Norman O. Brown Quotes & Sayings

Mankind today is still making history without having any conscious idea of what it really wants or under what conditions it would stop being unhappy; in fact what it is doing seems to be making itself more unhappy and calling that unhappiness progress. — Norman O. Brown

To be is to be vulnerable. — Norman O. Brown

Resisting madness is the maddest way of being mad. — Norman O. Brown

The dynamics of capitalism is postponement of enjoyment to the constantly postponed future. — Norman O. Brown

To be seen is the ambition of ghosts, and to be remembered is the ambition of the dead. — Norman O. Brown

I am what is mine. Personality is the original personal property. — Norman O. Brown

The human body is not a thing or a substance, given, but a continuous creation. — Norman O. Brown

Truth is error burned up. — Norman O. Brown

Utopian speculations ... must come back into fashion. They are a way of affirming faith in the possibility of solving problems that seem at the moment insoluble. Today even the survival of humanity is a utopian hope. — Norman O. Brown

Meaning is not in things but in between them. — Norman O. Brown

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

The solution to the problem of identity is, get lost — Norman O. Brown

All currency is neurotic currency. — Norman O. Brown

I perceive a necessary gap between seeing and being. I would not be able to have said certain things if I had been under the obligation to unify the word and the deed. As it is I can let my words reach out and net impossible things - things that are impossible for me to do. And this is a way to pay the price for saying or seeing things. — Norman O. Brown

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. — Norman O. Brown

The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system which is never a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new. — Norman O. Brown

The real deceivers are the literalists, who say, I cannot tell a lie. — Norman O. Brown

The view only changes for the lead dog. — Norman O. Brown

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

I've been impressed by the extent to which one gets sentenced by one's own sentences. One explores certain things in play and then in a strange way they become commitments which one has to live. I have gained a deep respect for the demonic power of the word. Words are not idle. They have consequences. — Norman O. Brown

The human libido is essentially narcissistic, but it seeks a world to love as it loves itself. — Norman O. Brown

There is no breakthrough without breakage"--Love's Body — Norman O. Brown

The insane do not share the normal prejudice in favor of external reality. — Norman O. Brown

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. — Norman O. Brown

The boundary line between self and external world bears no relation to reality; the distinction between ego and world is made by spitting out part of the inside, and swallowing in part of the outside. — Norman O. Brown

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

To love is to transform; to be a poet. — Norman O. Brown

Whoever expects to walk peacefully in the world must be money's guest. — Norman O. Brown

Love without attachment is light. — Norman O. Brown

In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness. — Norman O. Brown