Mark Romel > Quotes

“God is the ultimate fantasy of the Superiority Principle. Milton’s Lucifer, the ultimate individual, the most romantic figure in all of literature, is the Superiority Principle made flesh. Lord Byron loved him. Cesare Borgia came close. Caesar or nothing, as he liked to say. Every individual loves the Prince of Darkness! As Milton declared, ‘To reign is worth ambition though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.’ That is the philosophy of the individual, the motto of the Superman.”
― Mark Romel

“I refuse to share the thoughts of the ordinary. I am the outsider not because they expelled me but because I expelled them! I have rejected the world. I am contra mundum. I have climbed on top of the moon and deflected the earth from its path. I have put out the fires of the sun with just one of my tears.”
― Mark Romel, The Mistletoe Murders: A Nietzschean Murder Mystery

“Revenge is a color, a color that never fades. A beautiful color. It is the color of the sky at dawn when lovers are hauled out of their beds and garroted in the middle of the street; the color of the ancient sea when Noah’s Ark has been breached below the water line; the color of Jacob’s Ladder as it collapses while Jacob has climbed only half-way to heaven. But it is more than that, much more. It contains the pigment that colors the eyes of the lovers that betray you.”
― Mark Romel, The Mistletoe Murders: A Nietzschean Murder Mystery

“We need a rebirth of true democracy, followed by a transition to the meritocracy associated with Plato’s Republic. We need the most talented in charge, not the richest. We need a Sparta of the mind, a nation led by mental warriors who can change the world with their genius.”
― Mark Romel, Theresa May: The Bankruptcy of British Politics

“Anyone who engages in Buddhist meditation is subscribing to the bizarre doctrine that they do not actually exist, that they have no soul, that they are not a Self. They are agreeing with the extraordinary proposition that Nature - inexplicably - deals in creating pointless illusions.”
― Mark Romel, The False Awakeners: Illusory Enlightenment

“I feel too much. To feel too much is unhealthy. But an excess of sensitivity is the paint that colors the tormented castle of genius. All human greatness is pathological in origin. My suffering breathes life into me, more and more life, more life than I can deal with. It allows me to travel to places I might never otherwise have visited: places in the mind, in the soul, in the mythic layers of unspoken fears. It is the source of my secret strength. It is a strength of which even Nimue cannot deprive me.”
― Mark Romel, The Mistletoe Murders: A Nietzschean Murder Mystery

“When the release never comes, it turns into torture. There is nothing worse than to be perpetually on the verge of heaven, while trapped always in hell.”
― Mark Romel, The Mistletoe Murders: A Nietzschean Murder Mystery

“I will take you by the hand and lead you through all the stages of hell. All of us will flinch as we glimpse the spectral lakes of napalm, full of the charred souls of the damned. But we must go on. There is no way back.”
― Mark Romel, The Mistletoe Murders: A Nietzschean Murder Mystery

“There are seven billion people on this planet. As many as six billion pray and meditate, and never look at a book on reason, logic and math. Imagine if, instead, these six billion people were literate in reason, logic and math. If that were the case, we would already be building starships and making Star Trek for real rather than as a TV show.”
― Mark Romel, The False Awakeners: Illusory Enlightenment

“I want to pluck the sun from the sky and set fire to the whole earth, the whole universe. I want to see all creation engulfed in flames. Everything must burn and burn forever. Especially morality. And democracy. I want to see the flesh of those creatures melting in front of me. I want to see all their corrupt bones and internal organs on fire.”
― Mark Romel, The Mistletoe Murders: A Nietzschean Murder Mystery

“Capitalism isn’t merely amoral, it is actively immoral, and it has to conceal its immortality via the simulation of morality. Morality is not part of capitalism. Capitalism is all about serving the self-interest of the individual, and there’s nothing moral about that unless, like Ayn Rand, you insanely proclaim, “Selfishness is virtuous.” Morality is always external to capitalism, something alien to capitalism. Capitalism addresses morality through simulation. It even reifies morality and turns it into commodities. The Vatican sells religious trinkets to the credulous masses. Evangelical Christianity in America is a vast money-making machine. Disneyland and Hollywood simulate a moral order where the good are rewarded and the wicked punished (the opposite of what actually happens in capitalism).”
― Mark Romel, Unreal City: The Strange Disappearance of Reality

“I have come to paint over the sun, so defaced by an eternity of lies. I will pluck the moon from the sky and replace it with a torch that will set alight all of space. The curtains of darkness will perish in flames. The universe will be flooded by a new light, the light of the Truth.”
― Mark Romel, The Mistletoe Murders: A Nietzschean Murder Mystery

“The world has become a planetary Nozick Experience Machine, mediated by the ubiquitous smartphone. Everyone is plugged in, desperate for their pleasure fix, for their likes, their approvals. They have become addicted to hyperreality, yet hyperreality is soulless. It can’t satisfy exactly because it lacks, well, reality. You have been told you can have it all, you can have the perfect life. You can’t. However, you can be presented with images and experiences as if you had achieved it all. But you haven’t. You have to buy into the fantasy, but deep down there’s something missing. What is missing is you. You yourself have become hyperreal, which means you have lost the real you, and nothing can make up for the loss of yourself. You have become fixed to your persona, your mask, and now there is nothing beneath the mask. When you take the mask off at the end of an exhausting day of faking it, there’s no real face underneath, just a faked face, or a blank space. We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men. Mistah Kurtz, he dead.”
― Mark Romel, The Seer of Unreality: The Hyperreality Wars

“We live in a society indifferent to artistic and creative values. It’s practically impossible for artists to make a living. Artists feel more and more cut off from society. If we reject our dreamers, we shall create nothing but nightmares.”
― Mark Romel, Social Capitalism: Against Mammonism

“Dionysus is the dismembered God who comes back together. The Big Bang is where God is dismembered. It’s the God explosion, the Divine Suicide. The cosmic journey – the grand dialectic – is all about restoring the unity of God.”
― Mark Romel, The Seer of Unreality: The Hyperreality Wars

“Always be prepared to fall. You must take risks if you are to evolve. You must make mistakes if you want to learn.”
― Mark Romel, Strange World: Why People Are Getting Weirder

“On the other side of hell is heaven. Do you have the guts to pass through hell to get there?”
― Mark Romel, Strange World: Why People Are Getting Weirder

“Then along came social media, the worst thing of all, the Cretin Unbound. Any moron could shout down Prometheus. The confederacy of dunces could descend like a pack and mock Apollo and Pythagoras. Now I’m putting an end to this circus. The clowns have performed long enough. The joke’s not funny anymore.”
― Mark Romel, The Mistletoe Murders: A Nietzschean Murder Mystery

“Why is there something rather than nothing?” was the supremely profound question posed by Leibniz. The answer is that there is something and nothing – they are two sides of the same coin, two perspectives of the same thing. Zero, ontologically, is also infinity. It contains infinite elements that all balance each other out (they sum to zero). Zero and infinity cannot be found separately. Where you get “nothing” you always get “everything too”. They are inseparable twins. So, Leibniz answered his own question with the most consummate skill. A new question replaced it: “Why are something and nothing the same?” And the answer is that it’s because zero and infinity are the same: two sides of one coin.”
― Mark Romel, Strange World: Why People Are Getting Weirder

“We should live in a world of strong will, art, and reason. However, all of these are rejected by today’s world. Most people have low will, no artistic sensibility, and almost no capacity to reason.”
― Mark Romel, Identity and Lifestyle: The Forces That Drive the World

“Mind and life are synonymous. It is impossible to have a mind but not be alive. It is impossible to be alive and not have a mind. The whole of existence is both mental and alive. Existence is the ultimate living organism. It is the opposite of a dead, purposeless machine.”
― Mark Romel, Strange World: Why People Are Getting Weirder

“A flashbulb memory is a highly vivid memory retained for life. These memories are associated with exceptional historical or autobiographical events.
So, here’s the question. Is this life you’re leading right now one of your flashbulb lives, or is it one that you will want to forget as rapidly as possible, one you will come to regard as a total write-off? If it is, shouldn’t you be doing something to change the picture? Shouldn’t you be striving to make this one of your flashbulb lives?”
― Mark Romel, The Wasteland: America's Search for Redemption

“Cheating” is highly seductive to people, but it’s the worst thing you can do because, finally, the only person you are cheating is yourself.”
― Mark Romel, The Rigged Race of Life

“Suffering is essential to us, essential to our spiritual growth. A person who does not suffer might as well be dead, which is what Buddhism aspires to ... suffering is an indispensable part of life, without which we could never have joy. Who would turn their back on joy except a hater of life itself?”
― Mark Romel, The False Awakeners: Illusory Enlightenment

“Life is a satirical black comedy, told with the straightest of faces. Few are in on the joke. You need to have the drollest sense of humor, as dry as tinder.”
― Mark Romel, The Cosmic Jest: The Joke’s On Us

“Liars gain a huge advantage over truth-tellers, you know. Truth has been found to be a terrible weakness, an evolutionary catastrophe. The society that coated itself with lies was found to be a better survival machine. The man who told the truth was extraordinarily naive and stupid. Now the expectation is always of being lied to. Nowadays when one man is talking to another, he knows instinctively he is being lied to and his mind automatically overlays that set of lies with a neutralizing set of lies, leaving behind a kind of truth. But what sort of truth is it that arises exclusively from lies?”
― Mark Romel, The Mistletoe Murders: A Nietzschean Murder Mystery

“If you eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, you get sent to hell. All of the greatest geniuses in human history are all frying tonight, and every other night.”
― Mark Romel, Identity and Lifestyle: The Forces That Drive the World

“Everything tarred with the “Marxist” brush by right wingers never once involves Marxism, and never once advocates anything Marxist. Not a single major politician in the USA espouses any Marxist positions, or cites Marxism. The idea that America – a seriously right wing nation, with a far right President – is rife with Marxism is just about the biggest joke since a rebellious and troubled Jewish teen claimed that God fucked her rather than confess to an affair with a married man that resulted in her pregnancy.”
― Mark Romel, Social Capitalism: Against Mammonism

“We need a meritocracy where people’s skills and interests are identified when they are children, and they are given 10,000 hours of training in what they love so that they can become expert in it. When they leave education, they will be able to pour their heart and soul into their work because it’s the thing they find most fulfilling. “Laziness” will be eliminated. We will have a hard-working, high-achieving, inspired population of meritocrats with high self esteem and confidence. We want everyone to love what they do for work, and be surrounded by great, lifelong friends who share their passion.”
― Mark Romel, The Rigged Race of Life

“PR people are those who polish the mirrors in hell until even the Devil shines like an angel. Well, he was once … according to his Brand Manager (God).”
― Mark Romel, Strange World: Why People Are Getting Weirder