"There exists...a melancholy underlying our very outbursts of gaiety and accompanying us everywhere, without leaving us alone for a single moment. And there is nothing that can rid us of this lethal omnipresence: the self forever confronting itself."

~ Emil Cioran

“If you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also you will have betrayed our community in failing to make your contribution to the whole.”

— Rollo May

“As long as a man had the courage to reject what society told him to do, he could live life on his own terms.
To what end? To be free.
But free to what end?
To read books, to write books, to think."

—Paul Auster

“To read great books does not mean one becomes ‘bookish’; it means that something of the terrible insight of Dostoyevsky, of the richly-charged imagination of Shakespeare, of the luminous wisdom of Goethe, actually passes into the personality of the reader; so that in contact with the chaos of ordinary life certain free and flowing outlines emerge, like the forms of some classic picture, endowing both people and things with a grandeur beyond what is visible to the superficial glance.”

—John Cowper Powys

“The man of knowledge in our time is bowed down under a burden he never imagined he would ever have: the overproduction of truth that cannot be consumed.”

― Ernest Becker

Don't let yourself become cynical. Cynicism is a cheap emotion, a craven substitute for thought and action. Cynicism corrodes the will, dulls the conscience, blunts your sense of right and wrong... Stay alert to fine distinctions: become a pessimist like me.'

— Edward Abbey

“We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self. A secretion of sensory experience and feeling. Programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when, in fact, nobody is anybody.”

—Rust Cohle, True Detective

"In a nation of sex-obsessed saints and greedy selfish liberals, in a nation approaching a racial chasm grounded on growing poverty and a rampant lack of compassion, there seems to be a deep need to determine if someone else's thoughts are proper rather than well stated, or true, or funny, or felt.

Edward Abbey was not cut out for such a world.

He will never be what you approve of, though he will be what you secretly think but are afraid to say or admit to. And he will most often act out the one thing you dream of but cannot do: live your life regardless of the opinions of others."

-- Charles Bowden, The Red Caddy, Into the Unknown with Edward Abbey

"I have stolen more quotes and thoughts and purely elegant little starbursts of writing from the Book of Revelation than from anything else in the English Language—and it is not because I am a biblical scholar, or because of any religious faith, but because I love the wild power of the language and the purity of the madness that governs it and makes it music."

~ Hunter S. Thompson

“Men simply copied the realities of their hearts when they built prisons.”

— Richard Wright

“Today's policies and political activity treat people like pawns. More than ever before, attempts will be made to use people like cogs in a wheel. People will be handled like puppets on a string, and everyone will think that this reflects the greatest progress imaginable.”

—Rudolf Steiner

"I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives..."

-- W.H. Auden

“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac…
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.”

— George Orwell

"Where do you turn in the midst of a world bent on self-annihilation, a world where lives are snuffed out at random? Whom do you reach for to keep from disintegrating under the pressure, the carnage, and the loneliness? Who speaks to you in such trance-like misery?"

--Chris Hedge

“The whole life of the individual is nothing but the process of giving birth to himself; indeed, we should be fully born when we die — although it is the tragic fate of most individuals to die before they are born.”

— Erich Fromm

“The lonelier the place, the better it pleased me: its silence, its aura, its peculiar conformation, its enclosedness.”

— John Fowles

“Make no mistake about it: We are At War now ― with somebody ― and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives...

“This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed ― for anyone”

— Hunter S. Thompson

“War is no longer made by simply analyzed economic forces if it ever was. War is made or planned now by individual men, demagogues and dictators who play on the patriotism of their people to mislead them into a belief in the great fallacy of war when all their vaunted reforms have failed to satisfy the people they misrule.”

—Hemingway

The next war ...
may well bury Western
civilization forever.

—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“If anything about the present century is certain, it is that the power conferred on ‘humanity’ by new technologies will be used to commit atrocious crimes against it.

Those who ignore the destructive potential of new technologies can do so only because they ignore history. Pogroms are as old as Christendom…

There is a deeper reason why ‘humanity’ will never control technology. Technology is not something that humankind can control. It is an event that has befallen the world.”

— John Gray, Straw Dogs

Abstainer, n. A weak man who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.

Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.

—Ambrose Bierce