"I'm not interested in preserving the status quo; I want to overthrow it."
— Niccolò Machiavelli

"It's supposed to be automatic, but actually you have to push this button. "
— John Brunner (Stand on Zanzibar)

"One can't love humanity. One can only love people."
— Graham Greene (The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment)

"What is the cause of historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the sum total of wills transferred to one person. On what condition are the willso fo the masses transferred to one person? On condition that the person express the will of the whole people. That is, power is power. That is, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand. "
— Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace)

"Pity is cruel. Pity destroys."
— Graham Greene (The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment)

"Ser radical é tomar as coisas pela raiz. Mas, para o homem, a raiz é o próprio homem."
— Karl Marx (Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right)

"And when there are enough outsiders together in one place, a mystic osmosis takes place and you're inside."
— Stephen King (The Stand)

"Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form."
— Toni Morrison

""Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.""
— Neil Postman

"We must assume that creatures whose machines still function after three million years may build a society equally long-lasting."
— Arthur C. Clarke (2001: A Space Odyssey)

"Nobody likes to see a stupid guy wise up."
— Stephen King (The Stand)

"...today, the only class which, in its 'subjective' self perception, explicitly conceives of an presents itself as a class is the notorious 'middle class' which is precisely the 'non-class': the allegedly hard-working middle strata of society which define themselves not only by their allegiance to firm moral and religious standards, but by a double opposition to both 'extremes' of the social space - non-patriotic 'deracinated' rich corporations on the one side; poor excluded immigrants and ghetto-members on the other. The 'middle class' grounds its identity in the exclusion of both extremes which, when they are directly counterpoised, give us 'class antagonism' at its purest. The constitutive lie of the very notion of the 'middle class' is thus the same as that of the true Party line between the two extremes of 'right-wing deviation' and left-wing deviation' in Stalinism: the 'middle class' is, in its very 'real' existence, the embodied lie, the denial of antagonism - in psychoanalytic terms, the 'middle class' is a fetish, the impossible intersection of left and right which, by expelling both poles of the antagonism into the position of antisocial 'extremes' which corrode the healthy social body (multinational corporations and intruding immigrants), presents itself as the neutral common ground of Society. In other words, the 'middle class' is the very form of the disavowal of the fact that 'Society doesn't exist' (Laclau) - in it, Society does exist."
— Slavoj Žižek

"Having wallowed in a delightful orgy of anti-French sentiment, having deplored and applauded the villains themselves, having relished the foibles of bankers, railwaymen, diplomats, and police, the public was now ready to see its faith restored in the basic soundness of banks, railroads, government, and police."
— Michael Crichton (The Great Train Robbery)

"Any industrial product that comes in per capita quanta beyond a given intensity exercises a radical monopoly over the satisfaction of a need."
— Ivan Illich

"For the canons of good society are, or should be, the same as the canons of art. Form is absolutely essential to it."
— Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings)

"They came to study the dreadful vulgarity of this imaginary Mass Man they pretend to hate. But they're fascinated with the snake-pit. "
— Ray Bradbury (The October Country)

"Ah, art! Ah, life! The pendulum swinging back and forth, from complex to simple, again to complex. From romantic to realistic, back to romantic. "
— Ray Bradbury (The October Country)

"People are, generally speaking, either dead certain or totally indifferent."
— Jostein Gaarder (Sophie's World)

"Concurrently, the growing class power and public voice of conservative and liberal well-to-do black folks easily obscures the class cruelty these individuals enact both in the way they talk about underprivileged blacks and the way they represent them. The existence of that class cruelty and its fascist dimensions have been somewhat highlighted by the efforts of privileged-class blacks to censor the voices of black youth, particularly gangsta rappers who are opposing bourgeois class values by extolling the values of street culture and street vernacular. Significantly, the attack on urban underclass black youth culture and its gangster dimensions (glamorization of crime, etc.) is usually presented via a critique of sexism. Since most privileged-class blacks have shown no interest in advancing feminist politics, the only organized effort to end sexism and sexist oppression, this attack on sexism seems merely gratuitous, a smoke screen that deflects away from the fact that what really disturbs bourgeois folks is the support of rebellion, unruly behavior, and disrespect for their class values. In reality, they and their white counterparts fear the power these young folks have to change the minds and life choices of youth from privileged classes. If only underclass black folks were listening to gangsta rap, there would be no public effort to silence and censor this music. The fear is that it will generate class rebellion."
— bell hooks (killing rage: Ending Racism)

"Miss Leefolt sigh, hang up the phone like she just don't know how her brain gone operate without Miss Hilly coming over to push the Think buttons."
— Kathryn Stockett (The Help)

"It is always of interest to know what strikes another human being as remarkable."
— Graham Greene (The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment)

"The old man in the beard he felt convinced was wrong. He was too busy saving his own soul. Wasn't it better to take part even in the crimes of people you loved, if it was necessary hate as they did, and if that were the end of everything suffer damnation with them rather than be saved alone?"
— Graham Greene (The Ministry of Fear: An Entertainment)

"If two people stare at each other for more than a few seconds, it means they are about to either make love or fight. Something similar might be said about human societies. If two nearby societies are in contact for any length of time, they will either trade or fight. The first is non-zero-sum social integration, and the second ultimately brings it."
— Robert Wright

"Yankee Stadium, it’s like everything else in this country. In Europe, they save all their old buildings for history. Here, we just tear them all down."
— Bob Feller

""The real enemy" is the totality of physical and mental constraints by which capital, or class society, or statism, or the society of the spectacle expropriates everyday life, the time of our lives. The real enemy is not an object apart from life. It is the organization of life by powers detached from it and turned against it. The apparatus, not its personnel, is the real enemy. But it is by and through the apparatchiks and everyone else participating in the system that domination and deception are made manifest. The totality is the organization of all against each and each against all. It includes all the policemen, all the social workers, all the office workers, all the nuns, all the op-ed columnists, all the drug kingpins from Medellin to Upjohn, all the syndicalists and all the situationists."
— Bob Black (Abolition of Work and Other Essays)

"You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education."
— Bob Black (Abolition of Work and Other Essays)

"Under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations."
— Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities)

"Argumentation is a human enterprise that is embedded in a larger social and psychological context. This context includes (1) the total psyches of the two persons engaged in dialogue, (2) the relationship between the two persons, (3) the immediate situation in which they find themselves and (4) the larger social, cultural and historical situation surrounding them."
— Peter Kreeft (Pocket Handbook of Christian Apologetics)

"What, unless biological science is a mass of errors, is the cause of human intelligence and vigour? Hardship and freedom: conditions under which the active, strong, and subtle survive and the weaker go to the wall; conditions that put a premium upon the loyal alliance of capable men, upon self-restraint, patience, and decision. And the institution of the family, and the emotions that arise therein, the fierce jealousy, the tenderness for offspring, parental self-devotion, all found their justification and support in the imminent dangers of the young."
— H.G. Wells (The Time Machine)

"كثير من يفكرون ان امرآ ما هوالصحيح
وهكذا يتحول الامر الى صحيح"
— Paulo Coello

"I believe, Messieurs, in loyalty---to one's friends and one's family and one's caste."
— Agatha Christie (Murder on the Orient Express)

"We have been told over and over that "you can't change human nature," but the study of emic realities shows, quite the contraty, that almost anything can become "human nature" if society defines it as such."
— Robert Anton Wilson

"...I take as a point of departure the possibility and desirability of a fundamentally different form of society--call it communism, if you will--in which men and women, freed from the pressures of scarcity and from the insecurity of everyday existence under capitalism, shape their own lives. Collectively they decide who, how, when, and what shall be produced."
— Michael Burawoy (Manufacturing Consent: Changes in the Labor Process Under Monopoly Capitalism)

"False fears are a plague, a modern plague!"
— Michael Crichton (State of Fear)

"People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have corpses in their mouths."
— Raoul Vaneigem (Revolution of Everyday Life)