RANGER

“Oh the Beat generation was just a phrase I used in the 1951 written manuscript of On the Road to describe guys like Moriarty who run around the country in cars looking for odd jobs, girlfriends, kicks. It was thereafter picked up by West Coast Leftist groups and turned into a meaning like “Beat mutiny” and “Beat insurrection” and all that nonsense; they just wanted some youth movement to grab on to for their own political and social purposes. I had nothing to do with any of that. I was a football player, a scholarship college student, a merchant seaman, a railroad brakeman on road freights, a script synopsizer, a secretary … And Moriarty-Cassady was an actual cowboy on Dave Uhl’s ranch in New Raymer, Colorado … What kind of beatnik is that?”[22]”
― Semmelweis, Jack Kerouac and the Decline of the West

“Neither Ginsberg nor Burroughs achieved the level of fame that Kerouac did in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This is partly because, of the three, Kerouac was the least counter-cultural, the least anti-American in sentiment and purpose. To the contrary, he had a deep love of America as land, as place — On The Road is basically a prose love poem to America — which naturally translated itself into conservative political leanings, albeit of a nonconventional sort. (He famously watched the McCarthy hearings while getting high on marijuana and cheering for McCarthy.)”
― Semmelweis, Jack Kerouac and the Decline of the West

“What Hitler did not believe and what Stalin did not believe and what Mao did not believe and what the SS did not believe and what the Gestapo did not believe and what the NKVD did not believe and what the commissars, functionaries, swaggering executioners, Nazi doctors, Communist Party theoreticians, intellectuals, Brown Shirts, Black Shirts, gauleiters, and a thousand party hacks did not believe was that God was watching what they were doing. And as far as we can tell, very few of those carrying out the horrors of the twentieth century worried overmuch that God was watching what they were doing either. That is, after all, the meaning of a secular society.”
― David Berlinski, The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions

“I think there is a mystical minimum in human history and experience, which is at once too obscure to be explained and too obvious to be explained away.”
― G.K. Chesterton, The G.K. Chesterton Collection [34 Books]