Quotes

"In this system absolutely no man is secure, and you instinctively know it... You strain every nerve to educate your son and give him advantages. Over whom? Over the son of your neighbor. You are told everylastingly there is room on top. On top of whom? On top of your fellow man." - Eugene Debs

I first heard of Eugene Debs from reading Kurt Vonnegut, who constantly mentioned him. I was thinking about the DebsEbooks twitter account today (it automatically posts quotes at random). There are so many good ones and it was a nice way of propagating his thought. Have you seen anyone doing something similar on mastodon or bluesky?

Dolores Huerta is one of my heroes. When she said this quote, she was organizing farm workers in Arizona, who told her "no se puede" because of a law in the state that almost entirely banned migrate farm workers from unionizing. It's a pretty simple quote, but very powerful. Today, it's probably more associated with former president Obama, who used the English translation during his presidential campaign; however, this has been a common picket line chant during labor strikes since she said it in 1972 and the motto of the United Farm Workers of America

I first read this quote as a kid in the museum that was his former home, it stuck with me. He had been suffering intense pain from a spinal disorder. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Eastman

“How weak, how unpredictable is the human heart!”

—Alfred Kubin, The Other Side

"I have always thought it best to remain extinguished, to spread one's wings like a bird and sit by the sea in solitude."

—Sadeq Hedayat, The Blind Owl

“My mother. I don't think too harshly of her. I know she did all she could not to have me, except of course the one thing, and if she never succeeded in getting me unstuck, it was that fate had earmarked me for less compassionate sewers.”

—Samuel Beckett, Molloy

When I was 4, my world was small And I believed I knew it all But kindergarten made me see That there was more to life than me And as my education grew I kept on getting more confused So by the time I reached 13 I found I didn't know anything It seems to me that as you grow The more you learn, the less you know

“‘Everything that we supposedly live by and supposedly die by – whether it’s religious scriptures or makeshift slogans – all of it is show business. The rise and fall of empires – show business. Science, philosophy, all of the disciplines under the sun, and even the sun itself, as well as all those other clumps of matter wobbling about in the blackness up there –’ he said to me, pointing out the window beside the coffee-shop booth in which we sat, ‘show business, show business, show business.’”


—Thomas Ligotti, Teatro Grottesco

"Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, And yet a third of life is passed in sleep."

—Lord Byron

"We are not nihilistic towards life - it is life that is nihilistic towards us. It is life that denies us, expels us, and kills us. Do we not want to live intensely and forever? Are we the ones denying life? Is it not life that denies us day by day?"

—Julio Cabrera

We don't have to save the world. The world is big enough to look after itself. What we have to be concerned about is whether or not the world we live in will be capable of sustaining us in it.

Douglas Adams

“On the contrary, we freely acknowledge that what remains after the complete abolition of the will is, for all who are still full of will, assuredly nothing. But also conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and denied itself, this very real world of ours, with all its suns and galaxies, is - nothing.”

—Arthur Schopenhauer

C.S. Lewis