Charles > Charles's Quotes

“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.”
― Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

“Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstance require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about.”
― Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

“After all, every use of language without exception has some, if not all, of the characteristic features of lies.”
― Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

“The human race sleepwalked to oblivion, thinking only of the corporate logos on it's shroud.”
― J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come

“I accepted that a new kind of hate had emerged, silent and disciplined, a racism tempered by loyalty cards and PIN numbers. Shopping was now the model for all human behaviour, drained of emotion and anger.”
― J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come

“At the sales counter, the human race's greatest confrontation with existence, there were no yesterdays, no history to be relived, only an intense transactional present.”
― J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come

“Sport is the big giveaway. Wherever sport plays a big part in people's lives you can be sure they're bored witless and just waiting to break up the furniture.”
― J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come

“Dissembling was so large a part of middle-class life that honesty and frankness seemed the most devious stratagem of all. The most outright lie was the closest one came to truth.”
― J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come

“If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“[A] great embarrassing fact… haunts all attempts to represent the market as the highest form of human freedom: that historically, impersonal, commercial markets originate in theft.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“Rather than seeing himself as human because he could make economic calculations, the hunter insisted that being truly human meant refusing to make such calculations, refusing to measure or remember who had given what to whom, for the precise reason that doing so would inevitably create a world where we began "comparing power with power, measuring, calculating" and reducing each other to slaves or dogs through debt.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“I would like, then, to end by putting in a good word for the non-industrious poor. At least they aren’t hurting anyone. Insofar as the time they are taking time off from work is being spent with friends and family, enjoying and caring for those they love, they’re probably improving the world more than we acknowledge.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don't owe each other anything. On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly pay. We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities. But it's a false dichotomy. States created markets. Markets require states. Neither could continue without the other, at least, in anything like the forms we would rec­ognize today.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“money has no essence. It's not "really" anything; therefore, its nature has always been and presumably always will be a matter of political conten­tion.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“I am well known by my friends to be a workaholic - to their often justifiable annoyance. I am therefore keenly aware that such behavior is at best slightly pathological, and certainly in no sense makes one a better person.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“Solitary pleasures will always exist, but for most human beings, the most pleasurable activities almost always involve sharing something: music, food, liquor, drugs, gossip, drama, beds.”
― David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years

“Why is love so good...? You love someone and they leave. They come home one day and you say "What's happening?" and they say, "I got a better offer someplace else," and there they go, out of your life forever, and after that until you're dead you're carrying around this huge hunk of love with no one to give it to. And if you do find someone to give it to, the same thing happens all over.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“Fear can make you do more wrong than hate or jealousy. If you’re afraid you don’t commit yourself to life completely; fear makes you always, always hold something back. You shouldn’t be alone. It’s killing you; it’s undermining you. All the time, every day, you should be somewhere with people.”
― Philip K. Dick, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said

“When dealing with a depression the problem is not to bring the depressed person back to his/her normality, to reintegrate behavior in the universal standards of normal social language. The goal is to change the focus of his/her depressive attention, to re-focalize, to deterritorialize the mind and the flow of expression. Depression is based on the stiffening of existential refrain, on the obsessive repetition of the stiffened refrain. The depressed person is unable to go out, to leave the repetitive refrain and s/he goes and goes again in the labyrinth. The goal of the schizoanalyst is to give him/her the possibility to see other landscapes, and to change the focus, to open some new ways of imagination.”
― Franco Bifo Berardi

“Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.”
― Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

“Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“War was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a mudded field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Your heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“A legion of horribles, hundreds in number, half naked or clad in costumes attic or biblical or wardrobed out of a fevered dream with the skins of animals and silk finery and pieces of uniform still tracked with the blood of prior owners, coats of slain dragoons, frogged and braided cavalry jackets, one in a stovepipe hat and one with an umbrella and one in white stockings and a bloodstained wedding veil and some in headgear or cranefeathers or rawhide helmets that bore the horns of bull or buffalo and one in a pigeontailed coat worn backwards and otherwise naked and one in the armor of a Spanish conquistador, the breastplate and pauldrons deeply dented with old blows of mace or sabre done in another country by men whose very bones were dust and many with their braids spliced up with the hair of other beasts until they trailed upon the ground and their horses' ears and tails worked with bits of brightly colored cloth and one whose horse's whole head was painted crimson red and all the horsemen's faces gaudy and grotesque with daubings like a company of mounted clowns, death hilarious, all howling in a barbarous tongue and riding down upon them like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“It takes very little to govern good people. Very little. And bad people cant be governed at all. Or if they could I never heard of it.”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstitiion will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.

I dont see what that has to do with catchin birds.

The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I'd have them all in zoos.

That would be a hell of a zoo.

The judge smiled. Yes, he said. Even so.”
― Cormac McCarthy

“There is no such joy in the tavern as upon the road thereto.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West

“If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?”
― Cormac McCarthy, No Country for Old Men

“He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West