C

“The erasure of the personality is the fatal accompaniment to an existence which is concretely submissive to the spectacle’s rules, ever more removed from the possibility of authentic experience and thus from the discovery of individual preferences. Paradoxically, permanent self-denial is the price the
individual pays for the tiniest bit of social status. Such an existence demands a fluid fidelity, a succession of continually disappointing commitments to false products. It is a matter of running hard to keep up with the inflation of devalued signs of life. Drugs help one to come to terms with this state of affairs, while madness allows one to escape from it.”
― Guy Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle

“Suffering - curious as it may sound to you - is the means by which we exist, because it is the only means by which we become conscious of existing; and the remembrance of suffering in the past is necessary to us as the warrant, the evidence, of our continued identity. Between myself and the memory of joy lies a gulf no less deep than that between myself and joy in its actuality.”
― Oscar Wilde

“To talk of rational beings apart from man is as if we attempted to talk of heavy beings apart from bodies.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, The Basis of Morality

“If universal building codes and protections for children with pre-existing conditions can be presented as assaults on American values and the rule of law - and reported upon as such in major media that turn a promise of balance into an excuse for airing nonsense - then the debate has been dumbed down to such an extent that the right has already won, no matter what the result on election day.”
― John Nichols, The "S" Word: A Short History of an American Tradition...Socialism