Life's Pleasures Quote by Aleister Crowley

Crowley comes out swinging at the polite, padded world that insists it has “civilized” us. The phrasing is engineered to make bourgeois virtue sound less like progress and more like a chemical restraint: “suppress,” “keep,” “ignorant.” Modern morality isn’t guidance here; it’s a regime of managed perception. He frames “manners” as a partner in the crime, suggesting the social veneer isn’t harmless etiquette but an enforcement tool that trains the body to distrust itself.

The line’s real bite is its inversion of intoxication. People aren’t drunk on pleasure, sex, or sensation - they’re “fighting drunk on bogey tales.” Fear becomes the sanctioned drug, administered by institutions that profit from anxious, compliant citizens. “Bogey tales” (childish, almost comic) undercuts the grand seriousness with which moral panics are usually sold. Crowley implies the stories are flimsy; their power comes from repetition and authority, not truth.

Context matters: Crowley’s project as an occultist and critic was a sustained revolt against Christian sexual codes, Victorian prudery, and what he saw as the era’s hypocritical moral theater. Early 20th-century Britain was full of public decorum and private vice, plus rising pseudo-scientific anxieties about “degeneracy.” His rhetoric weaponizes that hypocrisy: if “modern” society is so advanced, why does it need censorship, shame, and superstition to hold itself together?

Subtext: nature is not the enemy. The enemy is a culture that turns instinct into sin and then sells salvation back at a markup.