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“All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Just as primitive man believed himself to stand face to face with demons and believed that could he but know their names he would become their master, so is contemporary man faced by this incomprehensible, which disorders his calculations. "If I can but grasp it, if I can but cognise it", so he thinks, "I can make it my servant.”
― Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age

“The fact is that libertarianism is not and does not pretend to be a complete moral or aesthetic theory; it is only a political theory, that is, the important subset of moral theory that deals with the proper role of violence in social life.

Political theory deals with what is proper or improper for government to do, and government is distinguished from every other group in society as being the institution of organized violence. Libertarianism holds that the only proper role of violence is to defend person and property against violence, that any use of violence that goes beyond such just defense is itself aggressive, unjust, and criminal. Libertarianism, therefore, is a theory which states that everyone should be free of violent invasion, should be free to do as he sees fit, except invade the person or property of another. What a person does with his or her life is vital and important, but is simply irrelevant to libertarianism.

It should not be surprising, therefore, that there are libertarians who are indeed hedonists and devotees of alternative lifestyles, and that there are also libertarians who are firm adherents of "bourgeois" conventional or religious morality. There are libertarian libertines and there are libertarians who cleave firmly to the disciplines of natural or religious law. There are other libertarians who have no moral theory at all apart from the imperative of non-violation of rights. That is because libertarianism per se has no general or personal moral theory.

Libertarianism does not offer a way of life; it offers liberty, so that each person is free to adopt and act upon his own values and moral principles. Libertarians agree with Lord Acton that "liberty is the highest political end" �� not necessarily the highest end on everyone's personal scale of values.”
― Murray N. Rothbard

“Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have is quite enough.”
― Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety

“Why does anyone take photographs ever? We never look at them anymore.”
― Anthony Horowitz, Magpie Murders

“I wonder if it's harder to be good in this age?”
― Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

“They do think the world is some kind of science-fiction novel, then. Do you realize how fervently most people will believe in the promises of technology, even when those promises fly in the face of common sense?”
― Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion

“قيام إسرائيل هو إحدى معجزات العصر الحديث .. وقمة البراعة الصهيونية .. والغفلة والبلاهة العربية أيضا”
― أنيس منصور, في السياسة الجزء الأول

“Everything seems just alike in these days.”
― E.M. Forster, Howards End

“The people's need to share has turned into a massive disease. It has taken them to the most private meaningless part of their lives. In such circumstance, values become redefined and what has been worthless in the past, has become the core value of the new age.
The disaster starts where the essence of the discourse changes. The modern age, with all its technological advances, has taken human to the fast fall. We are going down faster than being trapped into a mire. The transition of the discourse has also given us a great gift, senselessness. Therefore, we have transitioned into piles of senseless machines, drained of human essentiality and drowning into a giant mire. The sad part is, due to the lack of true sense, we don't even feel it. Our only safety guard, which is entirely absurd and phantasmagoric, comes from following the majority of the world's population. As long as we feel belonged to preponderancy, our nonsense will absolutely make sense.”
― Kambiz Shabankare

“I am going to tell a story now, and though I've made a life out of writing words, this is the first time I have told a story. There are no new stories in the world anymore, and no more storytellers. There is nothing left but the fragments of phrases that signalled their telling: once upon a time; why; and then; the end. But these phrases have lost their meanings through endless repetition, like everything else in this modern, mechanical age. And this machine age has no room for stories. These days we seek our pleasures out in single moments cast in amber, as if we have no desire to connect the future to the past. Stories? We have no time for them; we have no patience.”
― Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion

“When did we revert back to sticks and shields,
Uniform uniforms, stylized agenda reveals,
Hiding behind glass with nods to our reflection,
Blocking out the light that sparked the deception?

Who do we see staring across the isle,
A path once for feet now stretched into miles,
Removed from our view to a place unseen,
Forcing poisonous venom through a flickering screen?

Where should we gather outside of the homes,
But a place for the masses to manifest from their phones,
The hatred and evil broadcasting the waves,
Telling you daily, “Elvis lives and Jesus saves��?

What could restart a flawed mental state,
Built on cause and guilt for an unfulfilled faith
In policy, redemption, a nation self aware,
Our values compressed and trapped in despair?

How can we rise with the odds in their favor,
Sedated once more, still waiting for a Savior
Willing to spare from thoughts profound?
Stand tall, my friends, when the fool comes around.”
― Ross Caligiuri

“Stand tall, my friends, when the fool comes around.”
― Ross Caligiuri

“Now everything is done by machines, technology has relieved you of much work. What to do? You become aggressive, you fight, you get angry. Without any reason or rhyme, you become angry �� suddenly you flare up. Everybody knows that this is foolish, even you in your cooler moments know that that was foolish. But why did you flare up unnecessarily? The excuse was not enough. The real reason is not that there was some situation; the real reason is you have so much energy, so much petrol overflowing, inflammable, that any moment it can be active. That is why after anger you feel relaxed, after anger you feel a little well-being coming to you.”
― Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, When the Shoe Fits: Stories of the Taoist Mystic Chuang Tzu

“The issue of fascism since 1945 is further clouded by polemical name calling. The far Right in Europe after 1945 is loudly and regularly accused of reviving fascism; its leaders deny the charges no less adamantly. The postwar movements and parties themselves have been no less broad than interwar fascisms, capable of bringing authentic admirers of Mussolini and Hitler into the same tent with one-issue voters and floating protesters. Their leaders have become adept at presenting a moderate face to the general public while privately welcoming outright fascist sympathizers with coded words about accepting one’s history, restoring national pride, or recognizing the valor of combatants on all sides.

The inoculation of most Europeans against the original fascism by its public shaming in 1945 is inherently temporary. The taboos of 1945 have inevitably faded with the disappearance of the eyewitness generation. In any event, a fascism of the future—an emergency response to some still unimagined crisis—need not resemble classical fascism perfectly in its outward signs and symbols. Some future movement that would “give up free institutions�� in order to perform the same functions of mass mobilization for the reunification, purification, and regeneration of some troubled group would undoubtedly call itself something else and draw on fresh symbols. That would not make it any less dangerous.

For example, while a new fascism would necessarily diabolize some enemy, both internal and external, the enemy would not necessarily be Jews. An authentically popular American fascism would be pious, antiblack, and, since September 11, 2001, anti-Islamic as well; in western Europe, secular and, these days, more likely anti-Islamic than anti-Semitic; in Russia and eastern Europe, religious, anti-Semitic, Slavophile, and anti-Western. New fascisms would probably prefer the mainstream patriotic dress of their own place and time to alien swastikas or fasces. The British moralist George Orwell noted in the 1930s that an authentic British fascism would come reassuringly clad in sober English dress. There is no sartorial litmus test for fascism.”
― Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism