Norman O. Brown Quotations

In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.

I am what is mine. Personality is the original personal property.

Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.

The view only changes for the lead dog.

The dynamics of capitalism is postponement of enjoyment to the constantly postponed future.

Truth is error burned up.

The boundary line between self and external world bears no relation to reality; the distinction between ego and world is made by spitting out part of the inside, and swallowing in part of the outside.

Whoever expects to walk peacefully in the world must be money's guest.

Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of 'progress,' but only by viewing history as a neurosis.

To be is to be vulnerable.

All currency is neurotic currency.

The money complex is the demonic, and the demonic is God's ape; the money complex is therefore the heir to and substitute for the religious complex, an attempt to find God in things.

Utopian speculations ... must come back into fashion. They are a way of affirming faith in the possibility of solving problems that seem at the moment insoluble. Today even the survival of humanity is a utopian hope.

Resisting madness is the maddest way of being mad.

The insane do not share the normal prejudice in favor of external reality.

History is the enactment of ritual on a permanent and universal stage; and its perpetual commemoration.

To love is to transform; to be a poet.

I perceive a necessary gap between seeing and being. I would not be able to have said certain things if I had been under the obligation to unify the word and the deed. As it is I can let my words reach out and net impossible things - things that are impossible for me to do. And this is a way to pay the price for saying or seeing things.

The human body is not a thing or a substance, given, but a continuous creation.

Meaning is not in things but in between them.

Mankind today is still making history without having any conscious idea of what it really wants or under what conditions it would stop being unhappy; in fact what it is doing seems to be making itself more unhappy and calling that unhappiness progress.

To be seen is the ambition of ghosts, and to be remembered is the ambition of the dead.

The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system which is never a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new.

Love without attachment is light.