#dystopia

The greatest guilt of today is that of people who accept collectivism by moral default; the people who seek protection from the necessity of taking a stand, by refusing to admit to themselves the nature of that which they are accepting; the people who support plans specifically designed to achieve serfdom, but hide behind the empty assertion that they are lovers of freedom, with no concrete meaning attached to the word; the people who believe that the content of ideas need not be examined, that principles need not be defined, and that facts can be eliminated by keeping one's eyes shut. They expect, when they find themselves in a world of bloody ruins and concentration camps, to escape moral responsibility by wailing: "But I didn't mean this! ↗

— Ayn Rand

#design

What would I do without you? I'd die of stress and depression before nature killed me. ↗

— James Dashner

#james-dashner #the-kill-order #nature

That what?" "That I knew i misjudged you. That you love him. I'm not saying In what way. Maybe you don't know yourself. But anyone paying attention could see how much you care about him," he says gently. ↗

— Suzanne Collins

#friendship #grief #loss #friendship

Hear, hear.' Sister Martha hoisted her water glass. 'Let the rigid stick of self-righteousness be dislodged from her very uptight ass.' Father Ramon coughed. 'A-fucking-men,' Loup supplied helpfully. ↗

— Jacqueline Carey

#convent #dystopian #orphanage #toast #men

And it is strange that absence can feel like presence. ↗

— Ally Condie

#ally-condie #crossed #dystopia #dystopian-fiction #page-

I’m thinking ahead, imagining what our lives together would be like once we’re free from this hell and allowed to live and let go. You know? Really let go of our pain and finally enjoy each other … you and me. ↗

— Leslie Lee Sanders

#dystopian-fiction #erotic-romance #gay #gay-romance #glbt-romance

You talk as if a god had made the Machine," cried the other. "I believe that you pray to it when you are unhappy. Men made it, do not forget that. Great men, but men. The Machine is much, but not everything. ↗

— E.M. Forster

#future #machine #science-fiction #men

I never thought it would get this bad. I never thought the Reestablishment would take things so far. They're incinerating culture, the beauty of diversity. The new citizens of our world will be reduced to nothing but numbers, easily interchangeable, easily removable, easily destroyed for disobedience. We have lost our humanity. ↗

— Tahereh Mafi

#humanity #juliette #reestablishment #beauty

So, in the end, above ground you must have the Haves, pursuing pleasure and comfort and beauty, and below ground the Have-nots, the Workers getting continually adapted to the conditions of their labour. Once they were there, they would no doubt have to pay rent, and not a little of it, for the ventilation of their caverns; and if they refused, they would starve or be suffocated for arrears. Such of them as were so constituted as to be miserable and rebellious would die; and, in the end, the balance being permanent, the survivors would become as well adapted to the conditions of underground life, and as happy in their way, as the Upper-world people were to theirs. ↗

— H.G. Wells

#dystopia #prophesy #science-fiction #beauty

But then, the sky! Blue, untainted by a single cloud (the Ancientes had such barbarous tastes given that their poets could have been inspired by such stupid, sloppy, silly-lingering clumps of vapour). I love - and i'm certain that i'm not mistaken if i say we love - skies like this, sterile and flawless! On days like these, the whole world is blown from the same shatterproof, everlasting glass as the glass of the Green Wall and of all our structures. On days like these, you can see to the very blue depths of things, to their unknown surfaces, those marvelous expressions of mathematical equality - which exist in even the most usual and everyday objects. ↗

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

#equality