“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.

“All these philosophies have a common failing. They imagine life can be ordered by human reason. Either the mind can devise a way of life that is secure from loss, or else it can control the emotions so that it can withstand any loss.

In fact, neither how we live nor the emotions we feel can be controlled in this way. Our lives are shaped by chance and our emotions by the body. Much of human life – and much of philosophy – is an attempt to divert ourselves from this fact.”

— John Gray

"The mechanization of modern life has already influenced man to become more passive and to adjust himself to ready-made conformity.

No longer does man think in personal values, following more his own conscience and ethical evaluations; he thinks more and more in the values brought to him by mass media.

Headlines in the morning paper give him his temporary political outlook, the radio blasts suggestions into his ears, television keeps him in continual awe and passive fixation."

--Joost Meerloo

"The world is big and I want to
have a good look at it before
it gets dark."

~ John Muir

“In the very end, civilizations perish because they listen to their politicians and not to their poets.”

― Jonas Mekas

"The machine exists to create dependency. It is essentially a mechanism of colonisation. The history of modernity is the history of the spread of the Machine mentality to all corners of the Earth...

Externally, we see the results in a chaotic climate, dissolving cultures, spiralling rates of extinction and infernal destruction of nature.

Internally, we see it in the loss of our stories, in our broken-hearted confusion about who and where we are.

Locally, we see it in the loss of our self-sufficiency and agency in the place where all human stories begin: the home."

--Paul Kingsnorth, "Against the Machine"

"We have lost almost entirely the great and intricately developed sensual awareness, or sense-awareness, and sense-knowledge, of the ancients. It was a great depth of knowledge arrived at direct, by instinct and intuition, as we say, not by reason.

Not until we can grasp a little of the working of the ancient mind can we appreciate the "magic" of the world they lived in.

Men are far more fools today, for stripping themselves of their emotional and imaginative reactions, and feeling nothing. The price we pay is boredom and deadness. Our bald processes of thought no longer are life to us."

-- D.H. Lawrence

“Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.”

― Karl Popper