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1 " And that’s the terrible myth of organized society. That everything that’s done through the established system is legal. And that word has a powerful psychological impact. It makes people believe that there is an order to life and an order to a system. And that a person who goes through this order and is convicted has gotten all that is due him and therefore society can turn its conscious off and look to other things and other times. And that’s the terrible thing about these past trials that they have this aura of legitimacy an aura of legality. I suspect that better men than the world has known and more of them have gone to their deaths through a legal system then through all the illegalities in the history of man. Six million people in Europe during the Third Reich, legal, Sacco and Vanzetti, quite legal, the Haymarket defendants, legal, the hundreds of rape trials throughout the south where black men were condemned to death all legal, Jesus legal, Socrates legal and that is the kaleidoscopic nature of what we live through here and in other places because all tyrants learn that it is far better to do this thing through some semblance of legality than to do it without that pretext. "
― William M. Kunstler
2 " Prayer is a many fingeredand kaleidoscopic thing—it foldsand unfolds inside of you. It entersthe many rooms you cannot enter. "
― Cecilia Llompart
3 " Is China a drug? Like any drug, it depends entirely on the user’s own state of mind. If we’re making metaphors, for old China hands I’d imagine their time here draws parallels with the soaring euphoria and bleak depths of smoking opium, while China for the uninitiated is probably a bit like bath salts: the constantly convulsing nervous system, the paranoia, the god-complex, the rage. I’d liken my own China experience to a decade-long acid trip. It began with liberating my mind from the restraints of Western society. Then I departed on an odyssey that took me tens of thousands of miles across China, experiencing various metaphysical and spiritual states as my journey progressed, punctuated by periods of intense creativity due to my heightened sensory perceptions. To a background score of warped erhu and guzheng, and the looped calls of sidewalk vendors echoing into the void, the kaleidoscopic chaos of this culture surged around me like the Yangtze river – in outer space. Now I’m one with China’s cosmic consciousness. I want to reeducate the communists with love. Or maybe I’m not even here. Maybe I really did perish during my kora around Mount Kailash and none of this ever happened... "
4 " With riddles as black as coals, and answers as invisible as our past, I can only depend upon the crest of the rolling wave I now traversed; a romance worshiped only by the dreamer in us all, a psithurism of trust making its way through the years of our ascension to one day climb above the kaleidoscopic canopy of this mortal coil. "
― Dave Matthes , In This House, We Lived, and We Died
5 " The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history. I've always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresey. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. The pack of cards I carry around is forever shuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence, everything happens at once. The machines of the new technology, I understand, perform in much the same way: all knowledge is stored, to be summoned up at the flick of a key. They sound, in theory, more efficient. Some of my keys don't work; others demand pass-words, codes, random unlocking sequences. The collective past, curiously, provides these. It is public property, but it is also deeply private. We all look differently at it. My Victorians are not your Victorians. My seventeenth century is not yours. The voice of John Aubrey, of Darwin, of whoever you like, speaks in one tone to me, in another to you. "
― Penelope Lively , Moon Tiger
6 " What's more, the kaleidoscopic blend of gender-variant and gender-typical traits that characterizes gay people is exactly what enables us to make our own unique contributions to society. It's the reason that we should be valued, celebrated, and welcomed into society rather than merely being tolerated. The aim should be to foster acceptance of gay people as we are, in all our rich diversity and not to seek acceptance by shoe-horning ourselves into conformity with the straight majority. "
― Simon LeVay , Gay, Straight, and the Reason Why: The Science of Sexual Orientation
7 " Animals! the object of insatiable interest, examples of the riddle of life, created, as it were, to reveal the human being to man himself, displaying his richness and complexity in a thousand kaleidoscopic possibilities, each of them brought to some curious end, to some characteristic exuberance. "
― Bruno Schulz , The Street of Crocodiles
8 " There was a single window that tapered into a funnel, with eerie moonlight passing through it, reflecting directly off the globe like a mirror. For a moment, as I rose I saw something glimmering within. Dumbly, with feverish whispers assailing me, I realized it was the center of one of the distant galaxies, flaring after some unknown cataclysm. Its radiance was such that it burst from its prison. It met the moonlight halfway. It created kaleidoscopic colours on the walls. Then, in answer, the reliefs transformed from majestic art into something approaching divine, alive, plays from Egyptian memory, given the spark of life from space. I saw animal-headed gods move. They stepped from the walls to take their place around the altar. All stared at the globe. Each raised their arms in silent supplication. And such was their toxic ecstasy that I wished to join them, to forget my dreadful experiences and revel in something truly wondrous. "
― Tim Reed , Spider from the Well