“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

“Already, he was dreaming of a refined solitude, a comfortable desert, a motionless ark in which to seek refuge from the unending deluge of human stupidity.”

—Joris-Karl Huysmans

“The enemy of society is middle class and the enemy of life is middle age.”

—Orson Welles

“We live in a collective adrenaline rush, a world of endless promotional/commercial bullshit, that masks a deep systemic emptiness, the spiritual equivalent of asthma.”

—Morris Berman

“Nothing has a stronger influence psychologically on their children than the unlived life of the parent.”

– Carl Jung

"For the elites, the priority remains: keep people enclosed within the augmented unrealities of the internet complex, where experience is fragmented into a kaleidoscope of fleeting claims of importance, of never-ending admonitions on how to conduct our lives, manage our bodies, what to buy and who to admire or to fear."

--Jonathan Crary, Scorched Earth