Someday I want to be rich. Some people get so rich they lose all respect for humanity. That’s how rich I want to be.
History is filled with the sound of silken slippers going downstairs and wooden shoes coming up.
Virtue consisted in winning: it consisted in being bigger, stronger, handsomer, richer, more popular, more elegant, more unscrupulous than other people — in dominating them, bullying them, making them suffer pain, making them look foolish, getting the better of them in every way. Life was hierarchical and whatever happened was right. There were the strong, who deserved to win and always did win, and there were the weak, who deserved to lose and always did lose, everlastingly.
There is something wrong in a government where those who do the most have the least. There is something wrong when honesty wears a rag, and rascality a robe; when the loving, the tender, eat a crust, while the infamous sit at banquets.
What we call “human nature” in actuality is human habit.
When I read about some important moment or era in history, I always take it for granted that the people it happened to were aware of what was going on. In my mind’s eye, I see the agricultural workers of England during the Industrial Revolution feeling the pinch and saying to each other, “Eh, lad,” or whatever agricultural workers would say in those days, “what dost tha expect? It’s this Industrial Revolution at the bottom of it.”
The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.
History does not teach fatalism. There are moments when the will of a handful of free men breaks through determinism and opens up new roads. People get the history they deserve.
Suddenly, it becomes a subversion of progress to assert the common-sense principle that communities exist for the health and enjoyment of those who live in them, not for the convenience of those who drive through them, fly over them, or exploit their real estate for profit.
Man stands in his own shadow and wonders why it’s dark.
I do think that women could make politics irrelevant by a kind of spontaneous cooperative action, the likes of which we have never seen — just so far from people’s ideas of state structure and viable social structure that it seems to them like total anarchy. And what it is is very subtle forms of interrelation which do not follow some hierarchical pattern that is fundamentally patriarchal. The opposite of patriarchy is not matriarchy, but fraternity. And I think it’s women who are going to have to break the spiral of power and find the trick of cooperation.
By concentrating on what is good in people, by appealing to their idealism and their sense of justice, and by asking them to put their faith in the future, socialists put themselves at a severe disadvantage.
You know of the disease called “sleeping sickness.” There also exists a sleeping sickness of the soul. Its most dangerous aspect is that one is unaware of its coming. That is why you have to be careful. As soon as you notice the slightest sign of indifference, the moment you become aware of the loss of a certain seriousness, of longing, of enthusiasm and zest, take it as a warning. Your soul suffers if you live superficially.
Revolutions are not made: they come. A revolution is as natural a growth as an oak. It comes out of the past. Its foundations are laid far back.
You cannot contribute anything to the ideal condition of mind and heart known as brotherhood, however much you preach, posture, or agree, unless you live it.
Story by Jung of a conversation with a chief of the Pueblo Indians: Jung asked the chief’s opinion of the white man and was told that it was not a high one. White people, said Ochwiay Biano, seem always upset, always restlessly looking for something, with the result that their faces are covered with wrinkles. He added that white men must be crazy because they think with their heads, and it is well-known that only crazy people do that. Jung asked in surprise how the Indian thought, to which Ochwiay Biano replied that naturally he thought with his heart.
