[sciborg2]

"The values of contemporary capitalism are drawn out into a suffocating eternity: it was always like this, and it always will be; the Flintstones and the Jetsons were, after all, basically the same people. But meanwhile those strange shapes and patterns on the cave walls still glimmer, beckoning us in — if we knew how to understand them — to a world impossibly different to our own."
    -Sam Kriss

[sciborg2]

"we’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images.... What a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying."

-Gilles Deleuze

"Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it's permitted, but no one is capable of it anymore. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to think, and this they consider freedom."

–Oswald Spengler

[sciborg2]

"An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something, which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm."

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

"MYSELF: I know why it mattered to you. Because if the sense of your world had been lost, then the mountains of skulls piled in the ossuaries of your temples would have had no sense either, and your altar stones would have become no more than butcher's slabs stained with the blood of innocent human beings!

MONTEZUMA: Now look with the same eyes upon your own carnage...."

-Italo Calvino interviews Montezuma

=-=-=

One cannot ignore the marginal, the "little", the liminal, the "zara hatke" [somewhat odd], the woman we see only when we squint a little -- in these cracks may rebellion, and the promise of a better tomorrow, be found.
  -Qalandar

[sciborg2]

"An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something, which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm."

Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

"MYSELF: I know why it mattered to you. Because if the sense of your world had been lost, then the mountains of skulls piled in the ossuaries of your temples would have had no sense either, and your altar stones would have become no more than butcher's slabs stained with the blood of innocent human beings!

MONTEZUMA: Now look with the same eyes upon your own carnage...."

-Italo Calvino interviews Montezuma

=-=-=

One cannot ignore the marginal, the "little", the liminal, the "zara hatke" [somewhat odd], the woman we see only when we squint a little -- in these cracks may rebellion, and the promise of a better tomorrow, be found.
  -Qalandar

Above all, some of them, a mere handful in any generation perhaps, loved -- they loved the animals about them, the song of the wind, the soft voices..... On the flat surfaces of cave walls the three dimensions of the outside world took animal shape and form.

Here -- not with the ax, not with the bow -- man fumbled at the door of his true kingdom. Here, hidden in times of trouble behind silent brows, against the man with the flint, waited St. Francis of the birds -- the lovers, the men who are still forced to walk warily among their kind.
-Loren Eisley, 'The Inner Galaxy'

[sciborg2]

"Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a 'secondary rationalization' of instinctual drives....Unmasking [of hidden motives] should stop as soon as one is confronted with what is authentic and genuine in man, e.g., man's desire for a life that is as meaningful as possible. If it does not stop then, the only thing the 'unmasking psychologist' really unmasks is his own 'hidden motive' -- namely, his unconscious need to debase and depreciate what is genuine, what is genuinely human, in man."
  - Viktor Frankl

[TaoHorror]

"Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a 'secondary rationalization' of instinctual drives....Unmasking [of hidden motives] should stop as soon as one is confronted with what is authentic and genuine in man, e.g., man's desire for a life that is as meaningful as possible. If it does not stop then, the only thing the 'unmasking psychologist' really unmasks is his own 'hidden motive' -- namely, his unconscious need to debase and depreciate what is genuine, what is genuinely human, in man."
  - Viktor Frankl

This is a particularly good one, Sci