“You want praise from people who kick themselves every fifteen minutes, the approval of people who despise themselves.”

The Secret of Letting Go

MUNICH, February 10, 2007. http://www.rferl.org/featuresarticle/2007/02/a50c8a12-b6a8-44ad-92dd-58183e78a032.html <br class="br">2006- 2010

G 29
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook G (1779-1783)

Interview by Ira Shorr, February 11, 1996 http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/19960211.htm. <br class="br">Quotes 1990s, 1995-1999 <br class="br">Context: There are no conservatives in the United States. The United States does not have a conservative tradition. The people who call themselves conservatives, like the Heritage Foundation or Gingrich, are believers in -- are radical statists. They believe in a powerful state, but a welfare state for the rich.

Source: Emma (1815)

Fourth Lecture, p. 70.
The Psychology of Man's Possible Evolution (1950)
Context: People who think they can control their negative emotions and manifest them when they want to, simply deceive themselves. Negative emotions depend on identification; if identification is destroyed in some particular case, they disappear. The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them. I think that, for an ordinary mechanical man, the most difficult thing to realise is that his own and other people's negative emotions, have no value whatever and do not contain anything noble, anything beautiful or anything strong. In reality negative emotions contain nothing but weakness and very often the beginning of hysteria, insanity or crime. The only good thing about them is that, being quite useless and artificially created by imagination and identification, they can be destroyed without any loss. And this is the only chance of escape that man has.

"Postscript", p. 153.
The Anarchist Cookbook (1971)

Source: Reply to a suggestion by Thomas Moore that George Canning might join with the Whigs to pass Catholic emancipation, quoted in Paul Scherer, Lord John Russell: A Biography (1999), p. 24