"What limits people is that they don't have the
fucking nerve or imagination to star in their own movie, let alone
direct it."

Tom Robbins

Ill fares the land, to hast’ning ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay…”
– Oliver Goldsmith, The Deserted Village

“Have we not seen, at pleasure’s lordly call,
The smiling long frequented village fall?
While, scourg’d by famine from the smiling land
The mournful peasant leads his humble band;
And while he sinks, without one arm to save,
The country blooms – a garden and a grave…

Ill fares the land, to hast’ning ills a prey,
Where wealth accumulates, and men decay…”

"...the big trouble with dumb bastards is that they are too dumb to believe there is such a thing as being smart." -- Kurt Vonnegut

"Now, from America, empty indifferent things are pouring across, sham things, dummy life. . . . A house, in the American sense, an American apple or a grapevine over there, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which went the hopes and reflections of our forefathers ... Live things, things that lived -- that are conscious of us -- are running out and can no longer be replaced. We are perhaps the last to have known such things."
--Rainer Maria Rilke

"Many times in our travels I have lost everything but the clothes I was wearing and Lizbeth. The things I find in Dumpsters, the love letters and rag dolls of so many lives, remind me of this lesson. Now I hardly pick up a thing without envisioning the time when I will cast it aside...

"Anyway, I find my desire to grab for the gaudy bauble has been largely sated. I think this is an attitude I share with the very wealthy--we both know that there is plenty more where what we have came from. Between us are the rat-race million who nightly scavenge the cable channels looking for they know not what.

"I am sorry for them."

Travels with Lizbeth by Lars Eighner

"The purpose of welfare systems is not to help poor people. If the object were to help poor people, then that would be most surely done by giving money to poor people. But that is not the idea, as our tax code proves. If you give twenty dollars to someone on the street, there is not a way in the world you can deduct that donation from your taxes. To claim a deducation you must give the money to an organization that employs clerks and administrators and social workers and that, more than likely, puts nothing material into the hands of the poor... When the agency makes an accounting of the good it has done the poor, it will count the money it spent on paying social workers to hold the hands of the poor the same as money, if any, spent on bread. The purpose of welfare systems is to provide jobs for social workers and bureaucrats. I told Billy he should be grateful to have a job in the poverty industry, but to ask that such a job be meaningful is to ask too much."

Travels with Lizbeth by Lars Eighner

“I despise the cowardly clinging to life, purely for the sake of life, that seems so deeply ingrained in the American temperament,”

Christopher Lasch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Lasch
http://www.tnr.com/article/jeremiah-american-style-0?page=0,0

The Christian resolve to find the world evil and ugly has made the world evil and ugly.

Nietzsche

The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion, but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do.

Samuel P. Huntington

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_P._Huntington#Quotations

"At least the citizens of the former Soviet Union knew that their news was bullshit".

from blog: http://americathegrimtruth.wordpress.com/2010/04/05/america-the-grim-truth

The French moral philosopher Albert Camus argued that we are separated from each other. Our lives are meaningless. We cannot influence fate. We will all die and our individual being will be obliterated. And yet Camus wrote that “one of the only coherent philosophical positions is revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his obscurity. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope. That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it.”

“A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object,” Camus warned. “But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.”

The rebel, for Camus, stands with the oppressed—the unemployed workers being thrust into impoverishment and misery by the corporate state, the Palestinians in Gaza, the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the disappeared who are held in our global black sites, the poor in our inner cities and depressed rural communities, immigrants and those locked away in our prison system. And to stand with them does not mean to collaborate with parties, such as the Democrats, who can mouth the words of justice while carrying out acts of oppression. It means open and direct defiance.

The power structure and its liberal apologists dismiss the rebel as impractical and see the rebel’s outsider stance as counterproductive. They condemn the rebel for expressing anger at injustice. The elites and their apologists call for calm and patience. They use the hypocritical language of spirituality, compromise, generosity and compassion to argue that the only alternative is to accept and work with the systems of power. The rebel, however, is beholden to a moral commitment that makes it impossible to stand with the power elite. The rebel refuses to be bought off with foundation grants, invitations to the White House, television appearances, book contracts, academic appointments or empty rhetoric. The rebel is not concerned with self-promotion or public opinion. The rebel knows that, as Augustine wrote, hope has two beautiful daughters, anger and courage—anger at the way things are and the courage to see that they do not remain the way they are. The rebel is aware that virtue is not rewarded. The act of rebellion defines itself.

Chris Hedges:-

http://www.truthdig.com/report/page2/calling_all_rebels_20100308/

"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality".

- Dante

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/26260

Of that which one cannot speak, one should remain silent.

- Wittgenstein

Steal this book

http://www.tenant.net/Community/steal/steal.html

Who narrates governs

Regressives understand in ways that progressives tend to be clueless about, the simple idea that, who narrates governs

David Michael Green

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/26001