"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

The sickness of the individual is ultimately caused by and sustained by the sickness of his civilization

—Herbert Marcuse

“Inspiration is a word used by people who aren't really doing anything.”

― Nick Cave

"The business of philosophy is to teach man to live in uncertainty...More briefly, the business of philosophy is not to reassure people, but to upset them.

-- Lev Shesto

"Reading of course can easily be nothing more than a way to kill time; but if it is calculated and intense, it is a steady extension of one's life.

If life is measured by consciousness, one whose mind is full lives longer than one whose mind is empty — just as one who is awake 18 hours a day lives longer than one who sleeps away every 12 hours.

You can add to life by adding to the quantity of conscious moments through reading."

-- Jacques Barzun

“I’m a bit retarded, like most Americans.”

-- Henry Miller

“Inflation is going to impoverish all of us before people get pissed off enough to realize that all of the last hundred years of economic progress was actually a shell game to create billionaires, while the great masses of people saw their standard of living eroded and destroyed.”

— Terence McKenna

“Creativity is a funny thing. When we’re inventing something, we’re more vulnerable than we’ll ever be. Eating and sleeping mean nothing… To be creative you’ve got to be unsociable and tight-assed. Not necessarily violent and ugly, just unfriendly and distracted. You’re self-sufficient and you stay focused.”

- Bob Dylan

“The spiritual decline of the earth has progressed so far that peoples are in danger of losing their last spiritual strength, the strength that makes it possible even to see the decline.”

— Martin Heidegger