"I say let the world go to hell, but I should always have my tea."
— Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from Underground)

"Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. "
— George Orwell

"The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others."
— Cormac McCarthy

"Write something, even if it's just a suicide note. "
— Gore Vidal

"Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half."
— Gore Vidal

"Any war that requires the suspension of reason as a necessity for support is a bad war."
— Norman Mailer

"What an awful thing life is, isn’t it? It’s like soup with lots of hairs floating on the surface. You have to eat it nevertheless."
— Gustave Flaubert

"He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach - that it makes no sense."
— Philip Roth (American Pastoral)

"At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman."
— Albert Camus

"He chose The Metamorphosis over The Trial, he chose Bartleby over Moby-Dick, he chose A Simple Heart over Bouvard and Pecuchet, and A Christmas Carol over A Tale of Two Cities or The Pickwick Papers. What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows us and spurs us on, amid blood and mortal wounds and stench."
— Roberto Bolaño (2666)

"Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'."
— George Orwell

"Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me."
— George Orwell (1984)

"The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human."
— George Orwell

"Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations."
— George Orwell

"Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence."
— George Orwell

"Liberal: a power worshipper without power."
— George Orwell

"In the face of pain there are no heroes."
— George Orwell (1984)

"That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence."
— Christopher Hitchens

"it is interesting to find that people of faith now seek defensively to say that they are no worse than fascists or Nazis or Stalinists"
— Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything)

"Beware the irrational, however seductive. Shun the 'transcendent' and all who invite you to subordinate or annihilate yourself. Distrust compassion; prefer dignity for yourself and others. Don't be afraid to be thought arrogant or selfish. Picture all experts as if they were mammals. Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity. Seek out argument and disputation for their own sake; the grave will supply plenty of time for silence. Suspect your own motives, and all excuses. Do not live for others any more than you would expect others to live for you."
— Christopher Hitchens

"The greatest danger that besets us does not come from believers or atheists; it comes from those who, under the guise of religion, science or reason, imagine that we can free ourselves from the limitations of human nature and perfect the human species."
— Chris Hedges (I Don't Believe in Atheists)

"I am so clever that sometimes I don't understand a single word of what I am saying."
— Oscar Wilde

"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much."
— Oscar Wilde

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
— Oscar Wilde (Lady Windermere's Fan)

"A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it."
— Oscar Wilde

"The older I grow, the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that age brings wisdom."
— H.L. Mencken

"Truth would quickly cease to be stranger than fiction, once we got as used to it."
— H.L. Mencken (A Little Book in C Major)

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

"As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."
— H.L. Mencken

"The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out... without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane, intolerable..."
— H.L. Mencken

"Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."
— H.L. Mencken

"An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup."
— H.L. Mencken

"For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong."
— H.L. Mencken (H.L. Mencken on Religion)

"Conscience is the inner voice that warns us somebody may be looking."
— H.L. Mencken

"Giving every man a vote has no more made men wise and free than Christianity has made them good."
— H.L. Mencken

"A good politician is quite as unthinkable as an honest burglar."
— H.L. Mencken

"Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance."
— H.L. Mencken

"We must respect the other fellow’s religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart."
— H.L. Mencken

"It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man."
— H.L. Mencken

"A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier."
— H.L. Mencken

"It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place."
— H.L. Mencken

"Creator: A comedian whose audience is afraid to laugh."
— H.L. Mencken

"Don’t overestimate the decency of the human race."
— H.L. Mencken

"No one in this world has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby."
— H.L. Mencken

"It is often argued that religion is valuable because it makes men good, but even if this were true it would not be a proof that religion is true. That would be an extension of pragmatism beyond endurance. Santa Claus makes children good in precisely the same way, and yet no one would argue seriously that the fact proves his existence. The defense of religion is full of such logical imbecilities."
— H.L. Mencken

"The world outside had its own rules, and those rules were not human."
— Michel Houellebecq (The Elementary Particles)

"...beds last on an average much longer than marriages..."
— Michel Houellebecq (Whatever)

"I don't like this world. I definitely do not like it. The society in which I live disgusts
me; advertising sickens me; computers make me puke."
— Michel Houellebecq (Whatever)

"I've lived so little that I tend to imagine I'm not going to die; it seems improbable
that human existence can be reduced to so little; one imagines, in spite of oneself,
that sooner or later something is bound to happen. A big mistake. A life can just as
well be both empty and short. The days slip by indifferently, leaving neither trace nor
memory; and then all of a sudden they stop."
— Michel Houellebecq (Whatever)

"A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on."
— William S. Burroughs