Cintra Wilson > Quotes

“If Marilyn Monroe and Princess Diana were "candles in the wind," and Anna Nicole Smith was a bonfire in a hailstorm, and Lindsay Lohan is an electric toaster thrown intentionally into a Jacuzzi, then Paris Hilton s a strobe light in an epilepsy ward.”
― Cintra Wilson

“Right now, the economy is a whole lot like a fairly good-looking brain-dead chick in a persistent vegetative coma. You can't really wake her up, but there's things she's still good for.”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Once a decision is made to be tasteful and risk-free, all spark, soul, variety, sleaze, spontaneity and fun go right out the window”
― Cintra Wilson

“Stop pathetically believing that you deserve fame or fame deserves you. It's yucky, and it's only making you miserable, so stop.”
― Cintra Wilson, A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as Grotesque Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations

“Fame is a perverse deformity, an ego swelling as ludicrous as an extra organ, and the people that have it, for a huge part, are willfully and deliberately fucked-up past the point of ever having anything sweet or human or normal about themselves ever again.”
― Cintra Wilson, A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as Grotesque Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations

“I once saw a Betsey Johnson runway show that featured thongs and "ass cleavage," and I thought, This is the future.”
― Cintra Wilson

“Sometimes you have to lose a lot of Q-tips before you realize you have a hole in your head.

Colors Insulting To Nature”
― Cintra Wilson

“I'm always looking for evidence to support my conjecture that celebrity in Hollywood is sort of like a Joel Peter Witkin photograph: It looks like a big lush banquet table filled with abundance and cornucopias, and then if you look at it closer you see that all the fruit is made of wax and that entree in the middle of the table is actually a dead baby.”
― Cintra Wilson

“There's a big luscious peach of a dream in L.A. The peach has been repeatedly exposed as overripe and tainted with wormholes... but it's still the only giant peach in town. Even if it's wet-brown and crawling with centipedes, everyone wants their bite.”
― Cintra Wilson, A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Reexamined as Grotesque Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations

“Trump revealed his powerful secret to conquering financial adversity once, in a meeting to promote another one of his signature, view-eating housing developments: “You know,” he said, “what New York really needs—besides this project—is to reduce its debt. And let me tell you—this is something I know—it’s easy! You just don’t pay!” America”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Look deep into your heart, Gentle Reader. Deep, deep, deep; past your desire for true love, for inexhaustible riches or uncontested sexual championship, for the ability to fight crime and restore peace to a weary world. Underneath all this, if you are a true, red-blooded American, you'll find the throbbing desire to be famous.”
― Cintra Wilson

“The 20th century has been characterized by three developments of great political importance: The growth of democracy, the growth of corporate power, and the growth of corporate propaganda as a means of protecting corporate power against democracy. —Alex Carey, social scientist”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“The most undervalued thing in this world is the time, attention, concentration, and patient effort of unhurried human beings.”
― Cintra Wilson, Fear and Clothing: Unbuckling American Style

“Nothing in life was ever clearly drawn, obviously just, or totally emotionally satisfying, but the moment-to-moment stuff of reality featured infinitely more complication, sleaze, struggle, true beauty, unfairness, profundity, passion, and depth of consciousness than she, in her frantic struggle to be somebody other than her unspectacular self, had been previously aware of. page 302”
― Cintra Wilson, Colors Insulting to Nature

“I figure that if there's a heaven, then there's a room in heaven where you can look over all of history and be anyone you want to be, at a peak moment in their lives. For example, I always say I would choose to be one of Stevie Wonder's backup singers on the "Innervisions" album.”
― Cintra Wilson

“When you have lived your life under such dominant image-leadership, its pressures put a certain invisible English on the cue ball of your development: It influences all of your ideas about who you should be, all the ways in which you become yourself.”
― Cintra Wilson

“Freedom is too abstract a concept: You can’t eat it, fuck it, sit under it when it rains or even do very much with it besides get in trouble and have it taken away from you again. Most”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Military Keynesianism means the economy gets a sudden juice-boost of wildly unaccountable new defense spending. And here’s the kicker: It requires that we keep up sustained, prolonged and relentless military ambition in order for the economy not to suck backward into itself and collapse like a Superdome-size water blister. It’s the economic plan endorsed by Germany in the 1930s and under former GE spokesman Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Once,”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“It is not an empire’s job to make anyone rich or happy or relieve their suffering. In fact, these things are usually most successfully achieved outside of, or in spite of, most organized social constructs. Some would argue that the best kinds of happiness happen outside acceptable limits imposed by society, law or religion—all of which are control methods that we, the Divine Few, impose on you, the Nameless Inconsequential, in the hopes that you will censor yourselves into some form of voluntary slavery”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Perception is reality. Media is omnipresent. Therefore, he who controls the media controls perception, and therefore controls reality TV, and therefore controls reality. Take,”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“It’s an odds-on favorite that if one laid enough Mormon genealogy charts end to end, one could prove either that all these fine families are related or that at least they’ve all laid each other end to end.”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Any idiot knows that the first thing you do when seizing absolute power is bribe the Praetorian Guard. It’s really the only tenured and tacitly understood method of making the cogs of accession mesh smoothly. First you hand out big fat bonuses to the military, then seize your power by force, then build your consensus via relentless intimidation and bondage attire. Authoritarian”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“The Chinese had this empire-degeneration mambo wired. They actually devised a formula for it, since after several centuries a pattern emerged that was so regular you could pretty much set your sundial by it: Repeat, ad nauseum, for thousands of years. It’s”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Please keep abusing each other over differences of skin tone and absurdly tiny religious discrepancies. It’s good for the country. Racism needs to rise in periods where slavery makes a comeback, because if all you simian-browed, atavistic gutter-plebes started cooperating, all of a sudden, you’d barbecue our prissy fannies in a hot ghetto second. Vent”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Right now, the economy is a whole lot like a fairly good-looking brain-dead chick in a persistent vegetative coma. You can’t really wake her up, but there’s things she’s still good for. To”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Complain about your crumbling infrastructure and overzealous Homeland Security all you like, but as least you have a system that theoretically provides both, which is a damn sight better for national morale than knowing you don’t, and that at any moment some Aramis-drenched Visigoth could climb in the window of your bedroom, unzip your torso like a garment bag and eat out your liver with a crab fork.”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“Central to the idea of a democracy is the ruse that civilian control of the military prevents military dictatorships. But it’s different when the civilians running the defense establishment are oil barons, arms manufacturers, spooks and spokesmen for General Electric.”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“How could anyone catch all of the beauty in the Present Moment, when, after years of misery, there was suddenly a day when all the wonderfulness of life unexpectedly blew down from all directions all at once?”
― Cintra Wilson, Colors Insulting to Nature

“The comfort of the rich depends on an abundance of the poor. —Voltaire”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny

“All these massive executive-power-consolidating, pound-you-up-the-fanny-whenever-the-urge-so-takes-me directives could simply be ordered not to exist anymore by me, as your next president, with the simple stroke of my pen. So”
― Cintra Wilson, Caligula for President: Better American Living Through Tyranny