“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

“There is every reason to be sad at this moment: all the premonitions which I have had for ten years are coming true. This is one of the lowest moments in the history of the human race. There is no sign of hope on the horizon. The whole world is involved in slaughter and bloodshed. I repeat—I am not sad. Let the world have its bath of blood…”

— Henry Miller

“Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been brought to the greatest perfection, and it offers a greater range for enjoyment and appreciation than, possibly, any other purely sensory thing.”

—Ernest Hemingway

“The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work.”

― George Orwell

"War is a sociological safety valve that cleverly diverts popular hatred for the ruling classes into a happy occasion to mutilate or kill foreign enemies.”

~ Ernest Becker

“Each civilization represents an answer to the questions the universe proposes; but the mystery remains intact; new civilizations, with new curiosities, will come to try their luck, quite as vainly, each of them being merely a system of mistakes."

~Emil Cioran

“Listen, real poetry doesn't say anything; it just ticks off the possibilities. Opens all doors. You can walk through anyone that suits you.”

—Jim Morrison

"I feel my failure intensely
as if it were a vital organ
the gods grew from the side of my head.
You can't cover it with a hat and I no longer
can sleep on that side it's so tender.
I wasn't quite faithful enough
to carry this sort of weight up the mountain.
When I took my vows at nineteen
I had no idea that gods were so merciless.
Fear makes for good servants
and bravery is fraudulent. When I awoke
I wasn't awake enough."

~ Jim Harrison

“On and on we go, for the mental consciousness labours under the illusion that there is somewhere to go to, a goal to consciousness. Whereas of course there is no goal.

Consciousness is an end in itself. We torture ourselves getting somewhere, and when we get there it is nowhere, for there is nowhere to get to.”

— D.H. Lawrence

“I realized either I was crazy
or the world was crazy;
and I picked on the world.
And of course I was right.”

― Jack Kerouac

“This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers. ”

― William S. Burroughs

"In America you can say anything you want - as long as it doesn't have any effect."

--Paul Goodman

There's beauty and poetry everywhere, still, in this fabricated, war-torn world we've created for ourselves. If you have the eyes to see through the facade and beyond the machine, you come to realize, as Keats did, that the poetry of the earth is never dead.

“At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity: idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.”

— Aldous Huxley

"The masses can’t be large. They make mistakes but they are all mistakes. The masses can’t get out, they don’t want to, just paying off a credit card bill is one of their greatest victories. You can’t blame the masses too much, they have few alternatives. It takes a truly daring inventive soul to break free."

-- Charles Bukowski

“Every civilization carries the seeds of its own destruction, and the same cycle shows in them all. The Republic is born, flourishes, decays into plutocracy, and is captured by the shoemaker whom the mercenaries and millionaires make into a king. The people invent their oppressors, and the oppressors serve the function for which they are invented.”

—Mark Twain

“Many men go fishing all of their
lives without knowing that it
is not fish they are after."

—Henry David Thoreau

“There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives.

They shit them away. Dumb fuckers.

They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton.

They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them.

Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.”

— Charles Bukowski

You can’t imagine how stupid
the whole world has
grown nowadays.

—Nikolai Gogol