Frieda Vizel

“Because it equates tradition with prejudice, the left finds itself increasingly unable to converse with ordinary people in their common language”
― Christopher Lasch

“Right now, however, the extreme asymmetries of knowledge and power that have accrued to surveillance capitalism abrogate these elemental rights as our lives are unilaterally rendered as data, expropriated, and repurposed in new forms of social control, all of it in the service of others’ interests and in the absence of our awareness or means of combat. We have yet to invent the politics and new forms of collaborative action—this century’s equivalent of the social movements of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries that aimed to tether raw capitalism to society—that effectively assert the people’s right to a human future. And while the work of these inventions awaits us, this mobilization and the resistance it engenders will define a key battleground upon which the fight for a human future unfolds.”
― Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power

“Everyone asks: “But why should a worthless woman like you need an intellectual, artistic life?” To this I can only reply: “I don’t know, but eternally suppressing it to serve a genius is a great misfortune.”
― Cathy Porter, The Diaries of Sofia Tolstoy: A Chronicle of Marriage to Leo Tolstoy and Turbulent Turn-of-the-Century Russia

“The denial of age in America culminates in the prolongevity movement, which hopes to abolish old age altogether. But the dread of age originates not in the "cult of youth" but in a cult of the self. Not only in its narcissistic indifference to future generations but in its grandiose vision of a technological utopia without old age, the prolongevity movement exemplifies the fantasy of "absolute, sadistic power" which, according to Kohut, so deeply colors the narcissistic outlook. Pathological in its psychological origins and inspiration, superstitious in its faith in medical deliverance, the prolongevity movement expresses in characteristic form the anxieties of a culture that believes it has no future.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations