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1 " The logical extension of synthetic nature is the irrelevance of " true" nature--the certainty that it's not even worth looking at. (62) "
2 " I was still young and the whole world of beauty was opening before me, my own officious obstructions were often swept aside and, startled into self-forgetfulness, I again tasted Joy. ... One thing, however, I learned, which has since saved me from many popular confusions of mind. I came to know by experience that it is not a disguise of sexual desire. ... I repeatedly followed that path - to the end. And at the end one found pleasure; which immediately resulted in the discovery that pleasure (whether that pleasure or any other) was not what you had been looking for. No moral question was involved; I was at this time as nearly nonmoral on that subject as a human creature can be. The frustration did not consist in finding a " lower" pleasure instead of a " higher." It was the irrelevance of the conclusion that marred it. ... You might as well offer a mutton chop to a man who is dying of thirst as offer sexual pleasure to the desire I am speaking of. ... Joy is not a substitute for sex; sex is very often a substitute for Joy. I sometimes wonder whether all pleasures are not substitutes for Joy. "
3 " As Dalla Costa put it, women's unpaidlabor in the home has been the pillar upon which the exploitation of the waged workers, " wage slavery," has been built, and the secret of ies productivity (1972:31). Thus, the power differential between women and men in capitalist societry cannot be attributed to the irrelevance of housework for capitalist accumulation - an irrelevance belied by the strict rules that have governed women's lives - nor CO the survival of timeless cultural schemes. Rather, it should be interpreted as the effect of a social system of production that does not recognize the production and reproduction of the worker as a social-economic activity. and a source of capital accumulation, but mystifies it instead as a natural resource or a personal service, willie profiting from the wageless conclition of the labor involved. "
4 " What has happened, and is happening, to our under-standing of what law is for is subtler but no less portentous: we have come to mistakenly define what law is for. These mistakes do not result from unsuccessful efforts to get the matter right, unfortunately. Instead, lawmakers have lately deemed the truth about persons, marriage, family, and religion to be irrelevant to law. What these goods re-ally are does not matter, they say. Worst of all, the irrelevance of moral truth has been carefully cultivated: not considering who is really a person, or what marriage really is, or how religion truly works, has been celebrated as a great virtue of American public life, a trend that has be-come dominant since World War II.More exactly, under the influence of contemporary liberal doctrines about moral “neutrality,” our determination of what law is for has become the creature of consensus, not of what is, of what is true.6 The desideratum is not to get what law is for right, but to fit it all comfortably within dominant cultural mores and conventional morality. Our lawmakers have resolved that avoiding controversy is the overriding end of law, especially when it comes to considering what law is for. Our lawmakers correctly see that law’s moral foundation is potentially a source of great controversy. What they fail to recognize is that getting it wrong promotes the greatest injustice of all. "
5 " I’ve always resented the word maturity, primarily, I think, because it is most often used as a club. If you do something that someone doesn’t like, you lack maturity, regardless of the actual merits of your action. Too, it seems to me that what is most often called maturity is nothing more than disengagement from life. If you meet life squarely, you are likely to make mistakes, do things you wish you hadn’t, say things you wish you could retract or phrase more felicitously, and, in short, fumble your way along. Those “mature” people whose lives are even without a single sour note or a single mistake, who never fumble, manage only at the cost of original thought and original action. They do without the successes as well as the failures. This has never appealed to me and that is another reason I could never accept the common image of maturity that was presented to me.It was only after I came back from Trial that I came to a notion of my own as to what maturity consists of. Maturity is the ability to sort the portions of truth from the accepted lies and self-deceptions that you have grown up with. It is easy now to see the irrelevance of the religious wars of the past, to see that capitalism in itself is not evil, to see that honor is most often a silly thing to kill a man for, to see that national patriotism should have meant nothing in the twenty-first century, to see that a correctly-arranged tie has very little to do with true social worth. It is harder to assess as critically the insanities of your own time, especially if you have accepted them unquestioningly for as long as you can remember, for as long as you have been alive. If you never make the attempt, whatever else you are, you are not mature. "
― Alexei Panshin , Rite of Passage