“We shall be better prepared
for the future if we see how
terrible, how doomed
the present is.“

—Iris Murdoch, died on this day in 1999.

Schools train you to be ignorant with style [...] they prepare you to be a usable victim for a military industrial complex that needs manpower. As long as you're just smart enough to do a job and just dumb enough to swallow what they feed you, you're going to be alright [...] So I believe that schools mechanically and very specifically try and breed out any hint of creative thought in the kids that are coming up.

—Frank Zappa

"In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them enterprise and virtue. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."

- C. S. Lewis

“It's no good closing your eyes, you must leave them open in the dark, that is my opinion. I am not speaking of sleep, I am speaking of what I believe is called waking.”

—Samuel Beckett

“Modern Americans behave as if intelligence were some sort of hideous deformity…There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life.”

― Frank Zappa

“The centuries have grown heavy and weigh upon the moment. We are more corrupt than all the ages, more decomposed than all the empires.

Our exhaustion interprets history, our breathlessness makes us hear the death rattle of nations...the curtain of the universe is moth-eaten, and through its holes we see nothing, now, but masks and ghosts. . . "

~ Emil Cioran

“Nobody seems more obsessed by diet than our anti-materialist, otherworldly, New Age, spiritual types. But if the material world is merely illusion, an honest guru should be as content with Budweiser and bratwurst as with raw carrot juice, tofu, and seaweed slime.”

— Edward Abbey

The majority of men... are not capable of thinking, but only of believing, and... are not accessible to reason, but only to authority.

--Arthur Schopenhauer

"I came to a point where I needed solitude and just stop the machine of 'thinking' and 'enjoying' what they call 'living', I just wanted to lie in the grass and look at the clouds."

—Jack Kerouac

"Every revolution evaporates and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy."

--Franz Kafka

“People over forty can seldom be permanently convinced of anything. At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide.”

― F. Scott Fitzgerald

“To sit alone or with a few friends, half-drunk under a full moon, you just understand how lucky you are; it’s a story you can’t tell. It’s a story you almost by definition, can’t share. I’ve learned in real time to look at those things and realize: I just had a really good moment.”

–Anthony Bourdain

"At your age I looked for hardship, danger, horror, and death, that I might feel the life in me more intensely. I did not let the fear of death govern my life; and my reward was, I had my life. You are going to let the fear of poverty govern your life; and your reward will be that you will eat, but you will not live…"

-- George Bernard Shaw

“If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.”

― Peter Handke

“Indeed, freedom and the capacity for disobedience are inseparable; hence any social, political, and religious system which proclaims freedom, yet stamps out disobedience, cannot speak the truth.”

― Erich Fromm

"The world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities.

The artist who never makes art becomes cynical about those who do.

The lover who never risks loving mocks romance.

The thinker who never commits to a philosophy sneers at belief itself.

And yet, all of them suffer, because deep down they know: the life they mock is the life they were meant to live."

—Carl Jung

"Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry."

— Cassandra Clare

"Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth."

— Mary Oliver

"You haven’t always been the mug you are today, bogged down by circumstances, work, and thirst, the most disastrous of servitudes … Do you think that, just for a moment, you can revive the poetry in you?

--Louis-Ferdinand Céline

"The more money an American accumulates, the less interesting he becomes."

~ Gore Vidal

"Each of us was born with a certain amount of purity, which was destined to be perverted in contact with people."

— Emil Cioran