#th

Uncouth, clannish, lumbering about the confines of Space and Time with a puzzled expression on his face and a handful of things scavenged on the way from gutters, interglacial littorals, sacked settlements and broken relationships, the Earth-human has no use for thinking except in the service of acquisition. He stands at every gate with one hand held out and the other behind his back, inventing reasons why he should be let in. From the first bunch of bananas, his every sluggish fit or dull fleabite of mental activity has prompted more, more; and his time has been spent for thousands of years in the construction and sophistication of systems of ideas that will enable him to excuse, rationalize, and moralize the grasping hand. His dreams, those priceless comic visions he has of himself as a being with concerns beyond the material, are no more than furtive cannibals stumbling round in an uncomfortable murk of emotion, trying to eat each other. Politics, religion, ideology — desperate, edgy attempts to shift the onus of responsibility for his own actions: abdications. His hands have the largest neural representation in the somesthetic cortex, his head the smallest; but he's always trying to hide the one behind the other. ↗

— M. John Harrison

#greed #human-nature #thought #dreams

That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#anarchy #authority #politics #authority

Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I ask for. As a historian, I know what can be offered. ↗

— Ernst Jünger

#anarchy #authority #ernst-jünger #history #anarchism

If the jury have no right to judge of the justice of a law of the government, they plainly can do nothing to protect the people against the oppressions of the government; for there are no oppressions which the government may not authorize by law. ↗

— Lysander Spooner

#authorize #government #judge #jury #justice

The truth, indeed, is out—but the ears to hear it and the minds to learn from it seem to have been atrophied by a cultivated ignorance and a nearly total loss of critical insight. ↗

— Murray Bookchin

#history #truth #wikileaks #anarchism

I am an anarch – not because I despise authority, but because I need it. Likewise, I am not a nonbeliever, but a man who demands something worth believing in. ↗

— Ernst Jünger

#authority #beliefs #ernst-jünger #anarchism

‎Some of my finest hours have been spent on my back veranda, smoking hemp and observing as far as my eye can see. ↗

— Thomas Jefferson

#marijuana #pot-smoking #thomas-jefferson #verenda #observation

Wolves eat coyotes," Gordon said[...] If he weren't an old man, I had some rude things I could have said to that. "Yes," observed Adam blandly. "I do." Yep. That was the one that came to mind. And he didn't even blush when he said it. Maybe Gordon would miss the double entendre. But he grinned cheerfully at Adam. ↗

— Patricia Briggs

#werewolf #observation

Alive or dead, the truth won't rest. Rise up while you can. ↗

— Mira Grant

#truth #zombies #zombies

Laughter is poison to fear. ↗

— George R.R. Martin

#catelyn-stark #fear #george-r-r-martin #happiness #laughter