Sean R.

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.

And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.”
― Albert Camus

“The power of capitalist realism derives in part from the way that
capitalism subsumes and consumes all of previous history: one
effect of its 'system of equivalence' which can assign all cultural
objects, whether they are religious iconography, pornography, or
Das Kapital, a monetary value. Walk around the British Museum,
where you see objects torn from their Iifeworlds and assembled
as if on the deck of some Predator spacecraft, and you have a
powerful image of this process at work. In the conversion of
practices and rituals into merely aesthetic objects, the beliefs of
previous cultures are objectively ironized, transformed into
artifacts. Capitalist realism is therefore not a particular type of
realism; it is more like realism in itself.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet-!”
― George Orwell, 1984

“We are the centuries... We have your eoliths and your mesoliths and your neoliths. We have your Babylons and your Pompeiis, your Caesars and your chromium-plated (vital-ingredient impregnated) artifacts. We have your bloody hatchets and your Hiroshimas. We march in spite of Hell, we do – Atrophy, Entropy, and Proteus vulgaris, telling bawdy jokes about a farm girl name of Eve and a traveling salesman called Lucifer. We bury your dead and their reputations. We bury you. We are the centuries. Be born then, gasp wind, screech at the surgeon’s slap, seek manhood, taste a little godhood, feel pain, give birth, struggle a little while, succumb: (Dying, leave quietly by the rear exit, please.) Generation, regeneration, again, again, as in a ritual, with blood-stained vestments and nail-torn hands, children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. Children, too, of Eve, forever building Edens – and kicking them apart in berserk fury because somehow it isn’t the same. (AGH! AGH! AGH! – an idiot screams his mindless anguish amid the rubble. But quickly! let it be inundated by the choir, chanting Alleluias at ninety decibels.)”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., A Canticle for Leibowitz