"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

"It is our self-knowledge that must be torn across before we are whole. The man I know myself to be must be destroyed before the true man I am can exist. The old man in me must die and be put away."

— D.H. Lawrence

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”

― Ernest Hemingway

“Take life too seriously, and what is it worth? If the morning wake us to no new joys, if the evening bring us not the hope of new pleasure, is it worthwhile to dress and undress?”

—Goethe

"The evil in the world is all of our own making, and it proceeds entirely from our ruthless, senseless, wasteful, destructive and suicidal neglect of our own being."

—Thomas Merton

“It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.”

—Charles Dickens

"As far as I am concerned, I resign from humanity.

I no longer want to be, nor can still be, a man. What should I do ? Work for a social and political system, make a girl miserable ? Hunt for weaknesses in philosophical systems, fight for moral and esthetic ideals ? It's all too little."

-- Emil Cioran

Humanity had a lot more grit and guts back when people drank beer and smoked cigs and didn't have access to the narcotic glow of screens to whore out their low-grade opinions daily.

"Politics, wars, causes -- for thousands of years we have ended up with a sack of shit. It's time we learned to think."

~ Bukowski