Celia Green Quotes

61 Sourced Quotes

Society is a self-regulating mechanism for preventing the fulfilment of its members.

Celia Green
That society exists to frustrate the individual may be seen from its attitude to work. It is only morally acceptable if you do not want to do it. If you want to, it becomes a personal pleasure.

Celia Green
The human race knows enough about thinking to prevent it.

Celia Green
It is actually a principle of modern paternalism that if you want something you should be stopped from having it[…] Most foods are harmful to some people if taken in excess, and I expect the only reason that carrots are still available without a prescription is that no one has got very excited about them, or claimed that they might cure cancer.

Celia Green
What is scandalous is not that stupid people should sometimes inherit private incomes; but that clever people should sometimes not.

Celia Green
It is superfluous to be humble on one's own behalf; so many people are willing to do it for one.

Celia Green
The psychology of committees is a special case of the psychology of mobs.

Celia Green
People have been marrying and bringing up children for centuries now. Nothing has ever come of it.

Celia Green
Society is everybody's way of punishing one another because they daren't take it out on the universe.

Celia Green
The human race's favorite method for being in control of facts is to ignore them.

Celia Green
It is easier to make people appear equally stupid than to make them equally clever, so teaching methods are adopted which make it practically impossible for anyone to learn anything.

Celia Green
I spent a couple of years between eleven and thirteen analysing the social evaluations that were taken for granted, also acquiring a thorough scepticism about processes regarded as causal, and the consistency of the physical world, as well as the reliability of my own mental processes. By the time I was thirteen I was running out of things to think about, so starting on a run of exam-taking seemed all the more appropriate, as I was finding it difficult to make use of spare time.

Celia Green
The perception that existence exists invalidates the normal personality, as does the imminence of death.

Celia Green
The object of the educational system is to make the child feel suitably guilty for the harm that has been done to him.

Celia Green
Young people wonder how the adult world can be so boring. The secret is that it is not boring to adults because they have learned to enjoy simple things like covert malice at one another's expense. This is why they talk so much about the value of human understanding and sympathy - it has a certain rarity value in their world.

Celia Green
The way to do research is to attack the facts at the point of greatest astonishment.

Celia Green
Now if anyone were reminded about the inconceivable by the fact of existence at all constantly, he would sooner or later have the perception that there may be inconceivable considerations which are inconceivably more important than any conceivable consideration could be.

Celia Green
In an autocracy, one person has his way; in an aristocracy a few people have their way; in a democracy, no one has his way.

Celia Green
Research is a way of taking calculated risks to bring about incalculable consequences.

Celia Green
Physics has never been a comfortable subject for human psychology. The desire to regard everything outside the human race's purview as insignificant, and everything within that purview as firmly under the control of tribal myth and custom, is as strong today as it was in the time of Galileo.

Celia Green
Now if you do have a perception that any conceivable consideration may be utterly invalidated by some other consideration which you do not know, and if you are reminded of this perception constantly by the fact that things exist, certain modifications take place in the way you feel about things. These modifications have not taken place in the psychology of most people.

Celia Green
Progress towards sanity is achieved by abandoning first the desire for omnipotence and then that for exceptional achievement.

Celia Green
Now if you see that it is inconceivable that anything should exist, it is evident that at least one inconceivable fact is there. That is to say, that which exists is not limited to the conceivable. Since the inconceivable is there, it is impossible to set any limit to the quantity of inconceivableness which may be present in the situation. Now were the existence of anything consistently to remind you of the fact of inconceivability, since it is impossible to live without interacting with a large number of existing things, it would be impossible for you to feel in the same way about the conceivable.

Celia Green
Human nature: vindictiveness lightly coated with dishonesty.

Celia Green
'Social justice' - the expression of universal hatred.

Celia Green
The remarkable thing about the human mind is its range of limitations.

Celia Green
The object of modern science is to make all aspects of reality equally boring, so that no one will be tempted to think about them.

Celia Green
There are some things that are sure to go wrong as soon as they stop going right.

Celia Green
If you say to a theoretical physicist that something is inconceivable, he will reply: "It only appears inconceivable because you are naively trying to conceive it. Stop thinking and all will be well."

Celia Green
The chief difficulty of modern theoretical physics resides not in the fact that it expresses itself almost exclusively in mathematical symbols, but in the psychological difficulty of supposing that complete nonsense can be seriously promulgated and transmitted by persons who have sufficient intelligence of some kind to perform operations in differential and integral calculus...

Celia Green