“Humans cannot live without illusions. For the men and women of today, an irrational faith in progress may be the only antidote to nihilism. Without the hope that the future will be better than the past, they could not go on.” ― John Gray

“My tunes often deal with a moral crisis. I often feel myself a part of such a crisis and try to relate it in song. There’s a line in a poem I wrote that sums this up perfectly: ‘My betrayals are so fresh they still come with explanations.’" ~ Leonard Cohen

It is easy to boast of victory over ancient oppression, but what if victory has been gained at the price of an even greater subjection to the forces of the artificial necessity of the technical society which has come to dominate our lives? --Jacques Ellul

“Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.” —Bertrand Russell

“Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping.” ~ Hubert Reeves

It's a lonely world of frightened people. ~ Bukowski

“True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country.” -Kurt Vonnegut

"As a people we have become obsessed with Health. There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body." ~

“I know that without these great writers’ holy words seared into my brain, I would most likely have ended up chained to a wall in Camarillo State Hospital, zapped beyond recognition, or dead by misadventure.” — Johnny Depp

Progress is a pure illusion, it occurs only in the sphere of matter, but the spirit undeviatingly degrades. What our contemporaries consider as achievements are actually shameful vices… The end of the modern world is just the end of an illusion. — René Guénon

“Life, after all, is but one great insomnia and there is a lucid half-awakeness about everything we think or do.” ~ Fernando Pessoa

"What threatens us today is fear. .. Our danger is the forces in the world today which are trying to use man’s fear to rob him of his individuality, his soul, trying to reduce him to an unthinking mass." —William Faulkner

“Active men are usually lacking in higher activity — I mean individual activity. They are active as officials, businessmen, scholars, that is, as generic beings, but not as… unique men. In this respect they are lazy." —Nietzsche

Jack Kerouac’s great book ‘On the Road’ was published on this day In 1957. “’I read ‘On the Road’ in maybe 1959. It changed my life like it changed everyone else’s.” —Bob Dylan

“Puzzlement and doubt are, however, already crimes in the totalitarian state. The mind that is open for questions is open for dissent. In the totalitarian regime the doubting, inquisitive, and imaginative mind has to be suppressed. The totalitarian slave is only allowed to

"It's for the greater good if I smoke a joint and calm down." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

“The ancients, to awake from life, turned to death. The moderns flee from death in order not to awake, and take pains not even to think of it. Which are the more ‘practical’? Those who compare earthly life to sleep and wait for the miracle of the awakening, or those who see in

The truth does not require your participation to exist. Bullshit does. — Terence McKenna

“Alcohol makes other people less tedious, and food less bland, and can help provide what the Greeks called entheos, or the slight buzz of inspiration when reading or writing… Visiting today's Iran, I was delighted to find that citizens made a point of defying the clerical ban

“Generation of Swine.”