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

"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)

"Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea. "
— Guy Debord

"Young people everywhere have been allowed to choose between love and a garbage disposal unit. Everywhere they have chosen the garbage disposal unit."
— Guy Debord

"Before I got married I had six theories about raising children; now, I have six children and no theories."
— John Wilmot

"In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation. "
— Guy Debord

"There is no rest for the humble except in despising the great, whose only thought of the people is inspired by self-interest or sadism."
— Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Journey to the End of the Night)

"Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal."
— Guy Debord

"All reality is a game. Physics at its most fundamental, the very fabric of our universe, results directly from the interaction of certain fairly simple rules, and chance; the same description may be applied to the best, most elefant and both intellectually and aesthetically satisfying games. By being unknowable, by resulting from events which, at the sub-atomic level, cannot be fully predicted, the future remains makkeable, and retains the possibility of change, the hope of coming to prevail; victory, to use an unfashionable word. In this, the future is a game; time is one of the rules. Generally, all the best mechanistic games - those which can be played in any sense "perfectly", such as a grid, Prallian scope, 'nkraytle, chess, Farnic dimensions - can be traced to civilisations lacking a realistic view of the universe (let alone the reality). They are also, I might add, invariably pre-machine-sentience societies.

The very first-rank games acknowledge the element of chance, even if they rightly restrict raw luck. To attempt to construct a game on any other lines, no matter how complicated and subtle the rules are, and regardless of the scale and differentiation of the playing volume and the variety of the powers and attibutes of the pieces, is inevitably to schackle oneself to a conspectus which is not merely socially but techno-philosophically lagging several ages behind our own. As a historical exercise it might have some value, As a work of the intellect, it's just a waste of time. If you want to make something old-fashioned, why not build a wooden sailing boat, or a steam engine? They're just as complicated and demanding as a mechanistic game, and you'll keep fit at the same time."
— Iain M. Banks (The Player of Games)

"It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id."
— Gilles Deleuze (Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia)

"The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable."
— H.L. Mencken

"There is nothing more natural than to consider everything as starting from oneself, chosen as the center of the world; one finds oneself thus capable of condemning the world without even wanting to hear its deceitful chatter."
— Guy Debord

"[According to 1348 theorists, poisoning of Christian water by Jews was the cause of Black Death.]

Even the poison used to contaminate the Christian water supply was described in meticulous detail. It was "about the size of an egg," except when it was the "size of a nut" or a "large nut," "a fist" or "two fists"- and it came packaged in "a leather pouch," except when it was packaged in "linen cloth," "a rag," or a "paper coronet"; and the poison was variously made from lizards, frogs, and spiders- when it was not made from the hearts of Christians and from Holy Communion wafers."
— John Kelly (The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time)

"A theory is no more like a fact than a photograph is like a person."
— Ed Howe

"There is no instance of a country having benefited from prolonged warfare. "
— Sun Tzu (The Art of War)

"Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve."
— Karl Popper

"The amazing thing is that chaotic systems don't always stay chaotic," Ben said, leaning on the gate. "Sometimes they spontaneously reorganize themselves into an orderly structure."

"They suddenly become less chaotic?" I said, wishing that would happen at HiTek.

"No, that's the thing. They become more and more chaotic until they reach some sort of chaotic critical mass. When that happens, they spontaneously reorganize themselves at a higher equilibrium level. It's called self-organized criticality."
— Connie Willis (Bellwether)

"Style in painting is the same as in writing, a power over materials, whether words or colors, by which conceptions or sentiments are conveyed.
"
— Joshua Reynolds

"'They believed that prediction was just a function of keeping track of things. If you knew enough, you could predict anything. That's been cherished scientific belief since Newton.'
'And?'
'Chaos theory throws it right out the window.'"
— Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park)

"Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value the may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder."
— Carl Sagan

"In reality the universe has no geometry."
— Kedar Joshi (Superultramodern Science And Philosophy)

"Das Spiel ist der Inbegriff demokratischer Lebensart. Es ist die letzt uns verbliebene Seinsform. Der Spieltrieb ersetzt die Religiosität, beherrscht die Börse, die Politik, die Gerichtssäle, die Pressewelt, und er ist es, der uns seit Gottes Tod mental am Leben hält."
— Juli Zeh (Spieltrieb.)

""It often seems to me that's all detective work is, wiping out your false starts and beginning again."
"Yes, it is very true, that. And it is just what some people will not do. They conceive a certain theory, and everything has to fit into that theory. If one little fact will not fit it, they throw it aside. But it is always the facts that will not fit in that are significant.""
— Agatha Christie (Death on the Nile)

"Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough---as most wrong theories are!"
— H.G. Wells (The Time Machine)

"Ein Tier muss an nichts glauben außer an den unsinnigen Sinn des Überlebens. Allein, der pragmatische Mensch unterscheidet sich vom pragmatischen Tier in einer bedeutenden Einzelheit. Sein Spieltrieb erlischt nicht mit dem Eintritt der Geschlechtsreife. Sein Spieltrieb lebt ewig."
— Juli Zeh (Spieltrieb.)

"Nothing tires me more than what people think and nothing excites me more than what people do."
— Rosendo Morales

"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)

"Historically, we thus find ourselves faced with a sort of great divide in knowing how to be in the world; on the one hand, there is the original nomad for whom the journey, the being's trajectory, are dominant. On the other, there is the sedentary man for whom subject and object prevail, movement towards the immovable, the inert, characterizing the sedentary urban 'civilian' in contrast to the 'warrior' nomad."
— Paul Virilio

"The ambition of much of today's literary theory seems to be to find ways to read literature without imagination."
— Charles Simic (The Unemployed Fortune-Teller: Essays and Memoirs)