Thou therefore who desirest Magical Gifts, be sure that thy soul is firm and steadfast; for it is by flattering thy weaknesses that the Weak Ones will gain power over thee. Humble thyself before thy Self, yet fear neither man nor spirit. Fear is failure, and the forerunner of failure: and courage is the beginning of virtue. — Liber Libræ sub figurâ XXX – The Book of the Balance
Quote featured at FEAR IS FAILURE from the Ministry of Information.
This is not to absolve the world of its ugliness, or to deny that truly fearful things exist in it. But some of these things can be overcome–on the condition that we build an aesthetic on the overcoming rather than the fear.
I recently attended a gay dance/poetry performance of uncompromising hipness: the one black dancer in the troupe had to pretend to fuck a dead sheep.
Part of my self-induced stupidity, I confess, is to believe (& even feel) that art can change me, & change others. That’s why I write pornography & propaganda–to cause change. Art can never mean as much as a love affair, perhaps, or an insurrection. But…to a certain extent…it works.
Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Against the Reproduction of Death
People may start out with an initial prejudice against tyrants; but when tyrants or would-be tyrants treat them to adrenalin-releasing propaganda about the wickedness of their enemies—particularly of enemies weak enough to be persecuted—they are ready to follow him with enthusiasm.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited [Bookshop, Amazon, Publisher]
“My imagination can set no limit to the possibilities of Science, or of Art: our own Great Work is evidence of that.”
— Chapter 79 from Confessions
Quote featured at PROGRESS ANARCHY COMMON SENSE from the Ministry of Information.
“The puritan is always trying to make it impossible for those things which frighten him to exist. He does not understand that sensibility is not to be cured by protecting it from the obvious stimuli. The diseased tissue will merely begin to react to all sorts of contacts which have a merely symbolic relation with the original perils. This psychological fact is at the basis of such phenomena as fetishism. The saint hurries to the Thebaid to avoid the danger of Thais, only to find that the very stones rise up and take her place.”
— Chapter 68 from Confessions
Quote featured at PROGRESS ANARCHY COMMON SENSE from the Ministry of Information.
“A prominent writer calls attention to himself by the device of calling attention to the pangs of slaughtered oxen; another affirms his brotherhood with the Chicago Pig. Countless thousands turn Vegetarian, and then quarrel as to whether it is or is not True Vegetarianism to eat eggs. The war between the Fruitarians and the Nut-foodists nearly came to a cross word! I knew a ‘man’ who refused to eat bread because it was a fermented drink! A friend of mine knew an Anarchist who refused cocoa because it excited his animal passions!”
— The Vindication of Nietzsche from The Giant’s Thumb
Quote featured at PROGRESS ANARCHY COMMON SENSE from the Ministry of Information.
“Everyone admits that we have reached the summit of wisdom, scaled the loftiest pinnacles of morality, put the crown of perfection upon the cranium of progress, and everyone knows perfectly well how this remarkable result has been achieved. But at the first hint that anyone proposes to take a step farther on this road, he is universally set down as a lunatic of the most dangerous type. However, the most savage Lolos are content with that diagnosis, whereas the most enlightened English add that the pioneer is not only a lunatic but a pervert, degenerate, anarchist an the rest of it—whatever terms of abuse chance to be in fashion. The abolition of slavery, humane treatment of the insane, the restriction of the death penalty to serious offences, and of indiscriminate flogging, the admission of Jews, Catholics, Dissenters and women as citizens, the introduction of the use of chloroform and antiseptics, the application of stem to travel, and of mechanical principles to such arts as spinning and printing, the systematic study of nature, the extension of the term poetry to metres other than the heroic, the recognition of painting other than voluptuous coloured photographs as art, and of music other than classical melody as art—these and a thousand similar innovations have all been denounced as chimerical, blasphemous, obscene, seditious, anti-social and what not.”
— Chapter 55 from Confessions
Quote featured at PROGRESS ANARCHY COMMON SENSE from the Ministry of Information.
“You say—permit me to condense your more than somewhat tautological, pleonastic, prolix, diffuse and incoherent elucubrations!—that the whole idea of the Great Order is based on faith in Progress. The doctrine of successive aeons is nothing else. The system of training is nothing else. Nothing, in fact, is anything else.”
— Chapter LXXIX: Progress from Magick Without Tears
Quote featured at PROGRESS ANARCHY COMMON SENSE from the Ministry of Information.
“Anyhow, all that I really want you to get into your head ‘sunning over with little curls’ is that Progress demands Anarchy tempered by Common Sense, and that the most formidable obstacle is this Biology.
The experience of the Magician and the Yogi does suggest that there is room in the human brain as at present constituted for almost limitless expansion. At least our system of Training is more immediately practical than digging up our Corpora Quadragenina and planting them in a Monkey’s Medulla just to see what will come of it. So put down that bread-knife!”
— Chapter LXXIX: Progress from Magick Without Tears
Quote featured at PROGRESS ANARCHY COMMON SENSE from the Ministry of Information.
This Unicrusal PROGRESS ANARCHY COMMON SENSE Poster is a piece of helpful propaganda from the Ministry of Information, a take on the trilogy of WWII posters with a quote from Chapter LXXIX: Progress in Aleister Crowley‘s Magick Without Tears.