But the rich man... is always sold to the institution which makes him rich. Absolutely speaking, the more money, the less virtue... It puts to rest many questions which he would otherwise be taxed to answer; while the only new question which it puts is the hard but superfluous one, how to spend it. - Henry David Thoreau, On Civil Disobedience
As if the rope that is meant to tighten around our neck could ever be used to raise us from the bottom of the pit...Until when do we intend to go on pleading for alms while elbowing each other in the beggars' line?...When will we finally convince ourselves that selling one's dignity does not pay?...What power would the noose have if it could not find a neck? - Eduardo Galeano
The best defense is a good offense - Mel, the cook on Alice
That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write Fuck you right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say Holden Caulfield on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say Fuck you. I'm positive, in fact. - J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
This is how the hero of our time must be. He will be characterized by decisive inaction, or else by futile activity - Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time
I felt somehow happy to be so high above the world - a childish feeling, I grant, but we can't help becoming children as we leave social conventions behind and come nearer to nature. All life's experience is shed from us, and the soul becomes anew what it once was and will surely be again. - Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time
Ambition is nothing more than a lust for power...What is happiness but gratified pride?...Passions are merely ideas in their initial stages. They are the property of youth, and anyone who expects to feel their thrill throughout his life is a fool. - Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time
I often look back and wonder why I didn't choose to follow the path that fate had opened to me, where there were quiet joys and peace of mind in store for me. I could have never settled for it, though. I'm like a sailor, born and bred on the deck of a privateer. Storm and battle are part of his life, and if he's cast ashore he pines in boredom, indifferent to the pleasures of shady woods and peaceful sunshine. All day long, he walks the beach, listening to the steady murmur of the waves and gazing for the sight of a ship in the distant haze. He looks longingly at the pale strip between the ocean blue and the grey clouds, in hopes of seeing a sail, first like a seagull's wing, that then gradually stands out against the spray and runs in steadily towards the empty harbor. -Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time
The reign of such a one-dimensional reality does not mean that materialism rules...On the contrary there is a great deal of Why not try God?, Zen, existentialism, and beat ways of life. But such modes of protest and transcendence are no longer contradictory to the status quo and no longer negative. They are rather the ceremonial part of practical behaviorism, its harmless negation. and are quickly digested by the status quo as part of its healthy diet. - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
The people recognize themselves in their commodities, they find their soul in their automobile, hi-fi set, split-level home, kitchen equipment. The very mechanism that ties the individual to his society has changed, and social control is anchored in the new needs it has produced. - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
Under the rule of an oppressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. The range of choices open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but *what* can be chosen and what *is* chosen by the individual. Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves. Free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social control over a life of toil and fear - that is, if they sustain alienation. And the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls. Insistence on the depth and efficacy of these controls is open to the objection that we greatly overestimate the indoctrinating power of the media, and that by themselves the people would feel and satisfy the needs which are now imposed upon them. The preconditioning does not start with the mass media and with its centralization of control; the decisive is in the flattening out of contrast or conflict between the given and the possible. Here the so-called equalization of class distinctions reveals its ideological function...If the negro owns a cadillac, if they all read the same newspaper, this assimilation indicates not the disappearance of classes, but the extent to which the needs and satisfactions that serve the preservation of the establishment are shared by the underlying population. - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
The transplantation of social into individual needs is so effective that the difference between them seems to be purely theoretical. Can one really distinguish between the mass media as instruments of information and entertainment, and as agents of manipulation and indoctrination? Between automobiles as nuisance and convenience? Between the horrors and the comforts of functional architecture? - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
In the face of the totalitarian features of this society, the traditional notion of the neutrality of technology can no longer be maintained. Technology as such can not be isolated from its uses; the technological society is a system of domination which operates already in the concept and construction of techniques. - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
We may distinguish between true and false needs. False are those superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. Their satisfaction might be most satisfying to the individual, but this happiness is not to be maintained and protected if it serves to arrest the development of the ability to recognize the disease of the whole and grasp the chances of curing the disease. The result then is euphoria in unhappiness. Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and to hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of needs...The prevalence of repressive needs is an accomplished fact, accepted in ignorance and defeat, but must be undone in the interest of the happy individual as well as all those whose misery is the price of his satisfaction - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
To be sure, labor must precede reduction of labor, and industrialization must precede the development of humans needs and satisfactions. But as all freedom depends on the conquest of alien neccessity, the realization of freedom depends on the techniques of this conquest. The highest productivity of labor can be used for the perpetuation of labor, and the most efficient industrialization can serve the restriction and manipulation of needs. When this point is reached, domination - under the guise of affluence and liberty - extends to all spheres of private and public existence, integrates all authentic opposition, absorbs all alternatives. Technological rationality reveals its character as it becomes the great vehicle of better domination, creating a truly totalitarian universe in which society and nature, mind and body, are kept in a permanent state of mobilization for the defense of this universe. - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
Now it is precisely the new consciousness, the space for transcending the historical practice, which is being barred by a society in which objects as well as subjects constitute instrumentalities in a whole that has its raison d'etre in the accomplishments of its overpowering productivity. It's supreme promise is an ever more comfortable life for an ever growing number of people, who, in a strict sense, cannot imagine a qualitatively different universe of discourse and action, for the capacity to contain and manipulate subversive imagination and effort is an integral part of the given society. Those whose life is the hell of the Affluent Society are kept in line by a brutality which is medieval in practice. For the other, less underprivileged people, society takes care of the need for liberation by satisfying the needs that make servitude palatable and perhaps even unnoticeable, and it accomplishes this fact in the process of production itself. - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
Standardization and the routine assimilate productive and non-productive jobs...the organized worker...lives this denial [of the oppressive society] less conspicuously and, like other human objects of the social division of labor, he is being incorporated into the technological community of the administered population. - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
The slaves of developed indutrial civilization are sublimated slaves, but they are slaves, for slavery is neither by obedience nor by hardness of labor but by the status of being a mere instrument, and the reduction of man to the state of a thing. This is a pure form of servitude: to exist as an instrument, as a thing. And this mode of existence is not abrogated if this thing is animated and chooses its material and intellectual food, if it does not feel its being-a-thing, if it is a pretty, clean, mobile thing. Conversely, as reification tends to become totalitarian by virtue of its technological form, the organizers and administrators themselves become increasingly dependent on the machinery which they organize and administer. And this mutual dependence is no longer the diabolical relationship between Master and Servant, but a vicious circle which encloses both the Master and the Servant. Do the technicians rule, or is their rule that of the others, who rely on the technicians as their planners and executers? - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
Late industrial society has increased rather than reduced the need for parasitical and alienated functions. Advertising, public relations, indoctrination, planned obsolescences are no longer unproductive overhead costs but rather elements of basic production costs. In order to be effective, such production of socially neccessary waste requires continuous rationalization - the relentless utilization of advanced techniques and science...As long as this constellation prevails, it reduces the use-value of freedom: there is no reason to insist on self-determination if the administered life is the comfortable or even the good one. This is the rational and material grounds for the unification of opposites, for one-dimesional political behavior...Rejection of the State on behalf of the abstract idea of freedom is hardly convincing. The loss of the economic and political liberties which were the real achievements of the preceding two centuries may seem slight damage in a state capable of making the administered life secure and comfortable. If the individuals are satisfied to the point of happiness with the goods and services handed down to them by the administration, why should they insist on different institutions for a different production of different goods and services? And if the individuals are preconditioned so that the satisfying goods include thoughts, feelings, aspirations, why should they wish to think, feel, and imagine for themselves? True, the material and mental commodities offered may be bad, wasteful, rubbish - but Geist and knowledge are no telling arguments against satisfaction of needs. - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
The question must be raised whether this form of pluralism does not accelerate the destruction of pluralism...[opposing] forces cancel each other out in a higher unification in the common interest of the established position, to combat and contain qualitative change...The reality of pluralism becomes ideological, deceptive. It seems to extend rather than reduce manipulation and coordination...Once again: the insanity of the whole absorbs the particular insanities and turns the crimes against humanity into a rational enterprise...Even the most insane calculations are rational: the annihilation of 5 million is preferable to 10 million, etc. It is hopeless to argue that a civilization which justifies its defense by such a calculus proclaims its own end. - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
Is the production of 'affluence' promoting or delaying the satisfaction of still unfulfilled vital needs? If the first alternative is true, the contemporary form of pluralism would strengthen the potential for the containment of qualitative change, and thus prevent rather than impel the 'catastrophe' of self-determination. Democracy would appear to be the most efficient form of domination. - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
The greatness of a free literature and art, the fulfillment of the personality are daily adminstered and sold. The fact that they contradict the society which sells them does not count. If mass communications blend harmoniously and often unnoticeably art, politics, religion, and philosophy with commercials, they bring these realms of culture to their common denominator - the commodity form...As the great words of freedom and fulfilment are pronounced by campaigning leaders and politicians, on the screens, the radios, and the stages, they turn into meaningless sounds, which obtain meaning only in the context of propaganda, business, discipline, and relaxation. - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
In the realm of culture, the new totalitarianism manifests itself precisely in a harmonizing pluralism, where the most contradictory works and truths peacefully coexists in indifference...In contrast, desublimated sexuality is rampant in O'Neill's alcoholics, Faulkner's savages, in Hollywood orgies, and the adventures of suburban housewives. This is infinitely more realistic, daring, uninhibited. It is part and parcel of the society in which it happens, but nowhere its negation. What happens is surely wild and obscene, virile and tasty, quite immoral - and, precisely because of that, perfectly harmless. Sexuality turns into a vehicle for the bestsellers of oppression...This society turns everything it touches into a potential source of progress and exploitation, of drudgery and satisfaction, of freedom and oppression. Sexuality is no different. - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
[It is] a universe of discourse in which the categories of freedom have become interchangeable with their opposites...old historical concepts are invalidated by up-to-date operational redefinitions. The redefinitions are falsifications which, imposed by the powers that be and the powers of fact, serve to transform falsehood into truth. - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
Remembrance of the past may give rise to dangerous insights, and the established society seems to be apprehensive of the subversive contents of memory. - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
The functional language is a radically anti-historical language...This does not mean that history, private or general, disappears from the universe of discourse. The past is evoked often enough: be it as the Founding Fathers, or as Marx-Engels-Lenin, or as the humble origins of a presidential candidate. However, these too are ritualized invocations, which do not allow development of the content recalled: frequently, the mere invocation serves to block such development, which would show its historical impropriety. - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
Recognition and relation to the past as present counteracts the functionalization of thought by and in the established reality. It militates against the closing of the universe of discourse and behavior; it renders possible the development of concepts which destablilize and transcend the closed universe by comprehending it as a historical universe. Confronted with the given society as object of its reflection, critical thought becomes historical consciousness; as such, it is essentially judgement...The mediation of the past with the present discovers the factors which made the facts, which determined the way of life, which established the masters and servants; it projects the limits and alternatives. - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
This language controls by reducing the linguisic forms and symbols of reflections, abstraction, development, contradiction; by substitution of images for concepts...This kind of discourse is not terroristic. It seems unwarranted to assume that recipients believe, or are made to believe, what they are told...Rather, people don't believe it, or don't care, and yet act accordingly. One does not 'believe' the statement of an operational concept, but it justifies itself in action - in getting the job done, in selling and buying. - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
Nothing remains of ideology but the recognition of that which is - model of a behavior which submits to the overwhelming power of the established state of affairs. - Ernst Bloch
One might call autocratic a philosohy of technics which takes the technical whole as a place where machines are used to obtain power. The machine is only a means: the end is the conquest of nature, the domestication of natural forces through a primary enslavement. The machine is a slave which serves to make other slaves. Such a domineering drive may go together with the quest for human freedom. But it is difficult to liberate oneself by transferring slavery to other beings, men, animals, or machines. To rule over a population of machines subjecting the whole world means still to rule, and all rule implies acceptance of schemata of subjection. - Gilbert Simondon
The scientific approach to the vexing problem of mutual annihilation is mystifying to the extent to which it promotes (and even demands) behavior which accepts the insanity. It thus counteracts a truly rational behavior - namely, the refusal to go along, and the effort to do away with the conditions which produce the insanity. - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
Here is the original link (within the universe of domination of scarcity) between science, art, and philosophy. It is the consciousness of the discrepancy between the real and the possible, between the apparent and the authentic truth, and the effort to comprehend and master this discrepancy. - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
To the denial of freedom, even of the possiblity of freedom, corresponds the granting of liberties where they strengthen the repression. The degree to which the population is allowed to break the peace wherever there still is peace and silence, to be ugly and uglify things..is frightening...In the over-developed countries, an ever larger part of the population becomes one huge captive audience - captured not by a totalitarian regime, but by the liberties of the citizens whose media of amusement and elevation compel the Other to partake of their sights, sounds, and smells. Can a society which is incapable of protecting individual privacy within one's own four walls rightfully claim that it respects the individual and that it is a free society?...While the people can support the continuous creation of nuclear weapons, radioactive fallout, of questionable foodstuffs, they cannot tolerate being deprived of the entertainment and education which makes them capable of reproducing the arrangements for their defense and/or destruction. The non-functioning of television and the allied media might thus begin to achieve what the inherent contradictions of capitalism did not - the disintegration of the system. The creation of repressive needs has long since become a part of socially neccessary labor - neccessary in the sense that without it, the established mode of production could not be sustained. - Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man
He was like a dog. No one had yet drawn upon his face the lines that make a human being. - Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter
It seemed to Scobie that life was immeasureably long. Couldn't the test of a man have been carried out in fewer years? - Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter
For were he merely to hear the voice and it to have no more effect upon him than speech in Bantu or Erse then might it not as well cease? Unless its object be by mere sound to plague one in need of silence. - Samuel Beckett, Company
You do not count your steps anymore for the simple reason they number each day the same. Average day in day out the same. The way always being the same. You do not hear your footfalls anymore. Unhearing unseeing you go your way. Day after day the same way. As if there were no other anymore. For you there is no other anymore. - Samuel Beckett
Happiness is never really so welcome as changelessness. - Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter
How often, he thought, the lack of faith helps one see more clearly than faith. - Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter
It isn't beauty we love, it's failure - the failure to stay young forever, the failure of nerve, the failure of the body. Beauty is like success: we can't love it for long. - Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter
Everything everyone does is so - I don't know - not wrong, or even mean, or even stupid neccessarily. But just so tiny and meaningless - sad-making. And the worst part is, if you go bohemian or something crazy like that, you're conforming just as much as everyone else, only in a different way. - J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey
It is a writer's duty to imagine other people and sympathize with their situation. - Ken Kalfus, Perspelkino
Ah, but my computations, People say, Reduc'd the Year to better reckoning? Nay! 'Twas only striking from the calendar unborn Tomorrow, and dead Yesterday. - Rumi
What? Out of senseless Nothing to provoke A conscious Something to resent the Yoke, of unpermitted Pleasure under pain of Everlasting Penalties if broke! - Rumi
Everyday experience falls like snow, immaterial, crystalline, and microscopic, it enshrouds all the features of the landscape...Watching time snow down, ideas snow down, watching the silence of some aurora borealis light up, glowing the veritigo of enshrouding and whiteness. - Jean Beaudrillard, Cool Memories
Losing one's identity papers: your whole being refuses to believe in this, just as it refuses to believe in the death of a loved one. You search for hours before reconciling yourself to the idea, and even then you keep alive a hope of seeing them reappear miraculously, like a woman who has left you. The fact is they have become your shadow in the sunny world of capital. You are an orphan...There is a logic in this: the loss of your papers is never innocent, it is a sign of ruination. - Jean Beaudrillard, Cool Memories
Never resist a sentence you like, in which language takes its own pleasure and in which, after abusing it for so long, you are stupified by its innocence. - Jean Beaudrillard, Cool Memories
Holidays are in no sense an alternative to the congestions and bustle of the cities and work. Quite the contrary. People look to escape into an intensification of the conditions of ordinary life, into a deliberate aggravation of those conditions: further from nature, nearer to artiface, to abstraction, to total pollution, to well above average levels of stress, pressure, concentration, and monotony - this is the ideal of popular entertainment. No one is interested in overcoming alienation; the point is to plunge into it to the point of ecstasy. That is what holidays are for. And getting a tan is supernatural proof of this acceptance of the conditions of normal life. - Jean Beaudrillard, Cool Memories
You can only distinguish the sublime from the pleasant by the fact that the memory of it grips your heart. - Jean Beaudrillard, Cool Memories
What is supremely obscene is pity, indecent condescension. - Jean Beaudrillard, Cool Memories
Where does the stereo effect begin, the point where hi-fi becomes so uselessly that the music is lost in the obessession for its fidelity? Where is the point where the social becomes so uselessly sophisticated that it itself goes into stereo and loses itself in the obsession for security. - Jean Beaudrillard, Cool Memories
The indifference of trees to the historical moment. The indifference of dreams to interpretation. The indifference of the body to the revolution. - Jean Beaudrillard, Cool Memories
We used to leave them in peace. If they were called in, it was to get them to come and die in the towns, in the factories, or in a war. Why have we suddenly developed a need for them, when they have no need of anything? What do we want to serve as witnesses of? Because we will force them to if we have to: the new terror has arrived, not of 1984, but of the 21st century. The new negritude has arrived, the new servitude. There is already a roll-call of the martyrs of information...the new hostages, the new guinea pigs. Crucified on the altar of information, pilloried at their consoles. Buried alive under information. All this to make them admit the inexpressible service that is being done to them, to extract from them a confession of their sociality, of their 'normal' condition as associated anthropoids. - Jean Beaudrillard, Cool Memories
As for freedom, it will soon cease to exist in any shape or form. Living will depend upon an absolute obedience to a strict set of arrangements, which it will be no longer possible to transgress. The air traveler is not free. In the future, life's passengers will be even less so: they will travel through their lives fastened to their (corporate) seats. - Jean Beaudrillard, Cool Memories
Contact with the men who wield power and authority still leaves an intangible sense of revulsion. It's very like being in close proximity to fecal matter, the fecal embodiment of something unmentionable, and you wonder what it is made of and where it acquired its historically sanctioned character. Why this feeling of loathing for the politician? Is it the impression of being artificially subjected to a will that is even more stupid than your own, and which, by its very function, has to be crude? How can the decision making process be performed without simplifying the mechanisms of thought? - Jean Beaudrillard, Cool Memories
A society which allows an abominable event to burgeon from its dungheap and grow on its surface is like a man who lets a fly crawl unheeded across his face, or saliva dribble unstemmed from his mouth - either epileptic or dead. - Jean Beaudrillard, Cool Memories
These multifarious bodies with their lazy gait. The opposite of the torment of work - the ecstasy of work...There is never any night, any winter, any sun, any summer - it is the eternal season of work. - Jean Beaudrillard, Cool Memories
why talk of beauty what could be more beautiful than these heroic happy dead who rushed like lions to the roaring slaughter they did not stop to think they died instead then shall the voice of liberty be mute? - e e cummings
my specialty is living said a man (who could not earn his bread because he wouldn't sell his head) - e e cummings
a salesman is an it that stinks to please but whether to please itself or someone else makes no more difference than if it sells hate condoms education strawberries democra(caveat emptor)cy superflous hair or Think We've Met Subhuman rights Before. - e e cummings
a politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat but a man. - e e cummings
when God decided to invent everything he took one big breath as big as a circustent and everything began when man decided to destroy himself he picked the was of shall and finding only why smashed it into because - e e cummings
pity this busy monster, man unkind, not. progress is a comfortable disease: your victim (death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness - electrons deify one razorblade into a mountainrange; lenses extend unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish returns on its unself. a world of made is not a world of born - pity poor flesh and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this fine specimen of hypermagical ultraomnipotence. We doctors know a hopeless case if - listen: there's a hell of a good universe next door; let's go. - e e cummings
Humanity I love you, because you would rather black the boots of success than enquire whose soul dangles from its watch-chain which would be embarassing for both parties and because you unflinchingly applaud all songs containing the words country home and mother when sung at the old howard - e e cummings
In Kundera's vision the destruction of memory is both function and aim of totalitarianism...But memory is being destroyed in democratic societies as well. Our sense of impotence seems to grow in direct proportion to the spread of our knowledge. And so, in self-protection, does our sense of indifference, or at least our ability to recall, to identify. - William Shawcross, The Quality of Mercy
Americans do not enjoy the process of thinking. When they do concentrate, it is to escape all thought. - J. P. Sartre, Troubled Sleep
He knew it all backwards, he could foresee precisely what would happen, he could reckon minute by minute the years of misery that lay ahead, the daily toll of the long long years, heavy with boredom and hopelessness, and at the end of them, the squalid inevitable end: it was all there. - J. P. Sartre, Troubled Sleep
Intimidation and terrorism have become the chief instruments of government. Do they imagine that they will thus instill affection for themselves? Affection and loyalty are of the heart. They cannot be extorted at the point of a bayonet. - Motila Nehru (1922)
We inhale the world and exhale meaning. - Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh
The wind that uproots trees makes the grasses shine. The lordly wind loves the weakness and the lowness of grasses. Never brag of being strong. - Rumi
The night is almost over. You were young once, and content. Now you talk about money all the time. - Rumi
Someone who goes with half a loaf of bread to a small place that fits like a nest around him, someone who wants no more, someone who's not himself longed for by anyone else, he is a letter to everyone. You open it, it says, Live. - Rumi
I used to think up adventures for myself, inventing a life so that at least I could live. - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
Oh, if only I did nothing as a result of laziness. Lord, how I would respect myself then. I'd respect myself precisely because at least I'd be capable of being lazy. At least I would possess one more or less positive trait of which I could be certain. Question: Who am I? Answer: A sluggard!...A sluggard! Why that's a calling and a vocation, a whole career! Don't joke, it's true. - Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground
Ch'I K'ang-Tzu was plagued by burglars. He asked Master K'ung what he should do. Master K'ung replied, saying, If only you were free from desire, they would not steal, even if you paid them to. - Confucius, Analects
The Master said, Best of all to withdraw from one's generation; next to withdraw to another land; next best to leave because of a look; next best to leave because of a word. - Confucius, Analects
The Master said, He who seeks only coarse food to eat, water to drink, and bent arm for pillow, will without looking for it find happiness to boot. - Confucius, Analects
The demands that a gentleman makes are upon himself; the demands a small man makes are on others. - Confucius, Analects
Life itself seemed a meaningless wandering. There was surely no connection between sunrise and sunset, between today and tomorrow. - Ngugi, A Grain of Wheat
The snow has covered all the small details, but the tracks which have been walked on after the snow look like veins. An inconsequential snow scene like this creates images in my mind, induces in me a desire to enter it. By entering the snow scene I would become the back of someone. This back of course would not have any meaning if I were not at this window looking at it. Gloomy sky, snow covered ground, brighter than the sky, no mynahs and sparrows. Snow absorbing thought and meaning. - Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain
They have their own closed world which I will never be able to enter. They have their own methods of survival and self-protection, and roam beyond the fringes of what is known as society. However I can only return to pass my existence in what people are accustomed to calling a normal life, there is no alternative for me, and probably this is my tragedy. - Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain
I'm fighting to survive, no I'm not fighting for anything, I'm just protecting myself. I don't have the courage of that woman and I have not reached a state of utter despair, I am still seduced by the human world, I still haven't lived enough. - Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain
I don't know where I am at this moment, I don't know where this realm of heaven comes from, I look all around. I don't know that I don't understand anything, and still think I know everything. Things just happen behind me and there is always a mysterious eye, so it is best for me to pretend I understand even if I don't. While pretending to understand, I still don't understand. The fact of the matter is that I comprehend nothing, that I understand nothing. This is how it is. - Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain
In the end, in this vast ocean of humanity, you are at most only a spoonful of green seawater, insignificant and fragile. You should know there is little you can seek in this world, that there is no need for you to be so greedy, in the end all you can achieve are memories, hazy, intangible, dreamlike memories, impossible to articulate. When you try to relate them, there are only sentences, the dregs left from the filter of linguistic structures. - Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain
Unburdened by the neccessity of devoting most of their lives to the production, distribution, sale, and servicing of labor-saving machinery, lacking proper recreational facilities, these primitive savages were free to do that which comes as naturally to man as making love - making graven images. - Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
Whether in the favelas of Rio, the barrios of Caracas, the ghettos of Newark, the mining towns of West Virginia, or the tarpaper villages of Flagstaff and Gallup, it's the same the world over - one big wretched family, sequestered in sullen desperation, pawed over by social workers, kicked around by cops, and prayed over by missionaries. - Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
And whether good or bad in strictly pecuniary terms, industrial tourism exacts a spiritual price from those dependent on it for their livelihood. The natives must learn to accustom themselves to the spectacle of hordes of wealthy, outlandishly dressed strangers invading their land and their homes. They must learn the automatic smile. They must expect to be gaped at and photographed. They must learn to be quaint, picturesque, and photogenic. They must learn that courtesy and hospitality are not simply the customs of any society, but are rather a special kind of commodity which can be peddled for money. - Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire
There are times when creation can only be achieved through destruction. The urge to destroy, then, is a creative one. - Mikhail Bakunin
The realization of impermanence is paradoxically the only thing we can hold on to, perhaps our only lasting possession. - Sogyal Rinpoche
The need for money is therefore the real need created by the modern economy, and the only need which it creates...This is shown subjectively, partly in the fact that the expansion of production and needs becomes an ingenious and always calculating subservience to inhuman, depraved, unnatural, and imaginary appetites. - Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
Only in being productively active can man make sense of his life, and while he enjoys life, he is not greedily holding on to it. He has given up greed for having, and is fulfilled by being; he is filled because he is empty; he is much because he has little. - Erich Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man
The less you are...the more you have, the greater is your alienated life, and the greater is the saving of your alienated being. Everything which the economist takes from you in the way of life and humanity, he restores to you in the form of money and wealth. And everything which you are unable to do, your money can do for you; it can eat, drink, go to the ball and to the theater. It can acquire art, learning, historical treasures, political power, and it can travel. It can appropriate all these things for you, it can purchase everything; it is the true opulence. But although it can do all this, it desires only to create itself, and to buy itself, for everything else is subservient to it...Thus all passions and activities must be submerged in avarice. - Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
Labor is alienated because work has ceased to be a part of the worker's nature and consequently, he does not fulfil himself in his work but denies himself, has a feeling of misery rather than well-being, does not develop freely his mental and physical energies but is physically exhausted and mentally debased. The worker therefore feels himself at home only during his leisure time, where as at work he feels homeless. - Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
We are concerned here with the liberation of man from a kind of work which destroys his individuality, which transforms him into a thing, and which makes him a slave to things. - Erich Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man
Within the capitalist system all methods for raising the social productiveness of work are brought about at the cost of the individual laborer; all means for the development of production transform themselves into means of domination over and exploitation of the producers; they mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy every remnant of charm in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange from him the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in the same proportion as science is incorporated in it as an independent power. - Karl Marx, Capital
Private property is therefore the product, the neccessary result, of alienated labor, of the eternal relation of the worker to nature and to himself. Private property is therefore derived from the analysis of the concept of alienated labor; that is, alienated man, alienated labor, alienated life, and estranged man. - Karl Marx, Capital
No eunuch flatters his tyrant more shamelessly or seeks by more infamous means to stimulate his jaded appetite in order to gain some favor, than does the eunuch of industry, the entrepreneur, in order to acquire a few silver coins or to charm the gold from the purse of his neighbor...The man who has thus become subject to his alienated needs is a mentally and physically dehumanized being...the self-acting and self-conscious commodity. - Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts
As far as consumption is concerned, there is no difference betweeen manual workers and the members of the bureaucracy, the technocrats. They all crave for things, new things, to have and to use. They are the passive recipients, the consumers, chained and weakened by the very things which satisfy their synthetic needs. They are not related to the world productively, grasping it in its full reality, and in the process becoming one with it; they worship things, the machines which produce the things - and in this alienated world they feel as strangers and quite alone. - Erich Fromm, Marx's Concept of Man
Our present economic, social, and international arrangements are based, in large measure, on organized lovelessness. - Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy
But as a matter of fact...to tell you what I really think, as long as you have private property, and as long as cash money is the measure of all things, it is really not possible for a nation to be governed justly or happily. For justice cannot exist where all the best things in life are held by the worst citizens; nor can anyone be happy where property is limited to a few, since those few are always uneasy and the many are utterly wretched...However abundant goods may be, when every man tries to get as much as he can for his own exclusive use, a handful of men end up sharing the whole thing, and the rest are left in poverty. The result generally is two sorts of people whose fortunes ought to be interchanged: the rich are rapacious, wicked, and useless, while the poor are unassuming, modest men who work hard, more for the benefit of the public than of themselves. - Sir Thomas More, Utopia
Thus I am wholly convinced that unless private property is entirely done away with, there can be no fair or just distribution of goods, nor can mankind be happily governed. As long as private property remains, by far the largest and and the best part of mankind wil lbe oppressed by a heavy and inescapable burden of cares and anxieties. - Sir Thomas More, Utopia
A revolution that does not know how to defend itself is not a revolution - Bertolt Brecht
It is possible to neutralise carefully selected and planned targets, such as court judges, mesta judges [justices of the peace], police and state officials, etc. - CIA manual for Nicaraguan Contras
What is necessary is cruel and strong reactions. We need precision in time, place, and casualties...we must strike mercilessly, women and children included. Otherwise, the reaction is inefficient. At the place of action, there is no need to distinguish between guilty and innocent. - David Ben-Gurion (Founding Father of the State of Israel), 1948 (referring to the Palestinian people)
Any idiot can survive a crisis; it is this day-to-day living that wears you out. - Anton Chekhov