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

“We believe peace can kill us. So we live in a permanent state of war. We no longer can contrive a way to run an economy without war…

We have been at war for over a century now and it has bankrupted our treasury, destroyed our land, corrupted our people, and fouled our bed.

We are creatures of fear, supplicants, and we expect to be taken care of by something and we do not expect to be loved or give love.”

~ Charles Bowden

"War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other."

--Paul Valery

“For let us not deceive ourselves: most of the minds we associate with are housed in heads that have little more to offer than overgrown potatoes, stuck on top of whining and tastelessly clad bodies and eking out a pathetic existence that does not even merit our pity.”

— Thomas Bernhard

“If men want to oppose war, it is statism that they must oppose. So long as they hold the tribal notion that the individual is sacrificial fodder for the collective, that some men have the right to rule others by force, and that some (any) alleged “good” can justify it-there can be no peace within a nation and no peace among nations.”

—Ayn Rand