"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

We survive,
in the confusion
of a life reborn
beyond reason.

—Pier Paolo Pasolini

"Man is a strange, inauthentic creature who has very little contact with real Existence.

Intellectuals cut themselves off from reality by trapping themselves in a world of concepts; ordinary men are cut off from reality because they are so self-absorbed, so involved in the pettiness of everyday existence.

They live in a meaningless world because they find it so difficult to mean anything."

-- Colin Wilson

“The first panacea for a mismanaged nation is inflation of the currency; the second is war. Both bring a temporary prosperity; both bring a permanent ruin. But both are the refuge of political and economic opportunists.”

—Ernest Hemingway

"The reduction of human actions to mere tasks means that whether or not machines are becoming more like humans, humans are becoming more like machines."

—Jacques Ellul

“Don’t tell them too much about your soul. They’re waiting for just that.”

— Jack Kerouac

“… the greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled.”

~ Aldous Huxley

“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

“We're shut off from our own world. Primitive man once experienced the rich and sparkling flood of the senses fully. Children experience it for a few months-until "normal" training, conditioning, close the doors on this other world, usually for good. Somehow, the drugs opened these ancient doors. And through them modern man may at last go, and rediscover his divine birthright...”

—Tom Wolfe

“An era can be considered over
when its basic illusions have
been exhausted.”

—Arthur Miller

“Because the narcissist has so few inner resources, he looks to others to validate his sense of self. He needs to be admired for his beauty, charm, celebrity, or power—attributes that usually fade with time. Unable to achieve satisfying sublimations in the form of love and work, he finds that he has little to sustain him when youth passes him by…

In a dying culture, narcissism embodies the highest attainment of spiritual enlightenment."

—Christopher Lasch

"If money is the bond binding me to human life, binding society to me, connecting me with nature and man, is not money the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and bind all ties? Is it not, therefore, also the universal agent of separation."

-- Karl Marx, 1844 Manuscripts.