Jason

“The tragedy of man is that he has developed an intelligence eager to uncover mysteries, but not strong enough to penetrate them.”
― Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice, and History: A Chronicle of Pestilence and Plagues

“So it was with the various eccentrics she discovered in the next years. Some she went home with, some she didn't; some she photographed, others she just talked to, but everyone impressed her. Like the irate lady who appeared to Diane one night pulling a kiddy's red express wagon trimmed with bells and filled with cats in fancy hats and dresses. Like the man in Brooklyn who called himself the Mystic Barber who teleported himself to Mars and said he was dead and wore a copper band around his forehead with antennae on it to receive instructions from the Martians. Or the lady in the Bronx who trained herself to eat and sleep underwater or the black who carried a rose and noose around with him at all times, or the person who invented a noiseless soup spoon, or the man from New Jersey who'd collected string for twenty years, winding it into a ball that was now five feet in diameter, sitting monstrous and splendid in his living room.”
― Patricia Bosworth, Diane Arbus: A Biography

“It is hard to understand why the modern West has been so much more troubled by sexual images than by violent ones. Murder has always been illegal in the West, but the representation of murder has rarely inspired the kind of hue and cry generated by the depiction of adults having sex. Those who claim that pornography will impel children to engage in sexual conduct seem not the least bit concerned that war stories and Westerns will encourage children to kill their neighbors. For all the talk of "sex and violence" on television, no one seems to blink at the amount of blood spilled in a boxing match, but one can only imagine the outcry that would follow if a similar amount of semen were shown in a bedroom scene of a daytime soap opera.”
― David Allyn, Make Love, Not War: The Sexual Revolution: An Unfettered History

“You cannot change the world with ideas. People with few ideas are less likely to make mistakes; they follow what everyone else does and are no trouble to anyone; they're successful, make money, find good jobs, enter politics, receive honours; they become famous writers, academics, journalists. Can anyone who is so good at looking after their own interests really be stupid? I'm the stupid one, the one who wanted to go tilting at windmills.”
― Umberto Eco , The Prague Cemetery