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

“All efforts to make politics aesthetic culminate in one thing, war.”

—Walter Benjamin

"All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting."

--George Orwell

“Modern man does not think about current problems; he feels them. He reacts, but he does not understand them any more than he takes responsibility for them...

One thought drives away another; old facts are chased by new ones.

Propaganda... cannot permit time for thought or reflection."

— Jacques Ellul

"The only real radicalism in our time will come as it always has: from people who insist on thinking for themselves and who reject party-mindedness."

— Christopher Hitchens

“In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful."

—Leo Tolstoy

"True, the world still stands or spins, but the meaning has gone out of it. It is more dead, this illusory, everyday world, than if it had been shattered by a million atom bombs. We live as ghosts amid a world in ruins. All is senseless repetition."

~ Henry Miller

It appears that it was all a misunderstanding.
What was only a trial run was taken seriously.
The rivers will return to their beginnings.
The wind will cease in its turning about.
Trees instead of budding will tend to their roots.
Old men will chase a ball, a glance in the mirror–
They are children again.
The dead will wake up, not comprehending.
Till everything that happened has unhappened.
What a relief! Breathe freely, you who have suffered much.

-- Czeslaw Milosz

“It’s hard to understand other people, to know what’s hidden in their hearts, and without the assistance of alcohol it might never be done at all.”

― Michel Houellebecq

“Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries.”

—Hannah Arendt

"A man who has blown all his options can’t afford the luxury of changing his ways. He has to capitalize on whatever he has left, and he can’t afford to admit — no matter how often he’s reminded of it — that every day of his life takes him farther and farther down a blind alley…"

-- Hunter S. Thompson

"The most glorious moments in your life are not the so-called days of success, but rather those days when out of dejection and despair you feel rise in you a challenge to life, and the promise of future accomplishments."

~ Gustave Flaubert

“The world shall be nothing but a howl of pain and ecstasy, and the purest among men shall only be able to avoid self-contempt by resorting to weariness. The choice of agony will be the only choice left, and this will be sooner than we expect.”

—Albert Caraco

"We Americans cannot save the world. Even Christ failed at that. We Americans have our hands full in trying to save ourselves. And we've barely tried."

-- Edward Abbey

“I am quite sure now that often, very often, in matters concerning religion and politics a man’s reasoning powers are not above the monkey’s.”

~ Mark Twain

There is no love
(Not nearly, not enough)
We live unaided,
We die abandoned.

The appeal for pity
Resonates in the void
Our bodies are crippled,
But our flesh is eager.

Gone are the promises
Of a teenage body,
We enter an old age
Where nothing awaits us

Except the vain memory
Of our last days,
A convulsion of hate
And naked despair.

—Michel Houellebecq

“All greatness of character is dependent on individuality. The man who has no other existence than that which he partakes in common with all around him, will never have any other than an existence of mediocrity.”

—James Fenimore Cooper

“The wise man knows that it is better to sit on the banks of a remote mountain stream than to be emperor of the whole world.”

—Chuang Tzu

“There are people who want to fight to bring about peace—the most deluded souls of all. There will be no peace until murder is eliminated from the heart and mind.

Murder is the apex of the broad pyramid whose base is the self. That which stands will have to fall. Everything which man has fought for will have to be relinquished before he can begin to live as man.

Up till now he has been a sick beast and even his divinity stinks. He is master of many worlds and in his own he is a slave. What rules the world is the heart, not the brain, in every realm our conquests bring only death.

We have turned our backs on the one realm wherein freedom lies.”

— Henry Miller