Will Towne

“In all our actions, including those that appear selfless, we are in search of some kind of pleasure, even if it is only the pleasure of self-esteem. But while our desire for pleasure is infinite, our mental and physical organs are capable only of limited and temporary pleasures; and this mismatch between desire and capacity dooms us to perpetual dissatisfaction. There is no pleasure big or total enough to quench, even momentarily, our thirst for pleasure. But since the absence of pleasure is pain, it follows that we are always in pain, even when we might believe otherwise. And if life is nothing but an unbroken experience of pain, it would be better for every human being never to have been born.”
― Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone

“God knows that parents love to take any opportunity to strut around with their unbearable, intrusive spawns, every public place available. Parks, museums, theaters, hospital, cemeteries, unemployment offices, by pushing in front of them with a puffed chest those characatures of a sarcophagus that are their strollers or even by dangling under the noses of innocent bystanders, their shopping basket from which an ugly squealing head emerges, much to the delight of the makers, who benefit at little cost from their little siren who captures our attention and stimulates our repressed instinct for murder.”
― Théophile de Giraud, L'art de guillotiner les procréateurs: Manifeste anti-nataliste

“Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing— irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“As soon as the child is born, the mother who has just brought him into the world must console him, quiet his crying, and lighten the burden of the existence she has given him. And one of the principal duties of good parents in the childhood and early youth of their children is to comfort them, to encourage them to live,1 because sorrows and ills and passions are at that age much heavier than they are to those who through long experience, or simply because they have lived longer, are used to suffering. And in truth it is only fitting that the good father and the good mother, in trying to console their children, correct as best they can, and ease, the damage they have done by procreating them. Good God! Why then is man born? And why does he procreate? To console those he has given birth to for having been born?”
― Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone