It was so thoughtful of prehistoric peoples to have left an animated record of the species they were wiping out, so that we could see them later on.

When someone says that they believe in the "politics of the possible", what they are actually saying is: 'I wish to maintain the status quo.'

Since when is the realm of possibility so narrow that it precludes an intelligent future from becoming a reality?

The easy road of politics as usual is a dead end road.  Such are the politics of the unsustainable.

Twitter doesn't empower you.

It empowers Donald Trump.

Endless economic expansion has as its true meaning endless imperialism. 

 The Sun never sets on the global economy.

"All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy.  They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible.

[...] 

A humanitarian is always a hypocrite."  


- George Orwell in his essay "Rudyard Kipling"
  





"He could not understand what was happening, because he had never had any grasp of the economic forces underlying imperial expansion.  It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern.  Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelizing.  You turn a Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed 'natives', and then you establish 'the Law', which includes roads, railways and a court-house.  He could not foresee, therefore, that the same motives which brought the Empire into existence would end by destroying it.  It was the same motive, for example, that caused the Malayan jungles to be cleared for rubber estates, and which now causes those estates to be handed over intact to the Japanese.  The modern totalitarians know what they are doing, and the nineteenth-century English did not not know what they were doing.  Both attitudes have their advantages, but Kipling was never able to move forward from one into the other.  His outlook, allowing for the fact that after all he was an artist, was that of the salaried bureaucrat"

- George Orwell in his essay "Rudyard Kipling"

Hermann Hestenburgh Vanitas, Still Life. 18th century copy attributed to
Cornelis Van Spaendonck .

"Progress Celebrates Pyrrhic Victories Over Nature" - Karl Krauss

"We are proud of our museums where we display a way of living that we have made impossible." 

- A.K. Coomaraswamy

Is there a term more Orwellian than Political Correctness?

“The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.”

- Niccolo Machiavelli

The Triumph of Death

The oars of Democracy have always been manned by slaves.

"'Humanity'. - We do not regard animals as moral beings.  But do you suppose the animals regard us as moral beings? - An animal which could speak said: 'Humanity is a prejudice of which  we animals at least are free.'"

- Nietzsche Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality