The Illuminatus! Trilogy

"He [Hegel] is perfect... Unlike Kant, who makes sense only in German, this man doesnt make sense in any language."

"Correctly formulated, the Law [of Fives] is: All phenomena are directly or indirectly related to the number five, and this relationship can always be demonstrated, given enough ingenuity on the part of the demonstrator."

"Everybody is crazy," Saul said patiently, "if you dont understand his motives."

"The most thoroughly and relentlessly Damned, banned, excluded, condemned, forbidden, ostracized, ignored, suppressed, repressed, robbed, brutalized and defamed of all Damned things is the individual human being. The social engineers, statisticians, psychologists, sociologists, market researchers, landlords, bureaucrats, captains of industry, bankers, governors, commissars, kings and presidents are perpetually forcing this Damned Thing into carefully prepared blueprints and perpetually irritated that the Damned Thing will not fit into the slot assigned to it. The theologians call it a sinner and tries to reform it. The governor calls it a criminal and tries to punish it. The psychotherapist calls it neurotic and tries to cure it. Still, the Damned Thing will not fit into their slots."

"If you whistle while youre pissing, you have two minds, where one is quite sufficient. If you have two minds, you are at war with yourself. If you are at war with yourself, it is easy for an external force to defeat you. This is why Mong-tse wrote. "A man must destroy himself before others can destroy him."

"In a previous incarnation, Harry saw himself as as centurion, Semper Cuni Linctus, driving the nails into the cross. "Look," he said to Jesus, "nothing personal. Im only following orders." "So am I." Jesus said, "My Fathers orders. Arent we all?"

"That was a simple riddle used by Zen Masters in the training of monks, Joe remembered. You take a newborn gosling and slip it through the neck of a bottle. Month after month you keep it in there and feed it, until it is a fullgrown goose and can no longer be passed through the bottles neck. The question is: Without breaking the bottle, how do you get the goose out?"

"You never disappoint me." Hagbard said. "If they ever hang you, youll be arguing about whether the rope really exists until the last minute."

"Well, sir," said Cartwright "my basic finding is that life energy pervades the entire universe, just as light and gravity do. Therefor, all life is one, just as all light is one. All energies, you see, are broadcast from a central source, yet to be found. If our four amino acids - adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine - suddenly became life when you throw them together, then all chemicals are potentially alive. You and me and the fish and bugs are that kind of life made from adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine: DNA life. What we call dead matter is another kind of life: non-DNA life. Okay so far? If awareness is life, and if life is one, then the awareness of the individual is just one of the universes sensory organs. The universe produces beings like us in order to perceive itself. You might think of it as a giant, selfcontained eye. Consciousness is therefor also manifested as telepathy, clairvoyance, and telekinesis. Those phenomena are simply non-localized versiosn of consciousness. Im very interested in telepathy, and Ive had a lot of succes with telepathic research. These cases of communication are just further evidence that consciousness is a seamless web throughout the universe."

"You cannot understand a mans actions unless you understand his beliefs."

"If you have any answers, We will be glad to provide full and detailed questions."

"April 24 - Objectivity is presumably the opposite of schizophrenia. Which means that it is nothing but acceptance of everybody elses notion of reality. But nobodys perception of reality is the same as everybodys notion of it, which means that the most objective person is the real schizophrenic. It is hard to get beyond the accepted beliefs of ones own age. The first man to think a new thought advances it very tentatively. New ideas have to be around a while before anyone will promote them hard. In their first form, they are like tiny, imperceptible mutations that may eventually lead to new species. Thats why cultural cross-fertilization is so important. It increases the gene-pool of the imagination. The Arabs, say, have one part of the puzzle. The Franks another. So, when the Knights Templar meet the Hashishin, something new is born. The human race has always lived more or less happily in the kingdom of the blind. But there is an elephant among us. A one-eyed elephant."