LostLegend

“If it once became general, wealth would confer no distraction. It was possible no doubt to imagine a society in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries should be evenly distributed while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice, such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves. And when once they had done this they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance. To return to the agricultural past as some thinkers about the beginning of the 20th century dreamed of doing was not a practical solution. It conflicted with the tendency towards mechanization which had become quasi-instinctive throughout almost the whole world, and moreover, any country which remained industrially backward was helpless in a military sense and was bound to be dominated, directly or indirectly by its more advances rivals.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“And Samuel could remember hearing of a cousin of his mother’s in Ireland, a knight and rich and handsome, and anyway shot himself on a silken couch, sitting beside the most beautiful woman in the world who loved him. “There’s a capacity for appetite,” Samuel said, “that a whole heaven and earth of cake can’t satisfy.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“And then, dressed in a secretly made shroud, she went out on a moonlit night and drowned herself in a pond so shallow that she had to get down on her knees in the mud and hold her head under water. This required great willpower. As the warm unconsciousness finally crept over her, she was thinking with some irritation of how her white lawn shroud would have mud down the front when they pulled her out in the morning. And it did.”
― John Steinbeck, East of Eden

“What he was scared of was not that maybe she was a creature who survived by drinking other people's blood. No, it was that she might push him away.”
― John Ajvide Lindqvist, Let the Right One In