The Creep of Reason Produces Cynics
René Magritte (1898-1967) - Golconde, 1953
After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say, "I want to see the manager."
It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.
Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.
The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive - a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society - a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself . . . The purpose of man's life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.
The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
After one look at this planet any visitor from outer space would say, "I want to see the manager."
William Burroughs
It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.
William Faulkner
The proof that man is the noblest of all creatures is that no other creature has ever denied it.
G. C. Lichtenberg
Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.
Michel de Montaigne
The good, say the mystics of spirit, is God, a being whose only definition is that he is beyond man's power to conceive - a definition that invalidates man's consciousness and nullifies his concepts of existence. The good, say the mystics of muscle, is Society - a thing which they define as an organism that possesses no physical form, a super-being embodied in no one in particular and everyone in general except yourself . . . The purpose of man's life, say both, is to become an abject zombie who serves a purpose he does not know, for reasons he is not to question.
Ayn Rand
The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creature that cannot.
Mark Twain
Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason.
Orson Welles
