#existence

Opinions are to the vast apparatus of social existence what oil is to machines: one does not go up to a turbine and pour machine oil over it; one applies a little to hidden spindles and joints that one has to know. ↗

— Walter Benjamin

#applies #does #existence #go #hidden

What this country needs what every country needs occasionally is a good hard bloody war to revive the vice of patriotism on which its existence as a nation depends. ↗

— Ambrose Bierce

#country #depends #every #existence #good

A universe that came from nothing in the big bang will disappear into nothing at the big crunch. Its glorious few zillion years of existence not even a memory. ↗

— Paul Davies

#big #big bang #came #crunch #disappear

All treaties between great states cease to be binding when they come in conflict with the struggle for existence. ↗

— Otto von Bismarck

#binding #cease #come #conflict #existence

By placing discretion in the hands of an official to grant or deny a license, such a statute creates a threat of censorship that by its very existence chills free speech. ↗

— Harry A. Blackmun

#chills #creates #deny #discretion #existence

If this was the true self it was marvelous and what’s more it seemed never to change but always to pick up from the last stop, to continue in the same vein, a vein I had struck when I was a child and went down in the street for the first time alone and there frozen into the dirty ice of the gutter lay a dead cat, the first time I had looked at death and grasped it. From that moment I knew what it was to be isolated: every object, every living thing and every dead thing led its independent existence. My thoughts too led to an independent existence. ↗

— Henry Miller

#existence #life #nihilism #tropic-of-capricorn #change

It is on the acceptance or rejection of the theory of the Unity of all in Nature, in its ultimate Essence, that mainly rests the belief or unbelief in the existence around us of other conscious beings besides the Spirits of the Dead. ↗

— H. P. Blavatsky

#around #beings #belief #besides #conscious

Even in our day, science suspects beyond the Polar seas, at the very circle of the Arctic Pole, the existence of a sea which never freezes and a continent which is ever green. ↗

— H. P. Blavatsky

#beyond #circle #continent #day #even

It is living and ceasing to live that are imaginary solutions. Existence is elsewhere. ↗

— Andre Breton

#elsewhere #existence #imaginary #live #living