From the Journals

A comedian is a philosopher who is at least of some use.

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There is no narcotic like hatred. One’s suffering is obviated thereby. That a Jew has suffered that you should not: this myth (lie) is responsible for anti-Semitism. For when its adherents find that they suffer (truth), they take it out on the Jews, since by this absurd anti-Semitic logic, their redemption lies therein. Credo quia absurdum est.

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It could be that the only good death is a martyrdom.

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Long ago, I decided that I would rather be mediocre and alive than excellent and dead.

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People fail to appreciate the genius of the recondite religious. They offer a simulacrum of simplicity.

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“They live poetically that they might write themselves out of history in cryptic communion with the future.”

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In the future, we will still be in the present, which logic dictates that the past be infinite.

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The treatment of paintings by critical theorists is like the treatment of Scripture by rabbinics – it is treated as a function of the inerrant, and hence incapable of being unfit for infinite mining.

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The antique is valuable simply on account of its existence.

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The lighthouse tower does not seek to convert ships into lighthouse towers.

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Imitation of God betrays an intention to replace him.

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The more I see myself as animal, the more I see myself as created.

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In Das Leben der Anderen, a character refers to the supersession of the language of Freitot by that of Selbstmord. Disparagingly. But we hold to the latter, for otherwise the way is cleared for the reconciliation of killing and freedom.

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Our homeland is intellectual and retrospective, not prospective.

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When did marital fidelity become a thing? Prostitution is called the oldest profession, and so we know that marital infidelity is not to be equated with polygamy. There is something rapacious about marital infidelity. I hear that we observe sexual fidelity elsewhere in the animal kingdom.

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Atheism’s prescriptive edge counts for its truth.

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Man does not prove God. God proves man.

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It is amazing that poets write more about places than about the homeless who inhabit them.

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The example of Socrates makes it puzzling that intelligence and goodness do not always go together.

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There is no such thing as a right to self-defense. It is entirely a matter of prejudice in one’s own favor.

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My Envy. Envy is to be treated as a source of amusement.

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I am an instrument of doctoring; therefore, I must be sterile.

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Not the powerful, but the impotent create revolutions, some by pettiness, some by patience.

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We are either absurd in our vanity or absurd in the inefficaciousness of our observation thereof.

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If you would master others, master yourself first. That should keep you busy.

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Some Like It Hot is a boring movie except for when the two men are in drag. It is that they are both of their peers and not of their peers, that they want to take part in a way that would be disruptive, and cannot. They are hiding in plain sight. Where he woos her on the boat, where there is, in short, plot – this is boring. It is the situation (the “condition”) that is interesting.

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The father’s power to command is entirely a function of one’s discernment in his voice of an intention to serve.

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Socrates was a dialogist; Plato was a monologist; and Aristotle was a cataloguist.