quotes: bleak/off beat (original) (raw)

INCOMPLETE

"society is like a stew. if you don't stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top." - edward abbey

"a crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety." - aesop

"the inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts:
those with brains, but no religion, and those with religion, but no brains." - al-maʿarri

"admitting that both parties routinely ignore the constitution, reject the rule of law, and erode liberty is the first step to recovery." - justin amash

"waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. be one." - marcus aurelius

"i've got a bad case of the 3:00 am guilts - you know, when you lie in bed awake and replay all those things you didn't do right? because, as we all know, nothing solves insomnia like a nice warm glass of regret, depression and self-loathing." - d.d. barant

"we are surrounded by images of an alternative way of life. but where is this other way of life? where do they exist, these fabulous rewards and objects and people? where do they belong? here? there? or nowhere? - john berger

"the only cure for vanity is laughter, and the only fault that is laughable is vanity." - henri bergson

"life begets life. energy creates energy. it is by spending oneself that one becomes rich." - sarah bernhardt

"all my favorite singers couldn't sing." - david berman

"propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship." - william blum

"i'm apolitical, the more i travel and the less sure i am about exactly which political philosophies are commendable. the more government systems i see, the less enticed i am to give my allegiance to any set of people, so it would be disastrous for me to adopt a definitive point of view, or to adopt a party of people and say 'these are my people'. - david bowie

"to think clearly about enhancement, we have to acknowledge that human nature is a mixed bag and that our species has many "design flaws." - allen buchanan

"life is a wretched gray saturday, but it has to be lived through." - anthony burgess

"thou canst not think worse of me than i do of myself." - robert burton

"the optimist proclaims that we live in the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true." - james branch cabell

"i am a political atheist..." "politics has become a religion, and i don't bow to political gods." - gerald celente

"the worst thing to call somebody is crazy. it's dismissive. "i don't understand this person. so they're crazy." that's bullshit. these people are not crazy. they strong people. maybe their environment is a little sick." - dave chappelle

"the free man owns himself. he can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. if he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog." - g.k. chesterton

"writing, reading, and promoting a dystopian, orwellian, or post-apocalytptic genre in our current era is the equivalent of day-dreaming as a tornado comes crashing into your house." - noah cicero

"i do not want to father a flock, to be the fetish of fools and fanatics, or the founder of a faith whose followers are content to echo my opinions. i want each man to cut his own way through the jungle." - aleister crowley

"i have no country to fight for. my country is the earth. i am a citizen of the world." - eugene v. debs

"dreaming permits each and every one of us to be quietly and safely insane every night of our lives." - william c. dement

"there will come a time when it isn't 'they're spying on me through my phone' anymore. eventually, it will be 'my phone is spying on me'." - phillip k. dick

"young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit."- guy debord

"it is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. ignorance is never better than knowledge." - enrico fermi

"lighthouses are more useful than churches." - benjamin franklin

"keep talking about moving toxic wastes, but never let it cross your mind to quit producing them. keep judging yourselves in manson. don't look in the mirror. you will serve the earth as much as she serves you or you will commit suicide." - lynette "squeaky" fromme

"i am prepared to die... but there is no cause for which i am prepared to kill." mahatma gandhi

"i don't know if i work in order to do something, or in order to know why i can't do what i want to do." - alberto giacometti

"if you have been brutally broke, but still have the courage to be gentle to others then you deserve a love deeper than the ocean itself." - nikita gill

"propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident that they are acting on their free will." - joseph goebbels

"physical reality is one of the biggest horror movies of all, and you know how we love horror movies." - thaddeus golas

"normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it." - ellen goodman

"i turn and turn in my cell like a fly that doesn't know where to die." - antonio gramsci

"modern man, instead of attempting to raise himself to truth, seeks to drag truth down to his own level." - rene guenon

"we men are from the beginning animals like the other animals, and without changing our inborn nature we will live and die and the cycle will continue." - george ivanovich gurdjieff

"i believe we are a species with amnesia, i think we have forgotten our roots and our origins. i think we are quite lost in many ways. and we live in a society that invests huge amounts of money and vast quantities of energy in ensuring that we all stay lost. a society that invests in creating unconsciousness, which invests in keeping people asleep so that we are just passive consumers of products and not really asking any of the questions." - graham hancock

"in order to rally people, governments need enemies. they want us to be afraid, to hate, so we will rally behind them. and if they do not have a real enemy, they will event one in order to mobilize us." - thich nhat hanh

"a grownup is a child with layers on." - woody harrelson

"i'm sick of following my dreams. i'm just going to ask them where they're goin', and hook up with them later." - mitch hedberg

"i am free, no matter what rules surround me. if i find them tolerable, i tolerate them; if i find them too obnoxious, i break them. i am free because i know that i alone am morally responsible for everything i do." - robert a. heinlein

"men, like peaches & pears, grow sweet a little while before they begin to decay." - oliver wendell homes

"space isn't remote at all. it's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards." - fred hoyle

"a great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices." - william james

"the aim of argument, or discussion, should not be victory, but progress." - joseph joubert

"loneliness does not come from having no people around, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible." - carl jung

"i used to think i was the strangest person in the world but then i thought, there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways i do. i would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. well, i hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it's true i'm here, and i'm just as strange as you." - frida kahlo

"silence is of the gods; only monkeys chatter." - buster keaton

"you have never communicated anything other than animalic scents." - porochista khakpour

"military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy." - henry kissinger

"when you call yourself an indian or a muslim or a christian or a european, or anything else, you are being violent. do you see why it is violent? because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. when you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. so a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind." - jiddu krishnamurti

"nature is busy creating absolutely unique individuals, whereas culture has invented a single mold to which all must conform. it is grotesque." - u. g. krishnamurti

"the fact that people are willing to cross vast seas and mountainous terrain to murder people they know nothing about on request from people they know nothing about is the height of social absurdity, cultural violence, and incivility." - sterlin luxan

"keep your eye on the doughnut, not on the hole." - david lynch

"you monkeys think you control the show. not only do you not control the show you don't even know what show it is." - dennis mckenna

"the united states has far more to offer the world than our bombs and missiles and our military technology." - cynthia mckinney

"teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar." - bradley miller

"i'm funny, but looks ain't everything." - roger miller

"government is the coldest of all cold monsters. coldly it lies; and this lie slips from its mouth: "i, government, am the people." everything government says is a lie, and everything government has it has stolen." - friedrich nietzsche

"nobody is superior, nobody is inferior, but nobody is equal either. people are simply unique, incomparable. you are you, i am i." - osho

"those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses." - plato

"life is hard and it gets worse and worse and worse." - cat power

"man is the most insane species. he worships an invisible god and destroys a visible nature. unaware that the nature he is destroying is this god he is worshiping." - hubert reeves

"there are men running governments who shouldn't be allowed to play with matches." - will rogers

"flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people's minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead." - arundhati roy

"when i am with you, we stay up all night. when you’re not here, i can’t go to sleep. praise god for those two insomnias! and the difference between them." - rumi

"both now and for always, i intend to hold fast to my belief in the hidden strength of the human spirit." - andrei sakharov

"those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything." - george bernard shaw

"character is how you treat those who can do nothing for you." - ramandeep singh

"arguing with a fool proves there are two." - doris m. smith

"please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. there is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book." - patti smith

"darken your room, shut the door, empty your mind. you are still in great company." - a.o. spare

"we did not think of the great open plains, the beautiful rolling hills, the winding streams with tangled growth, as ‘wild’. only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was it ‘infested’ with ‘wild’ animals and ‘savage’ people. to us it was tame. earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the great mystery." - luther standing bear

"old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man." - leon trotsky

"it's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled." - mark twain

"you can't have a war on terrorism because that's not an actual enemy, it's abstract. it's like having a war on dandruff. that war will be eternal and pointless. it's idiotic. that's not a war, it's a slogan. it's a lie. it's advertising, which is the only art form we ever invented in american. and we use it to sell soap, wars and presidential candidates in the same fashion." -gore vidal

"to learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." - voltaire

"the notion that a human being should be constantly happy is a uniquely modem, uniquely american, uniquely destructive idea." - andrew weil

"every national border marks the place where two gangs of bandits got too exhausted to kill each other anymore and signed a treaty. patriotism is the delusion that one of these gangs of bandits is better than all the others." - robert anton wilson

"i am a most unhappy man. i have unwittingly ruined my country. a great industrial nation is now controlled by its system of credit. we are no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men." - woodrow wilson

"we accept the reality of the world with which we're presented." - christof - the truman show

"achievement is its own reward. pride obscures it." - major briggs - twin peaks

"i think human consciousness, is a tragic misstep in evolution. we became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. we are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight - brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal." - rust cohle - true detective

"there is an ancient indian saying that something lives only as long as the last person who remembers it. my people have come to trust memory over history. memory, like fire, is radiant and immutable while history serves only those who seek to control it, those who douse the flame of memory in order to put out the dangerous fire of truth. beware these men for they are dangerous themselves and unwise. their false history is written in the blood of those who might remember and of those who seek the truth." - albert hosteen - the x-files