Hakim Bey Quotes & Sayings

There is no becoming, no revolution, no struggle, no path; already you're the monarch of your own skin - your inviolable freedom waits to be completed only by the love of other monarchs: a politics of dream, urgent as the blueness of sky. — Hakim Bey

A Tong can perhaps be defined as a mutual benefit society for people with a common interest which is illegal or dangerously marginal - hence, the necessary secrecy. — Hakim Bey

Let us admit that we have attended parties where for one brief night a republic of gratified desires was attained. Shall we not confess that the politics of that night have more reality and force for us than those of, say, the entire U.S. Government? Some of the "parties" we've mentioned lasted for two or three years. Is this something worth imagining, worth fighting for? Let us study invisibility, webworking, psychic nomadism
and who knows what we might attain? — Hakim Bey

I maintain that (as usual) many sides exist to this issue rather than only two. Two-sided issues (creationism vs darwinism, "choice" vs "pro-life," etc.) are all without exception delusions, spectacular lies. — Hakim Bey

The dullard sees no eros in fine champagne; the sorcerer can fall intoxicated on a glass of water — Hakim Bey

The last possible deed is that which defines perception itself, an invisible golden chord that connects us: illegal dancing in the courthouse corridors. — Hakim Bey

i am awake only in what i love & desire to the point of terror -- everything else is just shrouded furniture, quotidian anaesthesia, shit-for-brains, sub-reptilian ennui of totalitarian regimes, banal censorship & useless pain ... — Hakim Bey

In short, it occurred to me that perhaps the only possible avant garde is the avant garden. — Hakim Bey

Words belong to those who use them only till someone else steals them back. — Hakim Bey

To say that 'I will not be free till all humans (or all sentient creatures) are free' is simply to cave in to a kind of nirvana-stupor, to abdicate our humanity, to define ourselves as losers. — Hakim Bey

If rulers refuse to consider poems as crimes, then someone must commit crimes that serve the function of poetry, or texts that possess the resonance of terrorism. — Hakim Bey

Only the dead are truly smart, truly cool. Nothing touches them. While I live, however, I side with bumbling suffering crooked life, with anger rather than boredom, with sweet lust, hunger & carelessness ... against the icy avant-guard & its fashionable premonitions of the sepulcher. — Hakim Bey

Where our knowledge of beauty harmonizes with the ludus naturae, sorcery begins.
No, not spoon-bending or horoscopy, not the Golden Dawn or make-believe shamanism, astral projection or the Satanic Mass
if it's mumbo jumbo you want go for the real stuff, banking, politics, social science
not that weak blavatskian crap. — Hakim Bey

I was beginning to feel that there would never be another American uprising, that the energy was gone, and I have some reasons to think that might be true. I like to point out that the crime rate in America has been declining for a long time, and in my opinion it's because Americans don't even have enough gumption to commit crimes anymore: the creative aspect of crime has fallen into decay. As for the uprising that takes a principled stand against violence, hats off to them, I admire the idealism, but I don't think it's going to accomplish much. — Hakim Bey

Turn to yourselves rather than to your Gods or to your idols. Find what hides in yourselves; bring it to the light; show yourselves! — Hakim Bey

One may always attempt as much insight, love, freedom of thought and expression, justice and tolerance as possible for oneself and the very few people who share one's truest life. To be a 'free lord' in secret is better than being a public slave, a willing accomplice of repression and injustice. — Hakim Bey

Ten minutes in a video store should convince any impartial observer that we live in a police state of consciousness, far more pervasive than the Nazis. — Hakim Bey

A freedom or pleasure that rests on someone else's slavery or misery cannot finally satisfy the self because it is a limitation or narrowing of the self, an admission of impotence, an offense against generosity and justice. Our freedom depends on other people's freedom, for our fates are inextricably interwoven with others', especially with those we love. — Hakim Bey

The sorcerer is a Simple Realist: the world is real
but then so must consciousness be real since its effects are so tangible. — Hakim Bey

Only drugs make you feel as good as people in TV ads appear to be. — Hakim Bey

Physical separateness can never be overcome by electronics, but only by 'conviviality,' by 'living together' in the most literal physical sense. The physically divided are also the conquered and the controlled. 'True desires' - erotic, gustatory, olfactory, musical, aesthetic, psychic, & spiritual - are best attained in a context of freedom of self and other in physical proximity & mutual aid. Everything else is at best a sort of representation. — Hakim Bey

The dullard finds even wine tasteless, while the sorcerer is intoxicated by the mere sight of water. — Hakim Bey

Mummies are dehydrated & they long for the blood of living words. — Hakim Bey

Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols ... Art tells gorgeous lies that come true. — Hakim Bey

IN PERSIA I SAW that poetry is meant to be set to music & chanted or sung
for one reason alone
because it works.
A right combination of image & tune plunges the audience into a hal (something between emotional/aesthetic mood & trance of hyperawareness), outbursts of weeping, fits of dancing
measurable physical response to art. For us the link between poetry & body died with the bardic era
we read under the influence of a cartesian anaesthetic gas. — Hakim Bey

Don't just survive while waiting for someone's revolution to clear your head. — Hakim Bey

The sage does not become trapped in semantics, does not mistake map for territory, but rather "opens things up to the light of Heaven" by flowing with the words, by playing with the words. Once attuned to this flow, the sage need make no special effort to "illumine," for language does it by itself, spontaneously. Language spills over. — Hakim Bey

Now the End of the World is an abstraction because it has never happened. It has no existence in the real world. It will cease to be an abstraction only when it happens
if it happens. (I do not claim to know "God's mind" on the subject- -nor to possess any scientific knowledge about a still non- existent future). I see only a mental image & its emotional ramifications; as such I identify it as a kind of ghostly virus, a spook-sickness in myself which ought to be expunged rather than hypochondriacally coddled & indulged. I have come to despise the "End of the World" as an ideological icon held over my head by religion, state, & cultural milieu alike, as a reason for doing nothing. — Hakim Bey

Sorcery: the systematic cultivation of enhanced consciousness or non-ordinary awareness & its deployment in the world of deeds & objects to bring about desired results. — Hakim Bey

Moloch merely shovels babies into the fire of productive capitalism. Mammon hooks them on the dead heroin of envy. — Hakim Bey

The Law waits for you to stumble on a mode of being, a soul different from the FDA-approved purple-stamped standard dead meat - & as soon as you begin to act in harmony with nature the Law garottes & strangles you - so don't play the blessed liberal middleclass martyr - accept the fact that you're a criminal & be prepared to act like one. — Hakim Bey

The Universe wants to play. Those who refuse out of dry spiritual greed & choose pure contemplation forfeit their humanity - those who refuse out of dull anguish, those who hesitate, lose their chance at divinity - those who mold themselves blind masks of Ideas & thrash around seeking some proof of their own solidity end by seeing out of dead men's eyes. — Hakim Bey

Chaos comes before all principles of order & entropy, it's neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass & define every possible choreography, all meaningless aethers & phlogistons: its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds. — Hakim Bey

Anyone who can read history with both hemispheres of the brain knows that a world comes to an end every instant
the waves of time leave washed up behind themselves only dry memories of a closed & petrified past
imperfect memory, itself already dying & autumnal. And every instant also gives birth to a world
despite the cavillings of philosophers & scientists whose bodies have grown numb
a present in which all impossibilities are renewed, where regret & premonition fade to nothing in one presential hologrammatical psychomantric gesture. — Hakim Bey