Raskolnikova

“The slavery of barbarians (i.e. our own slavery). The division of labour is the principle of barbarism. Dominance of mechanism. In an organism, the parts cannot be separated. The individualism of modernity and its opposite in antiquity. The wholly isolated individual of today is too weak and joins groups of slaves―of e.g. an academic discipline, a concept, a vice.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche

“[A mother] alone knows how to punish, to control, to keep children in a state of extended babyhood. A state that conceives of itself as an all-powerful mother is a fascistic state. In a dictatorship, citizens regress to infancy: they are swaddled, fed, and kept in the cradle by an omnipresent power that knows everything, can do anything and has utter sway over them, for their own good. Individuals are relieved of their autonomy, their freedom to make mistakes, or to get into danger. This is where our society is headed; perhaps because our era of greatness if already far behind us we are regressing toward models of collective organization that infantilize the individual.”
― Virginie Despentes

“When you look in the mirror you see not just your face but a museum. Although your face, in one sense, is your own, it is composed of a collage of features you have inherited from your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. The lips and eyes that either bother or please you are not yours alone but are also features of your ancestors, long dead pergaps as individuals but still very much alive as fragments in you. Even complex qualities such as your sense of balance, musical abilities, shyness in crowds, or susceptbility to sickness have been lived before. We carry the past around with us all the time, and not just in our bodies. It lives also in our customs, including the way we speak. The past is a set of invisible lenses we wear constantly, and through these we perceive de world and the world perceives us. We stand always on the shoulders of our ancestors, wheter or not we look down to acknowledge them.”
― David W. Anthony, The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World

“I incline toward things stripped of any chance of ending or surviving. So you will understand why I have always been concerned with the West. This concern seemed to you absurd or gratuitous. “The West—you aren’t even part of it,” you pointed out. Is it my fault if my greed for misery has not found another object? Where else will I find so persistent a will to fail? I envy the West the dexterity with which it manages to die out. When I would fortify my disappointments, I turn my mind toward this theme of an inexhaustible negative richness. And if I open some history of France, England, Spain, or Germany, the contrast between what they were and what they are gives me, besides a certain vertigo, the pride of having discovered, at last, the axioms of twilight.”
― Emil M. Cioran, Some Blind Alleys: A Letter