“Organisms are self-causing agencies. Every self is a tautology: self-evident, self-referential, self-centered, and self-created.”
Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems and the Economic World (1995)
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Section 10
The True Believer (1951), Part One: The Appeal of Mass Movements
Context: There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.
“The self is a center of relationships.”
The World's Religions (1991)
Context: The point is not merely that human relationships are fulfilling; the Confucian claim runs deeper than that. It is rather that apart from human relationships there is no self. The self is a center of relationships. It is constructed through its interactions with others and is defined by the sum of its social roles.
Source: Philosophy and the Return to Self-Knowledge (1997), p. 153
Source: An Approach to Cybernetics (1961), p. 103-104, partly cited in: Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, Alessio Cavallaro (2004) Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History.
“Every man has a mob self and an individual self, in varying proportions.”
Pornography and Obscenity (1929)
Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, Introduction
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.”
First Woman's Rights Convention, Seneca Falls, New York, [July, 19-20, 1848]. Declaration of Sentiments.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all P-brains are created equal.”
The Universe in a Nutshell (2001)
Source: The Warrior Within : The Philosophies of Bruce Lee (1996), p. 133
Context: I have come to discover through earnest personal experience and dedicated learning that ultimately the greatest help is self-help; that there is no other help but self-help— doing one’s best, dedicating one’s self wholeheartedly to a given task, which happens to have no end but is an ongoing process. I have done a lot during these years of my process. A swell in my process, I have changed from self-image actualization to self-actualization, from blindly following propaganda, organized truths, etc. to searching internally for the cause of my ignorance.