Pax Hominibus Bonae Voluntatis by Aleister Crowley in International, Dec 1917.

“At the present juncture my righteousness consists of being an animal of such a nature as to wish the power to pass into the hands of those people who are reasonable.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “He affirms again and again that the virtuous, those who have ‘pure desire and universal love,’ are happy in the midst of tyranny, and he foresees a day when ‘the spirit of nature,’ the spirit of beauty of his later poems, who has her ‘throne of power unappealable in every human heart,’ shall have made men so virtuous that ‘kingly glare will lose its power to dazzle and silently pass by,’ and as it seems even commerce, ‘the venal interchange of all that human art or nature yields, which wealth should purchase not,’ come as silently to an end.”
  2. “Blake represented the shapes of beauty haunting our moments of inspiration: shapes held by most for the frailest of ephemera, but by him for a people older than the world, citizens of eternity, appearing and reappearing in the minds of artists and of poets, creating all we touch and see by casting distorted images of themselves upon ‘the vegetable glass of nature’; and because beings, none the less symbols, blossoms, as it were, growing from invisible immortal roots, hands, as it were, pointing the way into some divine labyrinth.”
  3. “We are out to break the political will of another group of nations, and our worst foes are those of our own people who are giving the show away. We go to war to defend the rights of the little nations, and we imprison Irishmen who can not forget that their mothers were raped by British soldiers. We are particularly strong on Belgium, and her representative complains that there is to be no seat for Belgium on the Allied war council. The Germans go to war for Kultur, yet they cannot find an expedient for contracting out of the shelling of cathedrals. And if these things are done in the green tree of the people in power, what shall be done in the dry tree, and withered sticks of the mediocre.”
  4. “THERE are six major drawbacks to Auction Bridge. Here they are: 1. Mismated partners. You get a fiend for a partner and can’t shake him off. 2. Mismated hands, The two good heart hands never seem to come together. The good spade partners are opposed to each other, etc., etc. 3. The frequency with which bids are set. in actual practice only nine out of thirteen are successful at auction. 4. The fact that you are liable all through a rubber, for your partner’s mistakes. 5. The bickering, fault-finding, nagging, and exhibitions of bad temper. 6. It is not good game for the gambling type of player, as only two people can win–or lose–and they must always win or lose like amounts.”
  5. “Herbert Spencer has shown that the animal which adapts himself to his circumstances is going to survive longer than those who resist their environment. Away then with all considerations of principle!”