" Ours is a bourgeois civilization. I am not using this term in its Marxian sense. Chicken! In the vocabularies of modern art and religion it is bourgeois to consider that the universe was made for our safe use and to give us comfort, ease, and support. Light travels at a quarter of a million miles per second so that we can see to comb our hair or read in the paper that ham hocks are cheaper than yesterday. De Tocqueville considered the impulse toward well-being as one of the strongest impulses of a democratic society. He can't be blamed for underestimating the destructive powers generated by this same impulse. "
— Saul Bellow

"'The United States has 250 Billion tons of recoverable coal reserves - enough to last 100 years even at double the current rate of consumption.' We humans have inhabited the earth for many thousands of years, and now we can look forward to surviving for another hundred by doubling our consumption of coal? This is national security? The world-ending fire of industrial fundamentalism may already be burning in our furnaces and engines, but if it will burn for a hundred more years, that will be fine. Surely it would be better to intend straightforwardly to contain the fire and eventually put it out! But once greed has been made an honorable motive, then you have an economy without limits. It has no place for temperance or thrift or the ecological law of return. It will do anything. It is monstrous by definition."
— Wendell Berry

"Say what you will of fortitude, but show me the man who can patiently endure the laughter of fools when they have obtained an advantage over him. 'Tis only when their nonsense is without foundation that one can suffer it without complaint."
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (The Sorrows of Young Werther)

"He who despises himself still nonetheless respects himself as one who despises."
— Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)

"If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way."
— Bertrand Russell

"In the lobby, an old woman with legs wrapped in elastic bandages mopped the floor with filthy water. She kept missing the same spot, over and over. There was the overpowering smell of disinfectant, bad tobacco, and wet wool. This was the smell of Russia indoors, the smell of the woman in front of you on line, the smell of every elevator. Near an abandoned newsstand, dozens of overcoats hung on long rows of pegs, somber and dark, lightly steaming, like nags in a stable."
— David Remnick (Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire)

"Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating."
— Simone Weil

"The termagant who had dragged him out on long, boring walks, who had tried in vain to censor his reading, who had labeled him an impious liar and criminal, was dead at last, and the boy, hearing a servant say 'she has passed away', sank to his knees on the kitchen floor to thank God for so great a deliverance."
— Jonathan Keates (Stendhal)

"Affliction hardens and discourages us because, like a red hot iron, it stamps the soul to its very depths with the scorn, the disgust, and even the self-hatred and sense of guilt that crime logically should produce but actually does not."
— Simone Weil

""I love Wagner, but the music I prefer is that of a cat hung up by its tail outside a window and trying to stick to the panes of glass with its claws.""
— Charles Baudelaire

"Kid, show me a man who doesn't go down on his wife and I'll show you a man whose wife I can sleep with, tonight."
— Leo durocher

"We owe our fellow citizens something better than an institutional
structure that allows their fates to depend so deeply on the brute
luck of class origin."
— Debra Satz

"A man can't be angry at his own time without suffering some damage."
— Robert Musil (The Man Without Qualities Vol. 1: A Sort of Introduction and Pseudo Reality Prevails)

"For a long time now a hint of aversion had lain on everything he did and experienced, a shadow of impotence and loneliness, an all-encompassing distaste for which he could not find the complementary inclination. He felt at times as though he had been born with a talent for which there was at present no objective."
— Robert Musil (The Man Without Qualities Vol. 1: A Sort of Introduction and Pseudo Reality Prevails)

"What we call aid money serves only to strengthen the structures that generate poverty. Aid money never reaches those victims who, having lost their real assets, look for alternative ways of life outside the globalised system of production which are better suited to their needs."
— Majid Rahnema (Quand la misère chasse la pauvreté)

"Everything I’ve ever gotten in life is largely due to the fact that I was born in this country, America, at this time with these opportunities for its citizens. It is the primary obligation of our generation to turn over a similar America to our kids."
— Thomas L. Friedman

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
— Upton Sinclair