“Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there – I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. People sometimes say that the way things happen in movies is unreal, but actually it's the way things happen in life that's unreal. The movies make emotions look so strong and real, whereas when things really do happen to you, it's like watching television – you don't feel anything. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television. The channels switch, but it's all television.”
- Andy Warhol
"For a few years, Hollywood was constantly begging us to consider that our entire reality was one vast illusion, a dreamworld built by hidden archons to control you and lull you to sleep. They are hiding the truth. But what truth? In the end, it hardly mattered. The important thing wasn’t the hidden abode of production or the secrets of the unconscious, but a gesture: question everything, refuse to go along with the herd. Strange how everyone decided to abandon the herd at exactly the same time."
- Sam Kriss
“The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.”
- Jean Baudrillard
"Never trust a grown man who writes “hehe.”
- Nellie Bowles
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"It is better to conquer yourself than to win a thousand battles. Then, the victory is yours."
- Siddhartha Gautama
"Those who fear death most are those who enjoy life least."
- Edward Abbey
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Another re-post from Deep 6 FAWTL:
It's easy to have the courage of a lion. They're huge, have big claws and teeth, and no natural predators.
Instead, have the courage of a guinea pig. It's a two-pound fuzzy potato, with no offensive or defensive capacity, that will scream at an ape 100 times its size if the lettuce is too wilty.
"It may be better to be a live jackal than a dead lion, but it is better still to be a live lion. And usually easier." -- R. A. Heinlein, The Notebooks Of Lazarus Long
"You wanna hear a funny story? So, uh... five years ago, I quit performing live comedy, because I was beginning to have severe panic attacks while on stage. Which is not a great place to have them. So I... I quit, and I didn't perform for five years, and I spent that time trying to improve myself mentally. And you know what? I did. I got better. I got so much better, in fact, that in January of 2020, I thought, "You know what? I should start performing again. I've been hiding from the world, and I need to re-enter." And then, the funniest thing happened."
- Bo Burnham
"Much like how Warhammer is an excuse to explain away collecting toy figurines, Dungeons & Dragons as a game is a mere rationalization for collecting the same 7 geometric shapes over and over again. I know people who are so extreme in their dice spending that they nearly have enough to play pen and paper Shadowrun."
- Owen Crowlie (The Hard Times / Hard Drive)
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"A person with good intentions who promises things and is too lazy to come through is often more harmful than a malicious person. A malicious person is easier to spot. You can be on your guard against him. Plus, he's interested enough in you to try to hurt you. If you convert him, maybe you'll have a friend...
"But people like the assistant book editor who, I should point out, very often hold positions of power, don't even care enough about you to want to hurt you. That's why they're shocked when you get angry at them. They promise you things because they want to seem agreeable. They don't keep their promises because it's too much trouble. They keep on breaking their word because they're seldom penalized for it."
- Harvey Pekar
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Mark 8:36 [KJV]: "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"
Mark 8:36 [KJV]: "For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"
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"Civilized man knows of hardly any other way of understanding things. Everybody, everything, has to have its label, its number, certificate, registration, classification. What is not classified is irregular, unpredictable, and dangerous. Without passport, birth certificate, or membership in some nation, one’s existence is not recognized[...] We suffer from the delusion that the entire universe is held in order by the categories of human thought, fearing that if we do not hold to them with the utmost tenacity, everything will vanish into chaos."
- Alan Watts
"When things are going bad, I try to rationalize them by thinking, "oh well, what'll it matter in a hundred years." In a hundred years maybe it won't matter, but the trouble is that in the next few hours or days or weeks it matters a lot."
- Harvey Pekar
“Engineers are really good at making things better, but they can’t make them better than the laws of physics permit.”
- Mark Mills
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"Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves."
- Václav Havel
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"Born too late to explore the world. Born too early to explore the stars. Born just in time for the elites study the psychology of every person on Earth. We are in the epoch of exploring the mind. Like most explorations, the natives are expendable."
- Oz
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"I've learned that life is like a roll of toilet paper. The closer it gets to the end, the faster it goes."
- Andy Rooney
“I did not know how to become anything; neither spiteful nor kind, neither a rascal nor an honest man, neither a hero nor an insect. Now, I am living out my life in my corner, taunting myself with the spiteful and useless consolation that an intelligent man cannot become anything seriously, and it is only the fool who becomes anything.”
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground (1864)
“We may intend to achieve a particular outcome, but the complexity of the world, even in apparently simple situations, appears to be so great that it is not within our power to ordain the future.”
- Paul Ormerod
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"In my lifetime, in my part of the world, the notion and meaning of ‘home’ has steadily crumbled under external pressure until it is little more than a word. The ideal (post)modern home is a dormitory, probably owned by a landlord or a bank, in which two or more people of varying ages and degrees of biological relationship sleep when they’re not out being employed by a corporation, or educated by the state in preparation for being employed by a corporation. The home’s needs are met through pushing buttons, swiping screens or buying-in everything from food to furniture; for who has time for anything else, or has been taught the skills to do otherwise?"
- Paul Kingsnorth
"We would rather be ruined than changed.
We would rather die in our dread
Than climb the cross of the moment
And let our illusions die."
- W.H. Auden
"I yelled "cow!" to a woman on a bike. She gave me the finger, then plowed right into the cow. I tried."
- unknown
“The chief characteristic of the mass man is not brutality and backwardness,” Hannah Arendt writes, “but his isolation and lack of normal social relations.” Social isolation is the lifeblood of totalitarian movements. There are many things I fear about the future, but this unmooring is one of the most ominous."
- Chris Hedges
"[T]o say that the future will condemn x or y is to assume that the future will look like “us”—that by the time the future rolls around (whenever that may be) everybody will agree with us."
- William Deresiewicz