Joshua Yates

“And Spaceship Earth, that glorious and bloody circus, continued its four-billion-year-long spiral orbit about the Sun; the engineering, I must admit, was so exquisite that none of the passengers felt any motion at all. Those on the dark side of the ship mostly slept and voyaged into worlds of freedom and fantasy; those on the light side moved about the tasks appointed for them by their rulers, or idled waiting for the next order from above.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The Illuminatus! Trilogy

“The reading of all good books is like a conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.”
― Immanuel Kant

“It is fateful and ironic how the lie we need in order to live dooms us to a life that is never really ours.”
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

“beneath this crust, hundreds of fathoms down, there teems a world of checkered life in all its changing forms, a world of the same composition as ours, with the same instincts, the same sorrows, and also, no doubt, the same joys; everywhere the same struggle for existence. So it ever is. If we penetrate within even the hardest shell we come upon the pulsations of life, however thick the crust may be.”
― Fridtjof Nansen, Farthest North Being the Record of a Voyage of Exploration of the Ship 'Fram' 1893-1896 Vol. I