Norman O. Brown Quotes & Sayings

#1. Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.

Norman O. Brown

#2. The dynamics of capitalism is postponement of enjoyment to the constantly postponed future.

Norman O. Brown

#3. To be seen is the ambition of ghosts, and to be remembered is the ambition of the dead.

Norman O. Brown

#4. 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

#5. All currency is neurotic currency.

Norman O. Brown

#6. I am what is mine. Personality is the original personal property.

Norman O. Brown

#7. The solution to the problem of identity is, get lost

Norman O. Brown

#8. Truth is error burned up.

Norman O. Brown

#9. To be is to be vulnerable.

Norman O. Brown

#10. 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

#11. The real deceivers are the literalists, who say, I cannot tell a lie.

Norman O. Brown

#12. Resisting madness is the maddest way of being mad.

Norman O. Brown

#13. The human body is not a thing or a substance, given, but a continuous creation.

Norman O. Brown

#14. 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

#15. 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

#16. The view only changes for the lead dog.

Norman O. Brown

#17. 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

#18. 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

#19. The human libido is essentially narcissistic, but it seeks a world to love as it loves itself.

Norman O. Brown

#20. 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