Jordan West

“POLITICS IS THE ART OF CONTROLLING YOUR ENVIRONMENT"

This is one of the key things I learned in these years, and I learned it the hard way. Anybody who thinks "it doesn't matter who's President" has never been drafted and sent off to die in a vicious, stupid War on the other side of the World - or been beaten and gassed by Police for trespassing on private property - or been hounded by the IRS for purely political resasons - or locked up in the Cook County Jail with a broken nose and no phone access and twelve perverts waiting to stomp your ass in the shower. That is when it matters who is President or Governor or Police Chief. That is when you will wish you had voted.”
― Hunter S. Thompson, Hey Rube: Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine, and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness: Modern History from the ESPN.com Sports Desk

“Our teachers and troubadours stuffed our minds with the tales of our fathers - Aristotle and Arthur, Christ and Chretien. Our swordmasters swelled our thews with the steps and strikes of our fathers' fathers. Our thoughts tread again the paths first cut by our forebears' minds. Thus we hop and hew in the image of our fathers, and the fathers of our fathers. How might we then count ourselves new men, and not but shades of elder days, fleshed afresh in gaudy youth? Do we martyr ourselves upon knighthood's altar of our volition, or does some greater mind print its thumb upon us and so mold us into familar shape? What will lies within? What choice? Are we men, or the echoes of men, seeded once and springing forever from the same tired earth, watered forevermore by chivalry's iron unguent?”
― Graham Thomas Wilcox, Contra Amatores Mundi: A Gothic Fantasy

“People are crazy for some sort of assurance that the visible world is not the only world, which is an almost intolerable state of mind.”
― Robertson Davies

“The twentieth century imposes its own special brand of monotony whenever it’s given a free hand, and it doesn’t seem to matter whether the government is capitalist or socialist or fascist; either way, the end result is a sort of Levittown of the mind.”
― Lawrence Block, Tanner's Twelve Swingers: An Evan Tanner Mystery