Alexander > Alexander's Quotes

“You must know the story of how the race of ancient days reached the stars, and how they bargained away all the wild half of themselves to do so, so that they no longer cared for the taste of the pale wind, no for love or lust, nor to make new songs nor to sing old ones, nor for any of the other animal things they believed they had brought with them out of the rain forests al the bottom of time--though in fact, so my uncle told me, those things brought them”
― Gene Wolfe, The Sword of the Lictor

“We love dogs and eat cows not because dogs and cows are fundamentally different--cows, like dogs, have feelings, preferences, and consciousness--but because our perception of them is different.”
― Melanie Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism

“The path of the norm is the path of least resistance; it is the route we take when we're on auto-pilot and don't even realize we're following a course of action that we haven't consciously chosen. Most people who eat meat have no idea that they're behaving in accordance with the tenets of a system that has defined many of their values, preferences, and behaviors. What they call 'free choice' is, in fact, the result of a narrowly obstructed set of options that have been chosen for them. They don't realize, for instance, that they have been taught to value human life so far above certain forms of nonhuman life that it seems appropriate for their taste preferences to supersede other species' preference for survival.”
― Melanie Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism

“Have you ever noticed that, though we breed, raise, and kill ten billion animals per year, most of us never see even a single part of the process of meat production?”
― Melanie Joy, Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism

“we should instead substitute a simple notion of existence and allow that things come into and go out of existence. When present, they are real. After that, they are not.”
― Stephen Mumford, Metaphysics: A Very Short Introduction

“The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.”
― Carl Sagan

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
― Carl Sagan

“The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.”
― Carl Sagan

“The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us -- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Understanding is a kind of ecstasy”
― Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science

“The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we've learned most of what we know. Recently, we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“...there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“Before I leave, the Eurotrash girl tells me she likes my gazelleskin wallet. I tell her I would like to tit-fuck her and then maybe cut her arms off, but the music, George Michael singing “Faith,” is too loud and she can’t hear me. Back upstairs I find Patricia where I left her,”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface was all that anyone found meaning in … this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged …”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“Did I ever tell you that I want to wear a big yellow smiley-face mask and then put on the CD version of Bobby McFerrin’s ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ and then take a girl and a dog—a collie, a chow, a sharpei, it doesn’t really matter—and then hook up this transfusion pump, this IV set, and switch their blood, you know, pump the dog’s blood into the hardbody and vice versa, did I ever tell you this?”
― Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho

“Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness.”
― Italo Calvino

“Do we really lack the delicacy to let God die quietly, on his own, like a dog?”
― Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism

“There is no God and we are his prophets.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“When you die it's the same as if everybody else did too.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Perhaps in the world's destruction it would be possible at last to see how it was made. Oceans, mountains. The ponderous counterspectacle of things ceasing to be. The sweeping waste, hydroptic and coldly secular. The silence.”
― Cormac McCarthy, The Road

“Even though there is something out there that is not the world-for-us, and even though we can name it the world-in-itself, this latter constitutes a horizon for thought, always receding just beyond the bounds of intelligibility.”
― Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy

“If the supernatural in a conventional sense is no longer possible, what remains after the “death of God” is an occulted, hidden world. Philosophically speaking, the enigma we face is how to confront this world, without immediately presuming that it is identical to the world-for-us (the world of science and religion), and without simply disparaging it as an irretrievable and inaccessible world-in-itself.”
― Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet: Horror of Philosophy

“I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walking

“Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walking

“What is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walking

“Which is the best man to deal with,-he who knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, or he who really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all?”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walking

“The walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated hours …but it is itself the enterprise and adventure of the day.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walking