Killian Murphy

“What an ass you are!” Satan said. “Are you so unobservant as not to have found out that sanity and happiness are an impossible combination? No sane man can be happy, for to him life is real, and he sees what a fearful thing it is.”
― Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger

“Street Ballad

From high above the birds look down and sing because
they see
the monstrous comedies they miss, living several storeys
higher:
the dirty degradations and the gross humiliations,
they, like the gods, without pity, look down upon from a
telephone wire.

but as they sit there high above and gaze down upon our
brutal
short and messy circumstances, they do not see the one
who stands behind a cardboard tree examining them
coldly
with one eye closed and the other staring along the barrel
of a gun.”
― George Barker

“Far from being the smartest possible biological species, we are probably better thought of as the stupidest possible biological species capable of starting a technological civilization - a niche we filled because we got there first, not because we are in any sense optimally adapted to it.”
― Nick Bostrom, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

“there’s always been heroes,
there’s always been villains,
the stakes may have changed
but really there’s no difference.

there’s always been greed
and heartbreak and ambition.
jealousy, love,
trespass and contrition,

we’re the same beings that began,
still living,
in all of our fury and foulness and friction.
Everyday odysseys.
Dreams vs decisions.
The stories are there if you listen.”
― Kate Tempest, Brand New Ancients: A Poem