Eric

“Some are born mad, some achieve madness, and some have madness thrust upon 'em.”
― Emilie Autumn, The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls

“It's not Americans I find annoying; it's Americanism: a social disease of the postindustrial world that must inevitably infect each of the mercantile nations in turn, and is called 'American' only because your nation is the most advanced case of the malady, much as one speaks of Spanish flu, or Japanese Type-B encephalitis. It's symptoms are a loss of work ethic, a shrinking of inner resources, and a constant need for external stimulation, followed by spiritual decay and moral narcosis. You can recognize the victim by his constant efforts to get in touch with himself, to believe his spiritual feebleness is an interesting psychological warp, to construe his fleeing from responsibility as evidence that he and his life are uniquely open to new experiences. In the later stages, the sufferer is reduced to seeking that most trivial of human activities: fun.”
― Trevanian, Shibumi

“you can’t just move backward. You can’t push the chicken back into the egg, wine back into the grape, the boy back into the womb. If you want the baby to let go of your watch, you don’t just try to explain that he ought to do it—you offer him something he would rather have.”
― Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves

“Generalization is flawed thinking only when applied to individuals. It is the most accurate way to describe the mass, the Wad. And yours is a democracy, a dictatorship of the Wad.”
― Trevanian, Shibumi