Rica cass > Rica's Quotes

“I give myself to adjectives body and soul, I die with pleasure for them.”
― Violette Leduc, Mad in Pursuit

“Insanity is relative. It depends on who has who locked in what cage.”
― Ray Bradbury

“The real psychological truth is this: If you’ve got nothing to hide, you are nothing.”
― Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism

“It is so mysterious to want to suppress women. It is even more mysterious when women want to suppress women. I can only think we are so very powerful that we need to be suppressed all the time.”
― Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living

“Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don't abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book."

(Acceptance speech, National Book Award 2010 (Nonfiction), November 17, 2010)”
― Patti Smith

“I learned from him that often contradiction is the clearest way to truth”
― Patti Smith, Just Kids

“To be an artist, you need to exist in a world of silence.”
― Louise Bourgeois

“An artist can show things that other people are terrified of expressing.”
― Louise Bourgeois, Destruction of the Father/Reconstruction of the Father: Writings and Interviews, 1923–1997

“And what’s the use of talking, if you already know that others don’t feel what you feel?”
― Louise Bourgeois

“Every day you have to abandon your past or accept it, and then, if you cannot accept it, you become a sculptor.”
― Louise Bourgeois

“You are born alone. You die alone. The value of the space in between is trust and love.”
― Louise Bourgeois

“Art is the highest form of hope.”
― Gerhard Richter

“There was a time when you were not a slave, remember that. You walked alone, full of laughter, you bathed bare-bellied. You say you have lost all recollection of it, remember . . . You say there are no words to describe this time, you say it does not exist. But remember. Make an effort to remember. Or, failing that, invent.”
― Monique Wittig, Les Guérillères

“It is quite possible for a work of literature to operate as a war machine upon its epoch.”
― Monique Wittig

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

“To free yourself, to be more authentic, to be less addicted, to be less manipulated, to be less paranoid … for all these marvelous reasons, delete your accounts.”
― Jaron Lanier, Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

“Up to a point, having fun is good for you. But it’s not an adequate substitute for serious, purposeful activity. For lack of this kind of activity people in our society get bored. They try to relieve their boredom by having fun. They seek new kicks, new thrills, new adventures. They masturbate their emotions by experimenting with new religions, new art-forms, travel, new cultures, new philosophies, new technologies. But still they are never satisfied, they always want more, because all of these activities are purposeless. People don’t realize that what they really lack is serious, practical, purposeful work—work that is under their own control and is directed to the satisfaction of their own most essential, practical needs.”
― Theodore J. Kaczynski, Technological Slavery

“What gives modern society a superficial appearance of individualism, independence, and self-reliance is the vanishing of the ties that formerly linked individuals into small-scale communities. Today, nuclear families commonly have little connection to their next-door neighbors or even to their cousins. Most people have friends, but friends nowadays tend to use each other only for entertainment. They do not usually cooperate in economic or other serious, practical activities, nor do they offer each other much physical or economic security. If you become disabled, you don’t expect your friends to support you. You depend on insurance or on the welfare department.”
― Theodore J. Kaczynski, Technological Slavery

“All of us in modern society are hemmed in by a dense network of rules and regulations. We are at the mercy of large organizations such as corporations, governments, labor unions, universities, churches, and political parties, and consequently we are powerless. As a result of the servitude, the powerlessness, and the other indignities that the System inflicts on us, there is widespread frustration, which leads to an impulse to rebel. And this is where the System plays its neatest trick: Through a brilliant sleight of hand, it turns rebellion to its own advantage.

Many people do not understand the roots of their own frustration, hence their rebellion is directionless. They know that they want to rebel, but they don’t know what they want to rebel against. Luckily, the System is able to fill their need by providing them with a list of standard and stereotyped grievances in the name of which to rebel: racism, homophobia, women’s issues, poverty, sweatshops… the whole laundry-bag of “activist” issues.”
― Theodore J. Kaczynski, Technological Slavery

“The argument that “people now have more freedom than ever” is based on the fact that we are allowed to do almost anything we please as long as it has no practical consequences. See ISAIF, §72. Where our actions have practical consequences that may be of concern to the system (and few important practical consequences are not of concern to the system), our behavior, generally speaking, is closely regulated. Examples: We can believe in any religion we like, have sex with any consenting adult partner, take a plane to China or Timbuktu, have the shape of our nose changed, choose any from a huge variety of books, movies, musical recordings, etc., etc., etc. But these choices normally have no important practical consequences. Moreover, they do not require any serious effort on our part. We don’t change the shape of our own nose, we pay a surgeon to do it for us. We don’t go to China or Timbuktu under our own power, we pay someone to fly us there. On the other hand, within our own home city we can’t go from point A to point B without our movement being controlled by traffic regulations, we can’t buy a firearm without undergoing a background check, we can’t change jobs without having our background scrutinized by prospective employers, most people’s jobs require them to work according to rules, procedures, and schedules prescribed by their employers, we can’t start a business without getting licenses and permits, observing numerous regulations, and so forth.”
― Theodore J. Kaczynski, Technological Slavery

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“The only good human being is a dead one.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“Let's face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“The distinguishing mark of man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever.”
― George Orwell, Animal Farm

“All my life, books had been the life raft, the safe haven, the place I ran to when nothing else worked.”
― Elyn R. Saks, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness

“Ironically, the more I accepted I had a mental illness, the less the illness defined me—at which point the riptide set me free.”
― Elyn R. Saks, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness

“Who was I, at my core? Was I primarily a schizophrenic? Did that illness define me? Or was it an “accident” of being—and only peripheral to me rather than the “essence” of me? It’s been my observation that mentally ill people struggle with these questions perhaps even more than those with serious physical illnesses, because mental illness involves your mind and your core self as well. A woman with cancer isn’t Cancer Woman; a man with heart disease isn’t Diseased Heart Guy; a teenager with a broken leg isn’t The Broken Leg Kid. But if, as our society seemed to suggest, good health was partly mind over matter, what hope did someone with a broken mind have?”
― Elyn R. Saks, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness

“I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free.”
― Sylvia Plath, Ariel