"...creativity has always depended upon a fascination with the mysterious, and an appreciation for the kinds of questions that reveal more than answers can ever provide.

When creative processes become subordinated to preserving established interests; when the glorification of systems takes priority over the sanctity of individual lives, societies begin to lose their life-sustaining vibrancy and may collapse.”

― Butler Shaffer

“We should not be surprised, therefore, when we look back over the great conflicts that have torn the world apart since the Enlightenment, to discover that optimists have been far ahead of pessimists in their expressions of anger, and that the great crimes – the Holocaust and the Gulag included – should be laid, in the end, at the doors of those who were drunk on false hopes.”

- Roger Scruton

“Nations tend to see the other side's war atrocities as systemic and indicative of their culture and their own atrocities as justified or the acts of stressed combatants."

-- George Orwell

"She had wild eyes, slightly insane. She also carried an overload of compassion that was real enough and which obviously cost her something.“

— Charles Bukowski

The Bible tells us to be like God, and then on page after page it describes God as a mass murderer. This may be the single most important key to the political behavior of Western Civilization.

- Robert Anton Wilson

“Do not read, as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”

― Gustave Flaubert

“I’d rather hop freights around the country and cook my food out of tin cans over wood fires, than be rich and have a home or work.”

~ Jack Kerouac

“One can be proud of what one has done, but one should be much prouder of what one has not done. Such pride has yet to be invented…

The mission of Everyman is to fulfill the lie he incarnates, to succeed in being no more than an exhausted illusion.”

— Emil Cioran, BOTD 1911

"The true victor of the twentieth century is technology: the "undivine"-- namely, that worldly instrument "the divine goal"-- is the only transcendence, ousting the human being from his or her own self.

So cleverly has it achieved its victory that it has even endowed us with the illusion that instead of being its slave, we are instead the victor. This is the price we have paid for forgetting the cosmic character of our own being."

-- László Földényi, “Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts Into Tears”

“People wanted a loser who became a winner. Or a winner who became a loser. But a loser who stayed a loser? That was too much like themselves. They weren’t interested in themselves.”

~ Charles Bukowski

“It's easy to be a naive idealist. It's easy to be a cynical realist. It's quite another thing to have no illusions and still hold the inner flame.”

― Marie-Louise von Franz

"A tainted society has invented psychiatry to defend itself against the investigations of certain superior intellects whose faculties of divination would be troublesome."

--Antonin Artaud

“The worst men have the best jobs, the best men have the worst jobs or are unemployed or locked in madhouses.”

- Charles Bukowski

"Rejoice! The purpose of life is joy. Rejoice at the sky, the sun, the stars, the grass, the trees, animals, people. If this joy is disturbed it means that you’ve made a mistake somewhere. Find your mistake and correct it. Most often this joy is disturbed by money and ambition."

— Leo Tolstoy

“Appalachia. Appalachia ... Good God I lived there, in the northern fringe, on a little sub-marginal farm in western Pennsylvania, for the first eighteen years of my life.

Eighteen years. Good God.

Finally rescued by Hitler and the war (The war), the draft, the United States Army, God bless them all.

Otherwise, who knows, I might still be there driving a coal truck for the strippers, or teaching English to sullen delinquents with TV-shriveled minds in some grimy small-town high school, or even — God, the soul curls to think of it — traipsing the Appalachian Trail from end to end, for fun! for recreation! for re-creation!”

— Edward Abbey

We live in a political world
Under the microscope
You could travel anywhere
and hang yourself there
You've always got more
than enough rope

We live in a political world
Turning and a-thrashing about
As soon as you're awake,
you're trained to take
What looks like the
easy way out

— Bob Dylan

“All my life I’ve liked weeds.
Weeds are botanical
poets, largely unwanted.
You can’t make a dollar
off them.”

-- Jim Harrison

“We will gradually become indifferent to what goes on in the minds of other people when we acquire a knowledge of the superficial nature of their thoughts, the narrowness of their views and of the number of their errors. Whoever attaches a lot of value to the opinions of others pays them too much honor.”

― Schopenhauer

“I always thought old age would be a writer’s best chance... Now, my memory’s gone, all the old fluency’s disappeared. I don’t write a single sentence without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ So I know I was right.”

—Samuel Beckett