Norman O. Brown Quotes

14 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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
Islam is to be envisaged as dialectical evolution, or evolutionary mutation, in the prophetic tradition, in response to the limitations built into the structure of orthodox Christianity by its historic compromise with Roman imperialism; by its commitment to scriptural canon, creedal orthodoxy and episcopal hierarchy; and by its consequent scandalous history of schism and persecution (duly noted in the Koran).

Norman O. Brown
In the prophetic tradition, properly understood, Islam must be perceived as a legitimate dialectical response to the failure of orthodox Christianity. Protestants should be able to see that the need for a Protestant Reformation was there already in the 7th century C.E., to be perceived by prophetic eyes.... New light is coming from... a profounder appreciation of Judeo-Christian heresy, the alternatives eliminated by that triumph of orthodoxy which Hegel regards, as he regards all world-historical triumphs, as the triumph of God. Victrix causa deis placuit.

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

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

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
The insane do not share the normal prejudice in favor of external reality.

Norman O. Brown
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