Disco Elysium Artbook Quotes

“The grand, impenetrable system of G.W.F. Hegel – the philosophy of history – taught us two things. First, any truly believable world not only has but is history. Second, the only believable history is progress. A domino-tumble of opposing ideas has led us here. Yet built worlds exist in stasis. They are theme parks where the past is not at all different from the present. The Old Republic is precisely like the New Republic: lame as balls. It’s almost as if they barely had the imagination to come up with one version of their cosmos and were unwilling (or unable) to imagine it in motion. Commercial paracosms are static, reduced versions of reality. Just the space nonsense, please. I’ll have the cyberhacker and nothing else.

We did not want a commercial paracosm. It was un-Hegelian. We wanted a quasi-sacral object complex. All that is interesting and terrible about history – and only that. Magnified. Rarefied. Spreading outward from reality, like a dark grey solar corona. The crowning ceremony of the world.”
― Robert Kurvitz

“Eyes are direct, unmediated input to the brain. You like or dislike something before you have a chance to reason about it. It affects you emotionally without offering you a chance to throw up intellectual defenses first. Witnessing death and good art are materially equivalent experiences: they are visual information transmitted straight to the centers of emotion by way of the eye.”
― ZA/UM, Disco Elysium Digital Artbook