See, in addition, the Proust page (also contains lyrical quotes) and the Thoreau page.

"Consumerism is a system that links the desires of those without awareness to the actions of those without scruples to produce destruction without precedence."

- Mark Burch

"To differ from the multitude in thought and action is the sign of the superior person."

 - Tibetan Buddhist saying

"Those in power see changing consciousness as something they do not wish to do, because they will lose control. Therefore, they tend to bar that from happening, partly out of their own fear and inability to alter where they stand and how they think....by having this degree of control, by being able to seize and confiscate things and arrest people and put people you don't like into prison, you're gaining power, money and control. And that is the overwhelming drive of anybody who is in authority -- to get as much control and money and power as you can. The war on drugs is providing an unparalleled example of a mechanism for doing just that."

 - Alexander Shulgin

"Insight that dawns slowly seems to me to have more lasting effects than a fitful idealism, which is unlikely to hold out for long."

 - C.G. Jung from 'The Undiscovered Self'

"The city is the organization of silence and isolation, humanity paralyzed as a perpetual motion machine."

"Tourism: The process by which a space that has not been allocated for production or housing (i.e. the eradication of real life) is turned into a place where fake life can be had--for a price."

"A curious effect of the development of rapid transit systems is that as the distance between communities closes, the distance between individuals within those communities widens."

- http://deoxy.org/ct/alienation.htm

""Small-souled men"? Whew! Does that phrase ever run against the grain of American democracy! And yet, leaving aside its offensive, archaic sexism ....... I would suggest that it is only because we all tacitly do believe in something like Huneker's shocking distinction that most of us are willing to eat animals of one sort or another, to smash flies, swat mosquitoes, fight bacteria with antibiotics and so forth. We generally concur that "men" such as a cow, a turkey, a frog and a fish all possess some spark of consciousness, some kind of primitive "soul", but by God, it's a good deal smaller than ours is - and that, no more or no less, is why we "men" feel we have the perfect right to extinguish the dim lights in the heads of these fractionally-souled beasts and to gobble down their once warm and wiggling, now chilled and stilled protoplasm with limitless gusto, and not to feel a trace of guilt while doing so."

 - Douglas R. Hofstadter from the preface to the 20th-anniversary edition of 'Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid'

"Technology is lust removed from nature."

 - Musings from Don deLillo's 'White Noise'

"Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."

 - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"...it is not what one has experienced but what one does with what one has experienced that matters."

 - Aldous Huxley

"There is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community."

 - Oscar Wilde 

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

 - Hunter S. Thompson

"Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule."

  - Friedrich Nietzsche 

"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." 

 - Johan W. von Goethe

"Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men."

  - Thomas Huxley

One meets his destiny often in the road he takes to avoid it.

  - French Proverb

"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."

  - George Orwell

"Ignorance of death is destroying us. Death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything "

 - Saul Bellow from 'The Dean's December'

 - Jean-Paul Sartre

"Blasphemy, obscenity, charlatanism, sadistic excess, orgies and the aesthetics of the gutter, these are our moral expedients against stupidity, satiety, intolerance, provincialism, dullness, against the cowardice to bear responsibility, against the sack that eats at the front and shits behind"

 - Otto Mühl, in a letter to Erika Stocker

"Hackers, as a rule, love wordplay and are very conscious and inventive in their use of language. These traits seem to be common in young children, but the conformity-enforcing machine we are pleased to call an educational system bludgeons them out of most of us before adolescence."

 - from the introduction to The New Hacker's Dictionary

"Those who cry out the truth to an indifferent world too often weary, fall silent or come to doubt their own wit"

 - Editor's Foreword from Iris Murdoch's 'The Black Prince'

"...the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men."

 - Leonardo da Vinci

"The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed today,
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
Pleas'd to the last he crops the flow'ry food,
And licks the hand just rais'd to shed his blood."

 - Alexander Pope from 'Essay on Man'

"Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others."

 - Edward Abbey

"The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life."

 - Muhammad Ali

"Happiness is good health and a bad memory."

 - Ingrid Bergman

"A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step."

 - Chinese Proverb

"The best argument against democracy is a five minute talk with the average voter."

 - Winston Churchill

"The superior man is distressed by the limitation of his ability; he is not distressed by the fact that men do not recognize the ability he has."

 - Confucius

"A man who dares to waste an hour of time has not discovered the value of life."

 - Charles Darwin

"The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."

 - Richard Dawkins

"I'm interested in the fact that the less secure a man is, the more likely he is to have extreme prejudice."

 - Clint Eastwood

"Great spirits have often encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."

 - Albert Einstein

"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."

 - Cornelius Tacitus

"Good breeding consists in concealing how much we think of ourselves and how little we think of others"

 - Mark Twain (first discovered by us chalked on a board in a pub in Hampstead)