Kirby

“one cannot seek for what he knows, and it seems equally impossible for him to seek for what he does not know. For what a man knows he cannot seek, since he knows it; and what he does not know he cannot seek, since he does not even know for what to seek.”
― Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments

“The last statement reveals more than may appear at first glance: it indicates that Greenspan's mistake was to expect that the lending institutions' enlightened self-interest would make them act more responsibly, more ethically, in order to avoid short-term self-propelling cycles of wild speculation which, sooner or later, burst like a bubble. In other words, his mistake concerned not the facts, the objective economic data or mechanisms; it concerned rather the ethical attitudes generated by market speculation—in particular the premise that market processes will spontaneously generate responsibility and trust, since it is in the long-term self-interest of the participants themselves to act thusly. Clearly, Greenspan's error was not only and not simply one of overestimating the rationality of market agents—that is, their ability to resist the temptation of making wild speculative gains. What he forgot to include in the equation was the financial speculators' quite rational expectation that the risks would be worth taking, since, in the event of a financial collapse, they could count on the state to cover their losses.”
― Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

“Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises--War and Shopping--simply will not work.”
― Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story

“Indeed, one of the highest pleasures is to be more or less unconscious of one’s own existence, to be absorbed in interesting sights, sounds, places, and people. Conversely, one of the greatest pains is to be self-conscious, to feel unabsorbed and cut off from the community and the surrounding world.”
― Alan Wilson Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity