Alexander B

“Imperialism is dynastic politics under a new name, carried on for the benefit of absentee owners instead of absentee princes; but so far as regards its bearing on the material fortunes of the underlying community it all comes to the same thing. All the civilised nations are beset with imperialistic ambitions, and so far as their limitations will permit them they are all occupied with imperialistic schemes; that is to say schemes for the benefit of their vested business interests, masked as schemes for the aggrandisement of the nation.

There is a growing need of such national aids to busi-ness. A business corporation as such is restricted by certain large fornalities of common honesty, the ob servance of which is not contemplated when business is done in the name of the Nation. The Nation, being in effect a licenced predatory concern, is not bound by the decencies of that code of law and morals that governs private conduct. So the national pretensions make a convenient cover for such adventures in pursuit of gain as run beyond the pale. These adventures in business, as well as the national pretensions, unavoidably run at cross purposes with one another; the abiding purpose of all competitors being to get whatever may be got at the cost of their neighbors or at the cost of those industrially backward peoples who have something to lose. It is the foremost aim of the imperialistic statesmen to extend and enlarge the advantages of such of the nation's business men as are interested in gainful traffic in foreign parts; that is to say, it is designed to extend and enlarge the dominion of the nation's absentee owners beyond the national frontiers.”
― Veblen Thorstein

“Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn't it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life… You give them a piece of you. They don't ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like "maybe we should just be friends" or "how very perceptive" turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It's a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love.”
― Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 9: The Kindly Ones

“The dictatorial power of the Nazis was the blind power of the unchangeability and the inner contradictions of the fascist path which they pursued. It could be threatened by the bourgeoisie only in the purely theoretical event that from outside the country (from heaven perhaps!), the entire financial and economic deficit of German capitalism were wiped out, the contradictions removed and the position of the German bourgeoisie re-normalized. For then the fascist party would not only be dispensable, it would actually have to be removed speedily for the renormalization to succeed. We can thus see that the party derives its power not from its own strength or from any original political concept or line of its own but solely by virtue of the unavoidable predicament of the bourgeoisie, trapped between the profit and the loss calculations of its own class interest; as this predicament intensifies, so does the power of the Nazis. And the Nazis can hardly do better in their own interests than to employ the maximum possible ignorance and stupidity. The more bourgeois china is broken, the better fares the Party, the more inextricably is the bourgeoisie tied to its protection racketeers and the more noiselessly it has to abdicate lever after lever of its economic power to the Party. The black of the fascist cloth is the black of the ink into which the bourgeoisie has fallen. The dialectic of fascism is uncontrollable.”
― Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism

“I dreamed I saw my maternal grandmother sitting by the bank of a swimming pool, that was also a river. In real life, she had been a victim of Alzheimer’s disease, and had regressed, before her death, to a semi-conscious state. In the dream, as well, she had lost her capacity for self-control. Her genital region was exposed, dimly; it had the appearance of a thick mat of hair. She was stroking herself, absent-mindedly. She walked over to me, with a handful of pubic hair, compacted into something resembling a large artist’s paint-brush. She pushed this at my face. I raised my arm, several times, to deflect her hand; finally, unwilling to hurt her, or interfere with her any farther, I let her have her way. She stroked my face with the brush, gently, and said, like a child, “isn’t it soft?” I looked at her ruined face and said, “yes, Grandma, it’s soft.”
― Jordan B. Peterson, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief