Joseph Matheny > Joseph's Quotes

“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can't be any large-scale revolution until there's a personal revolution, on an individual level. It's got to happen inside first.”
― Jim MORRISON

“Where's your will to be weird?”
― Jim Morrison

“I like people who shake other people up and make them feel uncomfortable.”
― Jim Morrison, Eyes: Poetry, 1967-1971

“That's what real love amounts to - letting a person be what he really is. Most people love you for who you pretend to be. To keep their love, you keep pretending - performing. You get to love your pretence. It's true, we're locked in an image, an act - and the sad thing is, people get so used to their image, they grow attached to their masks. They love their chains. They forget all about who they really are. And if you try to remind them, they hate you for it, they feel like you're trying to steal their most precious possession.”
― Jim Morrison

“I don't want to be overly dramatic about it, but I think people more and more wonder, is this living, or are we just going through the motions? What's happening? Is everything being leached out of life? Is the whole texture and values and everything kind of draining away?”
― John Zerzan

“Culture has lead us to betray our own aboriginal spirit and wholeness, into an ever-worsening realm of synthetic, isolating, impoverishing estrangement. Which is not to say that there are no more everyday pleasures, without which we would loose our humanness. But as our plight deepens, we glimpse how much must be erased for our redemption.”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“God first created silence: whole, indivisible, complete. All creatures--man, woman, beast, insect, bird, and fish--lived happily together with this silence until one day man and woman lay down together and between them created the first word. This displeased God deeply and in anger she shook out her bag of words over the world, sprinkling and showering her creation with them. Her word store rained down upon all creatures, shattering forever the whole that once was silence. God cursed the world with words and forever after it would be a struggle for man and woman to return to the original silence. --Marlene Nourbese Philip”
― John Zerzan, Twilight of the Machines

“Are you listening or are you just waiting for your turn to talk?”
― Robert Montgomery

“The flood will lift the ghosts from the Hollywood lawn cemetery and they will disappear like ether in the now dead air. All the names will be erased from the billboards and the theatres and the piers and the magazines and the monuments. You live by myths of immortality, and your myths are not safe.”
― Robert Montgomery

“Between love and the automatic garbage chute, young people everywhere have made their choice and prefer the garbage chute. [Entre l'amour et le vide-ordure automatique la jeunesse de tous les pays a fait son choix et préfère le vide-ordure.]”
― Ivan Chtcheglov

“Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.”
― Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

“Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea. ”
― Guy Debord

“The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“Like lost children we live our unfinished adventures.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation.”
― Guy Debord

“Just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“Never work.”
― Guy Debord

“The more he identifies with the dominant images of need, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The spectacle’s estrangement from the acting subject is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“Tourism, human circulation considered as consumption is fundamentally nothing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal.”
― Guy Debord

“I have written much less than most people who write; I have drunk much more than most people who drink.”
― Guy Debord

“We still have some time to take advantage of the fact that radio and television stations are not yet guarded by the army.”
― Guy Debord, Internationale situationniste

“To see the universe as it truly is, is to see what we call chaos. That which we call order is merely our own apophenia at work.”
― Joseph Matheny, Game Over?

“Madness need not be all breakdown. It may also be break-through. It is potential liberation and renewal as well as enslavement and existential death.”
― Ronald D. Laing, The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise

“But here steps in Satan, the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds. He makes man ashamed of his bestial ignorance and obedience; he emancipates him, stamps upon his brow the seal of liberty and humanity, in urging him to disobey and eat of the fruit of knowledge.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“The urge for destruction is also a creative urge!”
― Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin

“Real humanity presents a mixture of all that is most sublime and beautiful with all that is vilest and most monstrous in the world.”
― Mikhail Alexandrovich Bakunin, God and the State

“By striving to do the impossible, man has always achieved what is possible. Those who have cautiously done no more than they believed possible have never taken a single step forward.”
― Mikhail Bakunin

“There is in every madman
a misunderstood genius
whose idea
shining in his head
frightened people
and for whom delirium was the only solution
to the strangulation
that life had prepared for him.”
― Antonin Artaud

“I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.”
― Antonin Artaud