Luke Rhinehart Quotations

In 1965, I was teaching a seminar on freedom when I told my students that the ultimate freedom lay in casting a dice to decide what to do. They were so shocked and fascinated that I knew I had to write the book.

Those who believe that they have absolute truth and the only moral system are destructive both to themselves and to those whom they try to convert.

Part of the philosophy of 'The Dice Man' is that you have got to be laughing at yourself at every moment and be free of yourself at every moment.

I am George Cockcroft. But when I come to England or Europe, where the name Luke Rhinehart is better known, then I use that name.

The thing the Buddhists and the Sufis have in common is a belief that religious certainties are destructive.

When I was a young man, barely 18, I discovered Jesus Christ as my personal saviour, and for six months I told my mother she was damned to hell. That wasn't much fun. I abandoned it.

'The Dice Man' is an anti-establishment cult novel, and you don't normally make studio films from such dark comedy material.

There have been 15 or 16 screenplays over the years, including one by me, but none of them has gotten made because Paramount is a huge studio. The Dice Man is an anti-establishment cult novel and you don't normally make studio films from such dark comedy material.

There is something fundamentally wrong with the way we normally live our lives and we'd sort of like to find out what it is.

Why did children seem to be so often spontaneous, joy-filled and concentrated while adults seemed controlled, anxiety-filled and diffused? It was the Goddam sense of having a self.

Man must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another, one set of values to another, one life to another. Men must be free from boundaries, patterns and consistencies in order to be free to think, feel and create in new ways. Men have admired Prometheus and Mars too long; our God must become Proteus.

Give up all hope, all illusion, all desire..I've tried. I've tried and still I desire, I still desire not to desire and hope to be without hope and have the illusion I can be without illusions..Give up, I say. Give up everything, including the desire to be saved.

To change man, the audience by which he judges himself must be changed. A man is defined by his audience: by the people, institutions, authors, magazines, movie heroes, philosophers by whom he pictures himself being cheered and booed. Major psychological disturbances, 'identity crises', are caused when an individual begins to change the audience for whom he plays: from parents to peers; from peers to the works of Albert Camus; from the Bible to Hugh Hefner.

We are blind to the worlds within us, waiting to be born.

Patterns are prostitution to the patter of parents.

Men must attempt to develop in themselves and their children liberation from the sense of self. Men must be free from boundaries, patterns and consistencies in order to be free to think, feel and create in new ways.

Life is islands of ecstasy in an ocean of ennui, and after the age of thirty land is seldom seen.

I hated myself and the world because I had failed to face and accept the limitations of my self and of life. In literature this refusal is called romanticism; in psychology, neurosis.