“Alas, we have not too little intimacy, but too much. Once there was the world of men and the world of women. Now the sexes, freely mingling, know each other too well, and both have lost their allure.”

“Freedom begins for an individual the moment he or she chooses to do the right thing without calculating the consequences.”

“Here are my conclusions after a lifetime of observation and reflection. Maleness at its hormonal extreme is an angry, ruthless density of self, motivated by a principle of ‘attack’ (cf. ‘roid rage’ produced in male bodybuilders by anabolic steroids). Femaleness at its hormonal extreme is first an acute sensitivity of response, literally thin-skinned (a hormonal effect in women) and secondly a stability, composure, and self-containment, a slowness approaching the sultry. Biologically, the male is impelled towards restless movement; his moral danger is brutishness. Biologically, the female is impelled toward waiting, expectancy; her moral danger is in stasis. Androgen agitates; estrogen tranquilizes—hence the drowsiness and ‘glow’ of pregnancy. Most of us inhabit not polar extremes but a constantly shifting great middle. However, a preponderance of gray does not disprove the existence of black and white. Sexual geography, our body image, alters our perception of the world. Man is contoured for invasion, while woman remains the hidden, a cave of archaic darkness. No legislation or grievance committee can change these eternal facts.”

“I see two principal kinds of male homosexuality. The first and most ancient is rooted in identification with the mother, perceived as a goddess. The castrated, transvestite priests of Cybele, honored in disco-like rites of orgiastic dance, survive in today’s glamorous, flamboyant drag queens. The second kind of homosexuality represents a turning away from the mother and a heroic rebellion against her omnipotence. Such homosexuality disdains femaleness and esteems perfected masculinity, which it symbolizes in the ‘hunk,’ the taughtly muscled, arrogantly architectural male form first fully imagined by the Greeks. Greek athletics were a religious spectacle of the beauty of masculinity, formalized in the kouros sculptures that began the Western high-art tradition.”

“My approach to art is multipartite, a psychomedical workup. First, palpation: I record the work’s emotional and sensory character, photographing it by faithful description. Second, genealogy: the work’s psychohistory, its relation to the artist and era. Third, X-ray: its skeleton or ritual deep structure. Fourth, analogy: its resemblance to other things, past and future, high and low.”

“Nothing so astounds me as the delusion of rationalists that human life is free of biophysical influences. It is irreligious and hubristical to imagine that we are divorced from the continuum of living things, alone among plants and animals in our imperviousness to lunar and seasonal rhythms. Science has barely begun to chart the complexities of our multiple hormone systems, which intricately interact and alter us physically and psychologically hour by hour. Hormones are our link to pagan nature. Thought itself is a net of racing electric impulses, the energy that unifies the cosmos, a music of atom’s dance.”

“Secularization is a welcome process if it allows us to analyze literature and art without moral preconception and sermonizing; but secularization is pernicious when it strips the spiritual dimension from experience.”

“Trying to remake the future, feminism cut itself off from sexual history. It discarded and suppressed the sexual myths of literature, art, and religion. Those myths show us the turbulence, the mysteries and passions of sex. In mythology we see men’s sexual anxiety, their fear of woman’s dominance. Much sexual violence is rooted in men’s sense of psychological weakness towards women.”