“Those who love life do not read. Nor do they go to the movies, actually. No matter what might be said, access to the artistic universe is more or less entirely the preserve of those who are a little fed up with the world.”

― Michel Houellebecq

“This is the perfect description of the 'automatic cultural man'—man as confined by culture, a slave to it, who imagines that he has an identity if he pays his insurance premium, that he has control of his life if he guns his sports car or works his electric toothbrush.”

~ Ernest Becker

"The noose tightens ever more around the few who are still capable of great disgust and great rebellion."

— Julius Evola

“I was trying my damnedest to lead a conventional life, for that was how I was brought up, and it was what my husband wanted of me. But one can't build little white picket fences to keep nightmares out.”

—Anne Sexton

“I tangled with
the world to
let it go
but couldn't free

it: so I made
words
to wrestle in my
stead and went

off silent to
the quick flow
of brooks, the
slow flow of stone.”

—A. R. Ammons

“The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give their lives a meaning.”

-- Emil Cioran

"I don’t believe in health foods and diets either. I have probably been eating all the wrong things all my life — and have thrived on it. I eat to enjoy my food. Whatever I do I do first for enjoyment.

I don’t believe in regular checkups. If there is something wrong with me I’d rather not know about it, because then I would only worry about it and aggravate the condition.

Nature often remedies our ills better than the doctor can. I don’t believe there is any prescription for long life. Besides, who wants to live to be a hundred?

What’s the point of it?

A short life and a merry one is far better than a long life sustained by fear, caution, and perpetual medical surveillance."

-- Henry Miller

Beauty is vanishing from our world becaue we live as though it did not matter.

-- Roger Scruton

"I can't watch TV longer than five minutes without praying for nuclear holocaust."

~ Bill Hicks

"I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair, with a love so vast and shattered it will reach you everywhere."

~ Leonard Cohen

"We are here to unlearn the teachings of the church, state, and our educational system. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."

-- Bukowski

“If anything about the present century is certain, it is that the power conferred on ‘humanity’ by new technologies will be used to commit atrocious crimes against it.

Those who ignore the destructive potential of new technologies can do so only because they ignore history. Pogroms are as old as Christendom…

There is a deeper reason why ‘humanity’ will never control technology. Technology is not something that humankind can control. It is an event that has befallen the world.”

— John Gray, Straw Dogs

"Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology.

The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom."

~ Murray Bookchin

“If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.”

― E.O. Wilson

"The aesthetics of modernism, with its denial of the past, its vandalization of the landscape and townscape, and its attempt to purge the world of history, was also a denial of community, home, and settlement."

-- Roger Scruton

“The interesting truth, untaught in most schools and unacknowledged in most written history, is that a glass of beer, a bottle of rum, a keg of hard cider, a flask of whiskey, or even a dry martini was often the silent, powerful third party to many decisions that shaped the American story from the 17th century to the present.”

~ Susan Cheever

"The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up."

~ Ernest Becker

“Mankind today is still making history without having any conscious idea of what it really wants or under what conditions it would stop being unhappy; in fact what it is doing seems to be making itself more unhappy and calling that unhappiness progress.”

—Norman O. Brown

"Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes."

—WILLIAM JAMES

“Once, I saw a bee drown in honey, and I understood.”

— Nikos Kazantzakis