#cia

Ah, Sir, a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet. And the man who carries this mirror in his pack will be accused by you of being immoral! His mirror shews the mire, and you blame the mirror! Rather blame that high road upon which the puddle lies, still more the inspector of roads who allows the water to gather and the puddle to form. ↗

— Stendhal

#novels #satire #social-criticism #satire

a politician is an arse upon which everyone has sat except a man ↗

— E.E. Cummings

#poems #poetry #politicians #politics #satire

In all her intercourse with society, however, there was nothing that made her feel as if she belonged to it... She stood apart from mortal interests, yet close beside them, like a ghost that revisits the familiar fireside, and can no longer make itself seen or felt. ↗

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

#society #solitude #anxiety

I see at intervals the glance of a curious sort of bird through the close set bars of a cage: a vivid, restless, resolute captive is there; were it but free, it would soar cloud-high. ↗

— Charlotte Brontë

#confidence #self-esteem #social-anxiety #anxiety

Know yourselves- be infertile and let the earth be silent after ye. ↗

— Peter Wessel Zapffe

#existencialism #pessimism #pessimism

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state as we may hope, than the Caucasian and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla. ↗

— Charles Darwin

#darwinism #negro #negroes #population-control #racial-superiority

Of all the problems which will have to be faced in the future, in my opinion, the most difficult will be those concerning the treatment of the inferior races of mankind. ↗

— Leonard Darwin

#eugenics #evolution #population-control #racial-superiority #racism

State ownership! It leads only to absurd and monstrous conclusions; state ownership means state monopoly, concentrated in the hands of one party and its adherents, and that state brings only ruin and bankruptcy to all. ↗

— Benito Mussolini

#economics #fascism #monopoly #politics #socialism

It is the power of the mind to be unconquerable. ↗

— Lucius Annaeus Seneca

#dissociation #mind #stoicism #transcendence #zen

Beyond the queues, the vacancy screens listed jobs in a multitude of languages. Invariably, they were low-paid and short-term dead-ends. Nearby, people in headphones sat at a bank of machines: the blind and the illiterate force-fed with ‘opportunities’ by soothing machine voices. On the far wall, in large print, a poster declared: BEGGARS CANNOT BE CHOOSERS. ↗

— Mark Cantrell

#science-fiction #social-justice #totalitarian-system-mechanisms #unemployment #welfare