Norman O. Brown Quotes

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

Love without attachment is light.

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

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

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

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.

To love is to transform; to be a poet.

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

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

Meaning is not in things but in between them.

All currency is neurotic currency.

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

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

To be is to be vulnerable.

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

Resisting madness is the maddest way of being mad.

Truth is error burned up.

For two thousand years or more man has been subjected to a systematic effort to transform him into an ascetic animal. He remains a pleasure-seeking animal.