“The joyfulness of infinite play, its laughter, lies in learning to start something we cannot finish.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“To repeat words is to speak them as though another were saying them, in which case I am not saying them... Even to repeat my own words is to say them as though I were another person in another time and place.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“It was not merely the souls of the Egyptian pharaohs that passed on into the afterlife but their complete offices and roles, along with all the tangible reminders of their earthly triumphs--including servants put to death.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Change is itself the very basis of our continuity as persons. Only that which can change can continue.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Immortality is the state of forgetting that we have forgotten... serious and in no way playful... a state of unrelieved theatricality... the supreme example of the contradictoriness of finite play. It is a life one cannot live.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Patriotism in one or several of its many forms (chauvinism, racism, sexism, nationalism, regionalism) is an ingredient in all societal play.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Deviation is antisocial and therefore forbidden by society under a variety of sanctions... Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“It is essential to the identity of a society to forget that it has forgotten that society is always a species of culture.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Unrepeatability is a characteristic of culture everywhere... culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition... Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun and not finished”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Culture has no boundaries. Anyone can be a participant in a culture—anywhere and at any time... a society without cuture would be too drab and lifeless to be endured.”

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“our imagination does not create within its outlines but creates the outlines themselves... the things we thought were there are not things at all.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Birth repeats nothing; it is not the outcome of the past but the recasting of a drama already under way... I am both the outcome of my past and the transformation of my past.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“The primary work of historians is to open all cultural termini, to reveal continuity where we have assumed something has ended, to remind us that no one's life, and no culture, can be known”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Storytellers invite us to return from knowledge to thinking, from a bounded way of looking to a horizontal way… [they] do not convert their listeners… they offer only vision… True storytellers do not know their own story.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“If we must obey to command, then our commanding is only obeying and not commanding at all.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“All culture has the form of gardening: the encouragement of spontaneity in others by way of one's own, the respect for source, and the refusal to convert source into resource.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“If anything appears to be a permanent feature of reality it is power — the constant impingement on us of superior forces both without and within. Everything from changes in the weather and acts of national governments to the irresistible push of instinct and the process of aging”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Time divided into periods is... not a time lived, but a time viewed... The infinite player is us does not consume time but generates it... Time does not pass... each moment is a beginning... time is a function of freedom.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Work is not an infinite player's way of passing time, but of engendering possibility. Work is not a away of arriving at a desired present and securing it against an unpredictable future, but of moving toward a future which itself has a future.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“sexuality is the only finite game in which the winner's prize is the loser [and] The most serious struggles are those for sexual property. For this wars are fought, lives are generously risked, great schemes are initiated.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“who wins empire, fortune, and fame but loses in love has lost in everything.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Sexual desires are usually not directly announced but concealed under a series of feints, gestures, styles of dress, and showy behavior. Seductions are staged, scripted, costumed... Like all finite play, it proceeds largely by deception.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“To speak, or act, or think originally is to erase the boundary of the self. It is to leave behind the territorial personality.”

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“A genius does not have a mind full of thoughts but is the thinker of thoughts, and is the center of a field of vision.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“There is a humiliating memory at the bottom of all serious conflicts... it is only by remembering what we have forgotten that we an enter into competition with sufficient intensity”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“The more we are recognized as winners, the more we know ourselves to be losers.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“unless we believe we actually are the losers the audience sees us to be, we will not have the necessary desire to win.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“by proving to the audience they were wrong, we prove to ourselves the audience was right”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“No one is ever wealthy enough, honored enough, applauded enough. On the contrary, the visibility of our victories only tightens the grip of the failures in our invisible past.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“the past is most definitely past, and therefore not forever sealed but forever open to creative reinterpretation.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Physicians treat the illness, not the person... But healing requires no specialists, only those who can come to us out of their own center, and who are prepared to be healed themselves.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“I am not free to the degree that I can overcome my infirmities, but only to the degree that I can put my infirmities into play. I am cured of my illness; I am healed with my illness.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“genuine sexual expression is at least as dangerous to society as genuine artistic expression,”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Society is where we prove to parents qua audience that we are not what we thought they thought we were.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“It is by no means an accident that the only successful attempt of the American citizenry to force the ending of a foreign war occurred simultaneously with a wide revision of sexual attitudes.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“the only true revolutionary act is not the overthrow of the father by the son—which only reinforces the existing patterns of resentment—but the restoration of genius to sexuality.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Infected then by the genius of the artist they recover their own genius, becoming beginners with nothing but possibility ahead of them.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“nature allows no master over itself [but] We take nature on as an opponent to be subdued for the sake of civilization.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“To garden is not to engage in a hobby or an amusement; it is to design a culture capable of adjusting to the widest possible range of surprise”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“The most elemental difference between the machine and the garden is that one is driven by a force which must be introduced from without, the other grown by an energy which originates from within itself... A machine must be designed, constructed, and fueled.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“All weapons are designed to affect others without affecting ourselves... meant not to win contests but to end them. Killers are not victors; they are unopposed competitors”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Myth provokes explanation but accepts none of it. Where explanation absorbs the unspeakable into the speakable, myth reintroduces the silence that makes original discourse possible.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“A story attains the status of myth when it is retold, and persistently retold, solely for its own sake... to tell it for no other reason than that it is a story.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“The Torah is not the story of the Jews; it is what makes Judaism a story.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Storytellers become metaphysicians, or ideologists, when they come to believe they know the entire story of a people.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“It is not necessary for infinite players to be Christians; indeed it is not possible for them to be Christians... Neither is it possible for them to be Buddhists, or Muslims, or atheists, or New Yorkers... All such titles can only be playful abstractions”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Who listens to his myth cannot rise above history to utter timeless truths about it.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Christians who deafened themselves to the resonance of their own myth have driven their killing machines through the garden of history”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Sexual attractiveness, or sexiness, is effective only to the degree that someone is offended by it.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“the voices of the gods proved to be ignorant and false; they have been silenced by the truth.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“All the moves of a finite player must be deceptive: feints, distractions, falsifications, misdirections, mystifications.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Inasmuch as the future is always surprising, the past is always changing... If surprise is no longer possible, all play ceases.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“societies become acutely dependent on their artists... the storytellers, the inventors, sculptors, poets, any original thinkers whatsoever... a society without culture would be too drab and lifeless to be endured.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“societies develop the belief that they can eliminate thievery by guaranteeing a certain amount of property—the impulse behind much social welfare legislation. But putting a coin into the pocket of the Artful Dodger will hardly convince him that he is no longer a legitimate contender for the coin in mine.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Only by free self-concealment can persons believe they obey the law because the law is powerful; in fact, the law is powerful for persons only because they obey it. We do not proceed through a traffic intersection because the signal changes, but when the signal changes.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Evil is not the acquisition of power, but the expression of power... Evil is never intended as evil... it originates in the desire to eliminate evil... arises in the honored belief that history can be tidied up, brought to a sensible conclusion.

”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Evil is not the inclusion of finite games in an infinite game, but the restriction of all play to one or another finite game... the termination of infinite play.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Power refers to the freedom people have within limits, strength to the freedom people have with limits... Power is concerned with what has already happened, strength with what has yet to happen.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“I am not strong because I can force others to do what I wish... but because I can allow them to do what they wish”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“we cannot be justified in owning what we do not need to use or plan to use... Consumption is an activity so different from gainful labor that it shows itself in the mode of leisure, even indolence.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“if property is to be protected less by power than by theater, then societies become acutely dependent on their artists—the storytellers, the inventors, sculptors, poets, original thinkers”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“wealth is not so much possessed as it is performed... We display the success of what we have done by not having to do anything.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Metaphysics is about the real but is abstract. Poetry is the making of the real and is concrete... Poetes cannot kill; they die. Metaphysics cannot die, it kills.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“To repeat words, even our own, is to contain them in their own sound.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“you are the unrepeatable center of your own vision”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“At its root all language has the character of metaphor, because no matter what it intends to be about it remains language, and remains absolutely unlike whatever it is about.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“By confronting us with radical unlikeness, nature becomes the source of metaphor... the joining of like to unlike such that one can never become the other.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“nature's perfect silence... a silence so complete there is no way of knowing what it is silent about—if anything.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Our attempt to control nature... is the refusal to accept nature as 'nature'...”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Our attempt to control nature... is the refusal to accept nature as 'nature'...”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“If nature is the realm of the unspeakable, history is the realm of the speakable... Since history is the drama of genius, its relentless surprise tempts us into designing boundaries for it... narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Historians sometimes speak of trends, of cycles, of currents, of forces, as though they were describing natural events. In doing so they must dehistoricize themselves... Genuine historians... who understand themselves to be historical abandon explanation altogether... Explanation can tolerate a degree of chance, but it cannot comprehend freedom at all.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“You will remain deaf to my explanations until you suspect yourself of falsehood.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Fate arises not as a limitation on our freedom, but as a manifestation of our freedom, testimony that choice is consequent.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Inasmuch as predictions are but explanations in reverse, it is possible that they will be quite as combative as explanations... our attempt to do so masks our desire for power over each other.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Human freedom is not a freedom over nature, it is the... answer to the spontaneity of nature with our own spontaneity... a freedom to embrace surprise and unpredictability... It is the freedom to change ourselves.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“vitality cannot be given, only found, the given patterns of spontaneity in nature are not only to be respected, but to be celebrated.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“In a matter of months we can cut down a rain forest that took tens of thousands of years to grow, but we are helpless in repulsing the desert that takes its place.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“The more power we exercise over natural process, the more powerless we become before it.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“To use the machine for control is to be controlled by the machine. To operate a machine one must operate like a machine... The goal of technology is therefore to eliminate itself... The more efficient the machine, the more it either limits or absorbs our uniqueness... Because we make use of machinery in the belief we can increase the range of our freedom, and instead only decrease it, we use machines against ourselves.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Genuine travel has no destination. Genuine travelers travel not to overcome distance but to discover distance... Travelers do not go somewhere, but constantly discover they are somewhere else... All travel is therefore change within the traveler”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Waste is unveiling... [it] reduces our ability to respond creatively... But waste is not the result of what we have made. It is what we have made.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“It is evil to think history is to end with a return to Zion, or with the classless society, or with the Islamization of all living infidels...”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Those Jews who claim the right to certain territories on the basis of a biblical promise, those Christians who believe the Russians are the great evil armies foreseen in biblical prophecies of the end of the world, repeat the bible but do not resonate with it.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Hindus understand their most authoritative texts, the Vedas, to be hear and the literature that derives from the Vedas to be composed.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Ideology is the amplification of myth. It is the assumption that since the beginning and end of history are known, there is nothing more to say... What ideologists are concerned to hide is the choral nature of history, the sense that it is a symphony of very different, even opposed, voices, each nonetheless making the other possible.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Julius Caesar originally sought power in Rome because he loved to play the very dangerous style of politics common to the the Republic; but he played the gave so well that he destroyed all his opponents... His word was now irresistible, and for that reason he could speak with no one, and his isolation was complete.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Abraham was promised that his descendents would be as numberless as the stars [and] All three of the West's major religions consider themselves children of Abraham, each has often understood to be itself the only and final family of the patriarch.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“The myth of the Buddha's enlightenment has the same paradox in it, the same provocation to explanation but with as little possibility of settling the matter... The perfect unspeakability has given rise to an immense flow of literature in scores of languages that shows no signs of abating.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“These experiences are not described by Freud the dispassionate scientist, they are made possible by Freud the mythic dreamer.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“If it is true that myth provokes explanation, then it is also true that explanation's ultimate design is to eliminate myth... whenever we find people deeply committed to explanation and ideology, we will find persons troubled by myths they cannot forget they have forgotten”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“In Jewish and Islamic mythology God provided us with a garden but did not, indeed could not, do the gardening for us. It was only a garden because we could respond to ti, because we could be responsible for it.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“A garden is not something we have, over which we stand as gods. A garden is... a vision of differences that leads always to a making of differences.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“The poet joyously suffers the unlike, reduces nothing, explains nothing, possesses nothing.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“if we cannot tell a story about what happened to us, nothing has happened to us.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“Whole civilizations rise from stories—and can rise from nothing else.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“No myth exists by itself; neither does it have a discoverable origin... Indeed, myth is the highest form of our listening to each other.”

from Finite and Infinite Games

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“if religion is at its core so antithetical to belief, why does it happen that belief systems gather so persistently around genuine religious expression?... What is it about religion that causes believers to reject it?... whenever we turn to religion for answers, instead of answers we are offered a deepened expression of the same question.”

from The Religious Case Against Belief (2008)

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“This open-ended, or what I have called horizontal, way of thinking then penetrates every aspect of Buddhism. It cancels the claim that anyone, even the most accomplished Buddhists, or bodhisattvas, can say what Buddhism is truly about.”

from The Religious Case Against Belief (2008)

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