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And you have been forever, and will be forever, and all the worrisome smashings of your foot on innocent cupboard doors it was only the Void pretending to be a man pretending not to know the Void.
Jack Kerouac
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And you have been forever, and will be forever, and all the worrisome smashings of your foot on innocent cupboard doors it was only the Void pretending to be a man pretending not to know the Void.

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There is one kind of laugh that I always did recommend; it looks out of the eye first with a merry twinkle, then it creeps down on its hands and knees and plays around the mouth like a pretty moth around the blaze of a candle, then it steals over into the dimples of the cheeks and rides around in those whirlpools for a while, then it lights up the whole face like the mellow bloom on a damask rose, then it swims up on the air, with a peal as clear and as happy as a dinner-bell, then it goes back again on gold tiptoes like an angel out for an airing, and it lies down on its little bed of violets in the heart where it came from.

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It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

JM
James Madison

The Federalist Papers

"

I saw the Tracker__ut that__ wrong, really. I saw right to where the tracking thing was. I saw those winnowing tentacles come out again, and the front figure pause, and then__t__ the only word that actually describes it__oze on again on its via dolorosa. And at that the hind figure seemed to summon all its strength. It seemed to open out a fringe of arms or tentacles, a sort of corona of black rays spread out. It gaped with a full expansion, and even I could feel that there was a perfectly horrible attraction, or vacuum drag, being exerted. That was horrible enough, with the face of the super-suffering man now almost under me resonating my own terror. But the worst thing was that, as the tentacles unwrapped and winnowed out toward their prey, I saw they weren__ really tentacles at all. They were spreading cracks, veins, fissures, rents of darkness expanding from a void, a gap of pure blackness. There__ only one way to say it__ne was seeing right through the solid world into a gap, an ultimate maelstrom. And from it was spreading out a__ can only call it so__ negative sunrise of black radiation that would deluge and obliterate everything. Of course it was still only a fissure, a vent, but one realized__his is a hole, a widening hole, that has been pierced in the dike that defends the common-sense, sensuous world. Through this vortex-hole that is rapidly opening, over this lip and brink, everything could slip, fall in, find no purchase, be swallowed up.It was like watching a crumbling cliff with survivors clinging to it being undercut and toppling into a black tide that had swallowed up its base. This negative force could drag the solidest things from their base, melt them, engulf the whole hard, visible world. And we were right on that brink. What was after us, for I knew now I was in its field, was not a thing of any passions or desires. Those are limited things, satiable things__n a way, balanced things, and so familiar, safe even, almost friendly in comparison with this. You know the grim saying, __ou can give a sop to Cerberus, but not to his Master._ No, this was__hat__ the technical term, I found, coined by those who have been up against this and come back alive__his was absolute Deprivation, really insatiable need, need that nothing can satisfy, absolute refusal to give, to yield. It is the second strongest thing in the universe, and, indeed, outside that. It could swallow the whole universe, and the universe would go for nothing, because in that gap the whole universe could fill not a bit of it. It would remain as empty, as gaping, as insatiable as ever, for it is the bottomless pit made by unstanchable Lack.

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Gerald Heard

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