He pretended to suspect me, of course. We can see now, thanks to you, that his whole life has been one long hypocrisy, that he has been pretending to be an artist, just like any other fraud. His deadly earnestness about it only made it worse; I see that now.
Edward Kelly (Aleister Crowley), The Artistic Temperament
We have pretended that there was no such thing as sex, no such thing as venereal disease, that our publicists were True Believers in Christianity, that our women were pure and our men brave; we have howled down every man who dared to hint the truth: we have sowed the wind of pious phrases, and we must reap the whirlwind of war. It has been the same in every drawer of our cupboard—and now the skeleton is out.
Aleister Crowley, The Vindication of Nietzsche
We have a credit system which when analysed meant that we were all pretending to be rich, a social system in which we all pretended to be esquires at the least. We had Dukes who never led, Marquesses with no marches to ward, Knights who could barely sit a donkey; we called our slattern slaves lady helps, our prostitutes soiled doves, our grumbling mumbling fumbling politicians statesmen.
And it is gone like a ghost—and an unclean spirit sure it was that haunted us.
Aleister Crowley, The Vindication of Nietzsche
