Asher's Maxims

The assumption that conflict originates in misunderstanding, madness, or malice undergirds the delusion that truth cannot withstand honest disagreement.

Making stuff up is not a form of opinion.

The distance between innocent and not guilty is equal to that between innocence and forgiveness.

A final judgement is a postulate since, without an ultimate reckoning and vindication, the cosmos is absurd.

If an earthworm knows God is there, that doesn’t mean it knows you and I are.

To regard a thing as at once symbolic and really present requires a particular mode of perception, even if that mode can never be fully active in another context.

One cannot legislate immunity or guilt, only a failure to account for it.

Never ague with someone who can’t distinguish a question of fact from a matter of opinion.

Socialism is the Scientology of politics.

The tyrannies of children are simply more transparent than those of their elders.

The post-civilized will eventually ruin anything.

Kids create tyrannies – if not around appearance, then around thought.

Revenge is best served in advance.

No one can tell you who you are, but no one should try to figure out who they are without a friend.

Projects get done by relentless consistency—by making small increments non-negotiable, and seizing quantum opportunities when available.

I used to think the most valuable thing I have is my freedom; but more valuable than that is knowing who I am.

Vice is when we try to fill a need illicitly, because it’s not getting filled otherwise.

It’s inconsistent for people to want all the wrath and rage of the Old Testament but not all the rules.

I don’t approve of revenge, so when I engage in it, I’m proactive about it.

Being happy and being content are different things; I’m much happier not deciding I’m finished already.

To win a game you hate, you have to create your own rules and define winning as your own enjoyment.

If you want to actually enjoy yourself at a cocktail party, give everyone permission to let their guard down.

Social situations are a process of uncovering what another person really geeks out about.

The cliquish person is the least comfortable and most out of place of everyone in the room.

When there’s posturing, bluster, and one-upsmanship at a social gathering, just bring up art.

An art studio is made of time.

Saying “like” in every other sentence is contrary to New York values. New York is direct, not circuitous; it doesn’t pad things.

The sin in my generosity to the poor is that I’m buying an avoidance; I’m paying the fear that an anguished person will want to be my friend.

I don’t judge myself by what little I give but by the generosity I withhold.

The problem with average people of high intelligence is feeling they have more license to blend bias and conjecture with reason.

The problem with evolution is evolutionists; they share too many cultural assumptions with their opponents.

I’d rather a thoughtful creationist than a knee-jerk evolutionist.

Every criticism one can level against the average person is summed up by shitty music.

Contradictions are not a sin; they’re evidence of experimentation.

I’m not a workaholic; I merely over-deliver.

If it weren’t for intellectual dishonesty, some people would have no intellect at all.

Those who do well on standardized tests are more likely to follow directions because, in order to do well on standardized tests, you have to follow directions.

I don’t imply things; I say them.

I’ve no animosity toward any gender, race, class, or sexual orientation, but I find all caricatures offensively tedious.

The belief that everyone deserves an opinion on everything destroys the prerequisite distinction between matters of opinion and questions of fact.

For most men, God is the terror of the ego engulfed in endless wishing after an artificial world.

A man who tells his girlfriend everything IS the girlfriend.

Intrinsic to the ape, notably the human ape, is the capacity to rebel; it is an essential adaptation to a fallen cosmos.

I hack everything I wear; if you can’t find the ‘screw you’ to convention in it, it just means my work for the day is subtle.

The most important distinction between man and boy is that man has settled on the things about himself that don’t change and is committed to those with the confidence of hard-won self-knowledge.

People with no regrets have either lived too little or are too morally insensitive to know what to regret.

When the world is the object of focus, things are always as bad as they seem.

The extortion of our industry, stripping of our liberties, and despoiling of our neighbors, are each predicated on the collusive evangelism of those who say it’s not nearly as bad as it seems.

I’m not intentionally larger than myself. I think I just actually am the larger self.

Being a writer is the opposite of being passionate for words; a writer murders and eviscerates his drafts, casting phrases into oblivion regardless of their beauty.

Honing our survival skills conditions us to live in the worst possible circumstances; we need to hone the skills it takes to thrive.

The acquisition of civilization makes me both a traditional conservative and traditional liberal, rather than the left or right wing product of a post-civilized milieu.

Pages are bricks, and a manuscript is built one brick at a time.

Current events are an essential fuel for fiction.

The worst thing to do with an unfinished draft is re-read it.

When you set to writing long form, you see how fast you are galloping toward death.

If you intend to sit down to work on a novel several times a week for many months, you have to love what you’re making.

Concealing actual thought has been the sine qua non of my public persona; so, it was more than necessary that my actual one should not.

I choose relationships according to what’s innate in me, you choose on what’s innate in you and, if we’ve chosen each other, that’s the basis of our different expectations.

The basis of one’s friendships isn’t chosen; it’s determined by innate personality; for me, it’s shared goals.

Political belief is just as problematic as religious belief; the former requires things to be as they appear, despite all evidence to the contrary; the latter insists on the reverse.

It doesn’t take wit to be an atheist: the sophistication of what fundamentalists believe in and what atheists deny is more or less on par

Intellectual honesty is the most elusive quantity in the world.

Achievement doesn’t come from a balanced life, but from pushing things off balance.

I respect public intellectuals of any stripe over demagogues who merely share my convictions; if you can’t read Russell Kirk and Lewis Mumford and Hannah Arendt and Eugene Debs and respect the integrity of thought in each – if you can only pick sides, you aren’t thinking.

The imaginative cannot abide pretense, because pretending about real things leaves one unfree to really imagine.

No one else can choose your commitments, because all motivation arises from the activity of personal volition.

All commitment starts with one commitment.

There are victims of circumstance but, as long as I’m not one, I refuse to allow the sentence “I wanted x but it didn’t happen.”

Nice people are indispensable to evil; therefore all resistance comes from anti-social impulses.

The first disputation of the individual is with the prison of fate, the second with the restraints of society, and finally we challenge the imagined limitations of the self.

A lot of people are very social but anti-communitarian; I’m the opposite.

Alcohol has become as much a part of the personal brand identity as car makers and designer clothes. As long as adults are so self-conscious about drinking, kids will adopt early and to excess. It’s not a force of nature, but of culture.

A bad knife is sharp for a moment.

A good knife dulls on the wrong surface, but a great knife doesn’t care what it cuts.

Young girls look dumber when you’re not trying to date them.