James Maconochie

“Study has been called a prayer to truth.”
― Antonin Sertillanges, THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE, Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods - Sertillanges

“No religion has ever demanded as much of the individual as such, and it might be said that. radical individualism is the very form of religious integrism [fundamentalism]. The modern religion of selfabnegation, of all-out operationality - the worst one of all since it recoups all the energy of irreligion, all the energy released by the eclipsing of traditional religions. This is the greatest irreligious conversion in history. By comparison with this voluntary holocaust, this escalation of sacrifice, the so-called return of religion which we pretend to fear - these occasional upsurges of religiosity or traditional integrism - is negligible. It merely conceals the fundamental integrism of this consensual society, the terroristic fundamentalism of this new sacrificial religion of performance. It masks the fact that society as a whole is moving towards religious metastasis. Religious effects are taken too seriously in their religious dimension and not seriously enough as effects, that is, as masking the true process. This is a screen tumour, a fixation abscess which, by focusing it, allows the evil to be exorcized at little cost, sparing the need to analyse the whole society, to analyse 'democratic' society, which is virtually converted to integrism and revisionism, to security and protectionism and, at the same time, to the techniques of crude promotion and intimidation.
This 'post-modern' individualism arises not out of a problematic of liberty and liberation, but out of a liberalization of slave networks and circuits, that is, an individual diffraction of the programmed ensembles, a metamorphosis of the macro-structures into innumerable particles which bear within them all the stigmata of the networks and circuits - each one forming its own micro-network and micro-circuit, each one reviving for itself, in its micro-universe, the now useless totalitarianism of the whole.”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End

“When she collected a Memory of a person, she was snipping free a bud of their soul, and she cultivated and grew it on the page. Charcoal for sinew, paper pulp for bone, ink for blood, the paper’s texture for skin.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“Cuando todo tiene carácter de producción los rituales desaparecen.”
― Byung-Chul Han, La desaparición de los rituales: Una topología del presente