Roberto Acioly

“Lao-tse, reduced to a few texts, is not more naive than we who have read everything. Profundity is independent of knowledge. We translate to other levels the revelations of the ages, or we exploit original intuitions by the latest acquisitions of thought. Thus Hegel is a Heraclitus who has read Kant; and our Ennui is an affective Eleaticism, the fiction of diversity unmasked and exposed to the heart...”
― Emil M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay

“I will not say that the average forethought of a community is inversely proportional to the rate of interest, though this is a view that might be upheld.”
― Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays

“In the present state of the world, not only are many people destitute but the majority of those who are not being haunted by a perfectly reasonable fear that they may become so at any moment. Wage-earners have the constant danger of unemployment; salaried employees know that their firm may go bankrupt or find it necessary to cut down its staff; businessmen, even those who are reputed to be very rich, know that the loss of all their money is by no means improbable. Professional men have a very hard struggle. After making great sacrifices for the education of their sons and daughters, they find that there are not the openings that there used to be for those who have the kinds of skills that their children have acquired. If they are lawyers, they find that people can no longer afford to go to law, although serious injustices remain unremedied; if they are doctors, they find that their formerly lucrative hypochondriac patients can no longer afford to be ill, while many genuine sufferers have to forgo much-needed medical treatment. One finds men and women of university education serving behind the counters in shops, which may save them from destitution, but only at the expense of those who would formerly have been so employed. In all classes, from the lowest to almost the highest, economic fear governs men’s thoughts by day and their dreams at night, making their work nerve-wracking and their leisure unrefreshing. This ever-present terror is, I think, the main cause of the mood of madness which has swept over great parts of the civilized world.”
― Bertrand Russell, In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays

“We keep the memory of past or recent victims only if their language has immortalized the blood which has spattered them. The executioners themselves survive only insofar as they were performers: Nero would be long since forgotten without his outbursts of bloody clowning.”
― Emil M. Cioran, A Short History of Decay