I gotta have my orange juice.

[T]he one thing you must know [as a leader] is that you have been exalted into a position, you see, of privilege, because of an historical chain of events, which dignifies you beyond your own merits. . . . [Y]ou know that you are not up to the occasion. You are less than the quality history bestows on you. . . .

Ceremonies warn all men that they are less than the office that has fallen upon [them]. . . . No man is self-made, because the fact that anybody who is willing to listen to you comes to you only as a gift, you see, of the historical process by which you happen to have something the other man needs, or the other man is asking for. The fact that he can speak to you is already something, you see, that is not of your own making. . . .

It is, however, true, gentlemen, that through ceremony . . . and title, and emblems, and symbols, and uniforms, and costumes, we are entering the halls of the past, as in great architecture. Architecture, you see, reflects, of course, this tremendous hall of antiquity out of which we come, and out of which we receive our meaning, our name, our status, our profession, our calling; everything we have: our property. . . .

Honor is reciprocal, gentlemen; love is reciprocal; work is reciprocal; and war is reciprocal. Life is not given you—to us—to individuals. If you analyze these four situations, . . . you will find the miracle of our existence is that it is each time a social birth. Society, the group, gives birth to us in our honor, in our love, in our work, and . . . in our struggles. (Eugen Rosenstock–Huessy, Cross of Reality, 1953)

To live means to say, “Good–bye,” and to found on this good–bye a new beginning.

You are all too sentimental, and you hang back and you think that you at one time were wonderful. You should only have seen you when you were nine. Terrible brats. I hope you are nicer now. (Eugen Rosenstock–Huessy, Cross of Reality, 1953)

Nobody is captain of his soul, gentlemen, or he has no soul. Soul is your part in God. And how can you be the captain of your soul, the one thing with which you are not yourself, but better than yourself? It’s a fantastic notion. . . .

You can be a captain of a ship. You can be captain of a thing, you see, which you direct by your mind. But if the soul is anything, it is your captain. If . . . man has a soul, then certainly nothing else is your captain, but your soul. So if the sentence then makes any sense, it would have to read, “The soul is my captain.” That makes sense. But to say, “I am the captain of my soul” means the execution of this soul. It means exactly that . . . it can’t grow. It means exactly that I—I, with my will, my purpose, my aim, my plan, my master plan, my science— that I plan my soul. . . .

That’s what we have today. It is a fantastic sentence. When you begin to think of this, you don’t wonder why people are today all crazy, and lunatics. “I am the captain of my soul” condemns a man not only to . . . loneliness and isolation, but it condemns him even to supervise his only growing point, his soul, from the point of his . . . mind. . . . Mr. Freud tells [you] how to treat your soul. . . instead of allowing your soul to tell you off. Who is master in the house? The devil of your mind or the soul?

Now, gentlemen, you have to decide this . . . So what about it? My mind can never contain me. I’m more than my mind. Tomorrow I’ll have a different mind; I’ll have a change of mind. Gentlemen, the decision is whether the mind, which is fixed, shall govern growth, or whether it shall not. (Eugen Rosenstock–Huessy, Circulation of Thought, 1949)