Dakota Cartwright

“People always think we look for love at our lowest to distract us. I am convinced we do it because we want someone to look us in the eye, to look our ugly in the eye and still choose us. I didn’t want a distraction, I wanted you to see a mess and still find me worthy of love, to tell me that you could still love me anyway.”
― Georges Bataille, The Dead Man

“The distinguishing feature of advanced industrial society is its effective suffocation of those needs which demand liberation—liberation also from that which is tolerable and rewarding and comfortable—while it sustains and absolves the destructive power and repressive function of the affluent society. Here, the social controls exact the overwhelming need for the production and consumption of waste; the need for stupefying work where it is no longer a real necessity; the need for modes of relaxation which soothe and prolong this stupefication; the need for maintaining such deceptive liberties as free competition at administered prices, a free press which censors itself, free choice between brands and gadgets.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“And by virtue of this relation, the concrete quality seems to represent a negation as well as realization of the universal. Snow is white but not "whiteness"; a girl may be beautiful, even a beauty, but not "beauty"; a country may be free (in comparison with others) because its people have certain liberties, but it is not the very embodiment of freedom. Moreover, the concepts are meaningful only in experienced contrast with their opposites: white with not white, beautiful with not beautiful. Negative statements can sometimes be translated into positive ones: "black" or "grey" for "not white," "ugly" for "not beautiful.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society

“The world of immediate experience―the world in which we find ourselves living―must be comprehended, transformed, even subverted in order to become that which it really is.”
― Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society