"An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry. "
— T.S. Eliot

"If rulers refuse to consider poems as crimes, then someone must commit crimes that serve the function of poetry, or texts that possess the resonance of terrorism. "
— Hakim Bey (T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone)

"But the problem is to make the soul into a monster"
— Arthur Rimbaud

"I slept with faith and found a corpse in my arms on awakening; I drank and danced all night with doubt and found her a virgin in the morning."
— Aleister Crowley

"For nothing bestializes a being like the taste for eternal happiness, the search for eternal happiness at any price, and mademoiselle Lucifer is that slut who never wanted to abandon eternal happiness."
— Antonin Artaud

"Those who self-righteously value their own contradictions are mighty on this Earth."
— Peter J. Carroll

"All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try and put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs. "
— Antonin Artaud

"Mythology is ancient psychology and psychology is recent mythology."
— cf. Hillman

"Today, in the worldwide circus of the images, occultism is the continuation of fashions, of habits or mannerisms of how to display oneself: pseudo-originality. The occult supermarket is universally plundered and leaves only a completely devalued treasury of total subjectivity. By picking the debris left after the breakdown of the symbolic order, the occultist's cultural reality ends up consisting of slightly differing arrangements of said pieces into signs of strict hierarchies. Normal activities one might expect in joining such a group, such as experiencing, recording and processing are curbed and one is reduced to subsistence on a diet of already fixed images that work in a consciousness dissolving away."
— P.R. Koenig

"If you are on the Path, and see the Buddha walking toward you, kill him."
— Tau Allen Greenfield

"For a hundred years or more the world, our world, has been dying. And not one man, in these last hundred years or so, has been crazy enough to put a bomb up the asshole of creation and set it off. The world is rotting away, dying piecemeal. But it needs the coup de grace, it needs to be blown to smithereens. Not one of us is intact, and yet we have in us all the continents and the seas between the continents and the birds of the air. We are going to put it down- the evolution of this world which has died but which has not been buried."
— Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer)

"Shit now is the color white folks are afraid of. Shit is the presence of death, not some abstract-arty character with a scythe but the stiff and rotting corpse inside the whiteman’s warm and private own asshole, which is getting pretty intimate. That’s what the toilet is for. You see many brown toilets? Nope, toilet’s the color of gravestones, classical columns of mausoleums, that white emblems the very emblem of Odorless and Official death. "
— Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow)

"The time flies. The time flies feed on rotting clocks."
— Craig Clevenger (Dermaphoria)

"Pity? [If] you don't want to be pitied because you're a cripple in a wheelchair, stay in your house!"
— Jerry Lewis

"'It smells terrible in here.'

'Well, what do you expect? The human body, when confined, produces certain odors which we tend to forget in this age of deodorants and other perversions. Actually, I find the atmosphere of this room rather comforting. Schiller needed the scent of apples rotting in his desk in order to write. I, too, have my needs. You may remember that Mark Twain preferred to lie supinely in bed while composing those rather dated and boring efforts which contemporary scholars try to prove meaningful. Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate.'"
— John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces)

"We're always thinking of eternity as an idea that cannot be understood, something immense. But why must it be? What if, instead of all this, you suddenly find just a little room there, something like a village bath-house, grimy, and spiders in every corner, and that's all eternity is. Sometimes, you know, I can't help feeling that that's what it is."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky

"I believe I am in Hell, therefore I am"
— Arthur Rimbaud

"But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?"
— Mark Twain

"There is a man, playing a violin, and the strings are the nerves in his own arm..."
— James O'Barr

"You can lead a whore to culture but you can't make her think."
— Mae West

"People sometimes talk about man's 'bestial' cruelty, but that is being terribly unjust and offensive to the beasts; a beast can never be as cruel as a human being, so artistically, so picturesquely cruel"
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)

"God runs electromagnetics by wave theory on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and the Devil runs them by quantum theory on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday."
— William Bragg

"Gods suppressed become devils, and often it is these devils whom we first encounter when we turn inward."
— Joseph Campbell

"Provided we can escape from the museums we carry around inside us, provided we can stop selling ourselves tickets to the galleries in our own skulls, we can begin to contemplate an art which re-creates the goal of the sorcerer: changing the structure of reality by the manipulation of living symbols ... Art tells gorgeous lies that come true."
— Hakim Bey (T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone)

"An orphans curse would drag to hell
A spirit from on high;
But oh! How more horrible that that
Is the curse in a dead man’s eye!"
— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin."
— H.L. Mencken

"Why not whip the teacher when the student misbehaves?"
— Diogenes Laërtius

"There are no innocent bystanders ... what are they doing there in the first place?"
— William S. Burroughs

"The human race tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What's left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars."
— Bertolt Brecht

"We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world."
— Terence McKenna

"Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you. Their tastes may not be the same. "
— George Bernard Shaw

"Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim."
— Bertrand Russell

"Our cure, to be no more; sad cure! "
— John Milton (Paradise Lost)

"Spelling is a way to make words safe, at least for now, until another technology appears to soften attacks launched from the mouth."
— Ben Marcus (Notable American Women)

"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

"I want to be violated by insight."
— Aimee Bender (The Girl in the Flammable Skirt: Stories)

"Ideas about a person's place in society, his role, lifestyle, and ego qualities will lose their hold as the cohesive forces in society disintegrate. Subculture values will proliferate to such a bewildering extent that a whole new class of professionals will arise to control them. Such a Transmutation Technology will deal in fashions, in ways of being. Lifestyle consultants will become the new priests of our civilizations. They will be the new magicians."
— Peter J. Carroll (Liber Null & Psychonaut: An Introduction to Chaos Magic)

"It is perfectly understandable, in a world where the media shout in the same vulgar way about genocides and sexual scandals, to think that silence is the ultimate form of respect for the victims. But the danger is that this honest search for decency, paradoxically in the same way as the screaming media headlines, will end up obscuring the tragedies, turning them into chaotic convulsions in the primeval mud."
— Gérard Prunier

"I have a perfect cure for a sore throat: cut it."
— Alfred Hitchcock

"Is adult amusement killing our children, or is killing our children amusing adults?"
— Marilyn Manson

"There's no flesh or blood within this cloak to kill. There's only an idea. Ideas are bulletproof. Farewell."
— Alan Moore

"I feel the way bank robbers must feel before they go out on that last job that ends up getting them all killed. That is to say, optimistic."
— Joey Comeau (Lockpick Pornography)

"Dear Nintendo, We need a new Mario game, where you rescue the princess in the first ten minutes, and for the rest of the game you try and push down that sick feeling in your stomach that she’s ‘damaged goods’, a concept detailed again and again in the profoundly sex negative instruction booklet, and when Luigi makes a crack about her and Bowser, you break his nose and immediately regret it. When Peach asks you, in the quiet of her mushroom castle bedroom ‘do you still love me?’ you pretend to be asleep. You press the A button rhythmically, to control your breath, keep it even."
— Joey Comeau

""Human beings are tool-making animals. Since the prehistoric era, we have created and used a wide variety of objects.

But now a significant change is about to occur.

In the near future, we will simply become another object that can be monitored, tracked and controlled within a vast machine.""
— John Twelve Hawks

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."
— H.P. Lovecraft

"Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic."
— Young-ha Kim (I Have the Right to Destroy Myself)

"People who don’t know how to summarize have no dignity. Neither do people who needlessly drag on their messy lives. They who don’t know the beauty of simplification, of pruning away the unnecessary, die without ever comprehending the true meaning of life."
— Young-ha Kim (I Have the Right to Destroy Myself)

"The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4am knows all my secrets."
— Poppy Z. Brite

"It has been said, 'the truth will make men free.' The truth alone has never made anyone free. It is only doubt which will bring mental emancipation."
— Anton Szandor LaVey

"The majority of dysfunctions that arise and entrench themselves in our lives are caused because of preconditioned expectations and assumptions."
— Ly de Angeles