#pit

Traditional hedonism...was based on the direct experience of pleasure: wine, women and song; sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll; or whatever the local variant. The problem, from a capitalist perspective, is that there are inherent limits to all this. People become sated, bored...Modern self-illusory hedonism solves this dilemma because here, what one is really consuming are fantasies and day-dreams about what having a certain product would be like. ↗

— David Graeber

#capitalism #redefining-consumption #dreams

The most pitiful among men is he who turns his dreams into silver and gold. ↗

— Khalil Gibran

#among #gold #his #into #men

...all these things were part of the business of dreams. He had learned not to laugh at the advertisements offering to teach writing, cartooning, engineering, to add inches to the biceps and to develop the bust ↗

— Nathanael West

#capitalism #commercialization #conformity #disillusionment #self-perception

When one has suffered or fears suffering, one pities those who suffer; but when one is suffering, one pities only oneself. ↗

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#education

On my license, it says I'm an organ donor, but the truth is I'd consider being an organ martyr. I'm sure I'm worth a lot more dead than alive - the sum of the parts equal more than the whole. I wonder who might wind up walking around with my liver, my lungs, even my eyeballs. I wonder what poor asshole would get stuck with whatever it is in me that passes for a heart. ↗

— Jodi Picoult

#self-pity #self-sacrifice #equality

[There] are people who make a complete and utter mockery of 'democracy' and 'equality' - they're the casualties of the primitive rules of competition which run our society, and the welfare state just keeps them alive. That's all. ↗

— Michael Palin

#competition #democracy #equality #poor #poverty

At times there's something so precise and mathematically chilling about nationalism. Build a dam to take away water AWAY from 40 million people. Build a dam to pretend to BRING water to 40 million people. Who are these gods that govern us? Is there no limit to their powers? ↗

— Arundhati Roy

#capitalism #corporations #dam #economics #environmental-degradation

Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door. ↗

— William Blake

#innocence #pity #william-blake #experience

We'd been assured it wouldn't be painful, though she might experience 'discomfort,' a term beloved of the medical profession that seems to be a synonym for agony that isn't yours. ↗

— Lionel Shriver

#hospital #medicine #pain #experience

Experience has taught us that material wants know no natural bounds, that they will expand without end unless we consciously restrain them. Capitalism rests precisely on this endless expansion of wants. That is why, for all its success, it remains so unloved. It has given us wealth beyond measure, but has taken away the chief benefit of wealth: the consciousness of having enough. ↗

— Robert Skidelsky Edward Skidelsky

#economics #wants #wealth #experience