Kaycee

“Almost the whole of modern medical research is dedicated to improving health in old age and extending the human life-span and we get more senility, not less. Extending it for what? We give them drugs to improve short-term memory, drugs to raise mood, drugs to increase appetite. They don’t need anything to make them sleep, that’s all they seem to do. What, I wonder, goes on in those senile minds during those long periods of half-consciousness. Memories, I suppose, prayers.”
― P.D. James, The Children of Men

“Present day kings aren’t very inspiring, the gods are on a vacation, and about the only heroes left are the scientists and the poor.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“it’s not that certain cruel actions are committed because the perpetrators are self-consciously and deliberatively evil. Rather it is because they think they are doing good. They are fueled by a strong moral sense. As Pinker puts it: “The world has far too much morality. If you added up all the homicides committed in pursuit of self-help justice, the casualties of religious and revolutionary wars, the people executed for victimless crimes and misdemeanors, and the targets of ideological genocides, they would surely outnumber the fatalities from amoral predation and conquest.”
― Paul Bloom, Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion – How Emotion Undermines Morality, Justice, and Good Policy

“I been thinkin' how it was in that government camp, how our folks took care of theirselves, an' if they was a fight they fixed it theirself; an' they wasn't no cops wagglin' their guns, but they was better order than them cops ever give. I been a-wonderin' why we can't do that all over. All work together for our own thing--all farm our own lan'...He was doin nothin' against the law, Ma. I been thinkin' a hell of a lot, thinkin about our people livin' like pigs, an' the good rich lan' layin' fallow, or maybe one fella with a million acres, while a hundred thousan' good farmers is starvin'. An' I been wonderin' if all our folks got together an' yelled, like them fellas yelled.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath