea as the test of an idea’s value is a quintessentially reactionary notion.”

“The attempt to require foreign scholars, businessmen, think-tankers, lawyers, architects and everyone else to express themselves in French—or to understand it when spoken by others—anytime they gathered on French soil could only have one outcome: they would take their business and their ideas somewhere else.”

“A country’s independence is not usually absolute. . . . there was not a single state in existence that did not have to bow to historical inevitabilities.”

Emma Goldman immediately recognized—long before it was fashionable—that the new-made world in Russia was a nightmare, not merely misguided in its excesses but evil from the start.

“Poets die young. That is not just a cliché. The life expectancy of poets, as a group, trails playwrights, novelists, and nonfiction writers by a considerable margin.”