Mohamed Aeed

“Man obviously is a being. As such he belongs to the totality of Being—just like the stone, the tree, or the eagle. But man's distinctive feature lies in this, that he, as the being who thinks, is open to Being, face to face with Being; thus man remains referred to Being and so answers to it. Man is essentially this relationship of responding to Being, and he is only this.”
― Martin Heidegger, Identity and Difference

“Over the last several months, public figures from the Pope downwards have bombarded us with the injunctions to fight against the culture of excessive greed and consumption. This disgusting spectacle of cheap moralization is an ideological operation if there ever was one: the compulsion (to expand) inscribed into the system itself is translated into a matter of personal sin, a private psychological propensity. The self-propelling circulation of Capital thus remains more than ever the ultimate Real of our lives, a beast that by definition cannot be controlled, since it itself controls our activity, blinding us to even the most obvious dangers we are courting.”
― Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

“The things for which we owe thanks are not things we have from ourselves. They are given to us. We receive many gifts, of many kinds. But the highest and really most lasting gift given to us is always our essential nature, with which we are gifted in such a way that we are what we are only through it. That is why we owe thanks for this endowment, first and unceasingly.”
― Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking?

“Old age is the most unexpected thing of all that happens to man," - notes Trotsky a few years before his end. If, as a young man, he had had the exact, visceral intuition of this truth, what a miserable revolutionary he would have made!”
― Emil M. Cioran, Anathemas and Admirations: Essays and Aphorisms