Kai Mustakoski

“In all major socializing forces you will find an underlying movement to gain and maintain power through the use of words. From witch doctor to priest to bureaucrat it is all the same. A governed populace must be conditioned to accept power-words as actual things to confuse the symbolized system with the tangible universe. In the maintenance of such a power structure, certain symbols are kept out of the reach of common understanding—symbols such as those dealing with economic manipulation or those which define the local interpretation of sanity. Symbol-secrecy of this form leads to the development of fragmented sub-languages, each being a signal that its users are accumulating some form of power. With this insight into a power process, our Imperial Security Force must be ever alert to the formation of sub-languages.”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

“I am where I think not.”
― Jacques Lacan

“To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.”
― Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity

“For the classics, philosophical insight was the product of a life of leisure; for me, a life of leisure is the product of philosophical insight.”
― Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms