“As long as the utility reigning in moral value judgments is solely the utility of the herd, there can be no morality of neighborly love.”

—F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §201 (edited excerpt).

Graf Zeppelin over the Pyramids of Giza, Egypt, 1931.⁣

The real hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. "Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does." They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted.

— Aldous Huxley

Poker players in rural Texas, USA, 1963

“When a philosopher suggests these days that he is not a skeptic, everybody is annoyed.”

—F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §208 (edited excerpt).

Come, let us pity those who are better off than we are.
Come, my friend, and remember
that the rich have butlers and no friends,
And we have friends and no butlers.

Come, let us pity the married and the unmarried.

Dawn enters with little feet
like a gilded Pavlova
And I am near my desire.
Nor has life in it aught better
Than this hour of clear coolness,
the hour of waking together.


– Ezra Pound, The Garret

To Ezra