Chris Orlet > Chris's Quotes

“The pro-death view should be of interest even to those who do not accept it. One of its valuable features is that it offers a unique challenge to those pro-lifers who reject a legal right to abortion. Whereas a legal pro-choice position does not require a pro-lifer to have an abortion—it allows a choice—a legal pro-life position does prevent a pro-choicer from having an abortion. Those who think that the law should embody the pro-life position might want to ask themselves what they would say about a lobby group that, contrary to my arguments in Chapter 4 but in accordance with pro-lifers’ commitment to the restriction of procreative freedom, recommended that the law become pro-death. A legal pro-death policy would require even pro-lifers to have abortions. Faced with this idea, legal pro-lifers might have a newfound interest in the value of choice.”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“If I were to give an award for the single best idea anyone has ever had, I'd give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton & Einstein and everyone else. In a single stroke, the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose, with the realm ... of physical law.”
― Daniel Dennett

“Each one of us was harmed by being brought into existence. That harm is not negligible, because the quality of even the best lives is very bad—and considerably worse than most people recognize it to be. Although it is obviously too late to prevent our own existence, it is not too late to prevent the existence of future possible people.”
― David Benatar, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence

“The dominant way we deal with death in our culture is religious. And our religious culture deals with death by pretending it isn’t real. Religion deals with death by pretending it isn’t permanent; by pretending that the loss of the ones we love is just like a long vacation apart; by pretending that our dead loved ones are still hanging around somehow, like the dead grandparents in a “Family Circus” cartoon; by pretending that our own death is just a one-way trip to a different place. Our religious culture deals with death by putting it on the back burner, by encouraging people to stick their fingers in their ears and yell, “I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you!”
― Greta Christina, Comforting Thoughts About Death That Have Nothing to Do with God

“There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. Dumb fuckers. Their minds are full of shit. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.”
― Schopenhauer

“After a year of therapy, my psychiatrist said to me, "Maybe life isn't for everyone.”
― Larry Brown

“You can also look upon our life as an episode unprofitably disturbing the blessed calm of nothingness.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Suffering of the World

“There’s folks you just don’t need. You’re better off without em. Your life is just a little better because they ain’t in it.”
― William Gay

“That’s when I first learned that it wasn’t enough to just do your job, you had to have an interest in it, even a passion for it.”
― Charles Bukowski

“Man is a self-conscious nothing.”
― Julius Bahnsen

“Some speculative minds have faith that we are en route to a utopia where people are not mainly absorbed in a job that is killing them or despondent because they do not have a killing job.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

“Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence—those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you'd collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.”
― Aldous Huxley, Island

“I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.”
― Woody Allen, Annie Hall: Screenplay

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
― H.L. Mencken, In Defense of Women

“For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life—I wrote this some years ago—that were worth the postage. The penny-post is, commonly, an institution through which you seriously offer a man that penny for his thoughts which is so often safely offered in jest. And I am sure that I never read any memorable news in a newspaper. If we read of one man robbed, or murdered, or killed by accident, or one house burned, or one vessel wrecked, or one steamboat blown up, or one cow run over on the Western Railroad, or one mad dog killed, or one lot of grasshoppers in the winter—we never need read of another. One is enough. If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden

“It was all right to be who he was, but others would probably think it was terrible. A couple of times in the past he'd reached this absolute zero of the truth, and without fear or bitterness he realized now that somewhere inside it there was a move he could make to change his life, to become another person, but he'd never be able to guess what it was.”
― Denis Johnson, Angels

“I’m pretty sure he did not believe in God or an afterlife. He believed in art and the arts as the highest people could live for.--Virginia Adler Brautigan”
― Brautigan, Richard

“Anyone who conceives of writing as an agreeable stroll towards a middle-class life-style will never write anything but crap.”
― Derek Raymond, He Died With His Eyes Open

“There is always that dream of escape, but there is no place to escape to, you just run into yourself.”
― Willy Vlautin

“First of all read Céline; the greatest writer of 2,000 years”
― Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man

“Mr. Reese had told him that life, at its core, was a cruel burden because we had the knowledge that we were born to die. We were born with innocent eyes and those eyes had to see pain and death and deceit and violence and heartache. If we were lucky we lived long enough to see most everything we love die. But, he said, being honorable and truthful took a little of the sting out of it. It made life bearable. Mr. Reese said liars and cowards were the worst people to know because they broke your heart in a world that is built to break your heart. They poured gas on an already cruel and barely controllable fire.”
― Willy Vlautin, Don't Skip Out on Me

“Nothing I like to do pays well.”
― Charles Portis, True Grit

“Government is the flow of power and force. When government is in the hands of Godly men, it is good. But in the hands of all others, it is evil.”
― William Billings, director, national christian action coalition

“There are thirty-two ways to write a story, and I’ve used every one, but there is only one plot – things are not as they seem.”
― Jim Thompson

“: “So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away is an American tragedy that takes place in the 1940’s. It remembers the independence and dignity of a small group of people whose life-style was already doomed, even as they lived it, thinking that it would go on forever. The first television antenna on an American house was their tombstone.”
― Richard Brautigan, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away

“Ah, yes, there was a future in the insane asylum. No winter spent there could be a total loss.”
― Richard Brautigan

“But I had not the strength nor the inclination to bandy words with a drunkard. What have you done when you have bested a fool?”
― Charles Portis, True Grit

“Third-rate men, of course, exist in all countries, but it is only here that they are in full control of the state, and with it of all the national standards.”
― H.L. Mencken, A Second Mencken Chrestomathy

“I found out long ago that the place where the law is apt to be abused most is right around a courthouse.
– Jim Thompson”
― Jim Thompson, Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s