“The artist deals with what cannot be said in words. The artist whose medium is fiction does this in words. The novelist says in words what cannot be said in words.” The left hand of darkness — Ursula K. Le Guin

“Owing chiefly to industrialism, many needs which were formerly satisfied without effort” Why Men Fight — Bertrand Russell

“This girl, he thought, could eat him, then burp raucously and be upon her way without a second thought.” Jerusalem — Alan Moore

“The volume of the mass of commodities brought into being by capitalist production is determined by the scale of this production and its needs for constant expansion, and not by a predestined ambit of supply and demand, of needs to be satisfied.” Capital: Volume II — Karl Marx

“As if you could kill time without injuring eternity.” Walden — Henry David Thoreau

“obloquy” Why Men Fight — Bertrand Russell

“In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.” Walden — Henry David Thoreau

“The ultimate fact from which war results is the fact that a large proportion of mankind have an impulse to conflict rather than harmony, and can only be brought to coöperate with others in resisting or attacking a common enemy.” Why Men Fight — Bertrand Russell

“But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue.” Man's Search for Meaning — Viktor E. Frankl

“A world full of patriots may be a world full of strife. The more intensely a nation believes in its patriotism, the more fanatically indifferent it will become to the damage suffered by other nations.” Why Men Fight — Bertrand Russell

“this fact implies the latent possibility of replacing metallic money with tokens made of some other material, i.e. symbols which would perform the function of coins.” Capital: Volume I — Karl Marx

“Training in receptivity is the complement and antidote to training in analysis and symbol manipulation. Both kinds of training are absolutely indispensable. If you neglect either of them you’ll never grow into a fully human being.” Island — Aldous Huxley

“Stalin had been a gangster who really believed he was a social scientist. Khrushchev was a gangster who hoped he was a social scientist.” Red Plenty — Francis Spufford

“Every day, when you’re on the run, is the whole of your life. Every free minute is a short story with a happy ending.” Shantaram: A Novel — Gregory David Roberts

“If your papers were in order and your heart was good you were in no danger.” For Whom The Bell Tolls — Ernest Hemingway

“So miracles were possible, after all. The Internet bookstores worked. Culture, despite the disappearances and guilt, was still alive, in a permanent state of transformation,” 2666: A Novel — Roberto Bolaño and Natasha Wimmer

“Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is.” Death's End — Cixin Liu and Ken Liu

““to think that people complain about modern life having no meaning! Look at what life was like when it did have a meaning. A tale told by an idiot or a tale told by a Calvinist? Give me the idiot every time.” Island — Aldous Huxley

“‘What are we to think of a law which can only assert itself through periodic crises? It is just a natural law which depends on the lack of awareness of the people who undergo it’” Capital: Volume I — Karl Marx

“Self-optimization, it turns out, amounts to total self-exploitation.” Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power — Byung-Chul Han and Erik Butler

““And which are the best answers?” “None of them is best without the others.” Island — Aldous Huxley

“policies that illegalize human beings are legal and moral fictions.” Undoing Border Imperialism — Harsha Walia and Andrea Smith

“Like every other place name in the British Isles, Inner and Outer Qwghlm represent a gross misnomer with ancient and probably comical origins.” Cryptonomicon — Neal Stephenson

“I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized.” Walden — Henry David Thoreau

“obloquy” Why Men Fight — Bertrand Russell

“Corporations that run private prisons and detention centers made over five billion dollars in combined annual profits in the United States over the past decade.” Undoing Border Imperialism — Harsha Walia and Andrea Smith

““to think that people complain about modern life having no meaning! Look at what life was like when it did have a meaning. A tale told by an idiot or a tale told by a Calvinist? Give me the idiot every time.” Island — Aldous Huxley

“Developed to re-empower the victim, the Zero Approach gun worked on a principle of etheric consent and only fired when the target was asking for it. Since its introduction, the homicide rate had risen by four hundred per cent.” Slaughtermatic — Steve Aylett

“susurrus” Jerusalem — Alan Moore

“the scientific evidence very robustly supported the contention that people living at adequacy, and confident they would stay there (a crucial point), were healthier and thus happier than rich people.” The Ministry for the Future: A Novel — Kim Stanley Robinson

“was reassuring to be judged by appearances, when the judge was both accurate and friendly.” Dhalgren — Samuel R. Delany and William Gibson

“I am eternally grateful to him, and indirectly to what Harvard used to be, I suppose, for my knack of finding in great books, some of them very funny books, reason enough to feel honored to be alive, no matter what else may be going on.” Timequake — Kurt Vonnegut

“The desperation might be worse now, but not the corruption. The drug trade, he conceded, was something new, but the real burden of the drug trade on Mexican society (and on American society) was overstated.” 2666: A Novel — Roberto Bolaño and Natasha Wimmer

“A wife was to be endured. Men learned that from television, she thought.” Flight Behavior — Barbara Kingsolver

“The rich are only defeated when running for their lives.” The Black Jacobins — C.L.R. James

“The object of the pacifist should be to give men more and more political control over their own lives, and in particular to introduce democracy into the management of industry, as the syndicalists advise.” Why Men Fight — Bertrand Russell

“What people fear when they engage in the struggle is not that they will fail to get their breakfast next morning, but that they will fail to outshine their neighbors.” The Conquest of Happiness — Bertrand Russell and Daniel C. Dennett

“That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier, more sacred, and auroral hour than he has yet profaned, has despaired of life, and is pursuing a descending and darkening way.” Walden — Henry David Thoreau

“The fact is, there are very few political, social, and especially personal problems that arise because of insufficient information.” Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology — Neil Postman

“The giant stands on this sheet of paper, and we can only see the trace where its feet touch the paper.” The Three-Body Problem — Cixin Liu and Ken Liu

“In every case, the working class creates by the surplus labour of one year the capital destined to employ additional labour in the following year And this is what is called creating capital out of capital.” Capital: Volume I — Karl Marx

“it is the most efficient means, in calories of energy per person per mile, ever devised for moving bodies—even” Ecotopia: A Novel — Ernest Callenbach

“not just lost the plot but having wilfully flushed the entire script down the shitter.” Jerusalem — Alan Moore

“Somewhere is The One. The solution. Fulfillment. Fulfilled women. Filled full. My Prince. Come. Come away, Death. She stumbles into her Mommy’s shoes, little girl playing house. I could kick her.” The Female Man — Joanna Russ

“Simply on the basis of its temporality, digital communication conveys affect more than it transmits feeling. Shitstorms are streams of affect. They represent exemplary phenomena of digital communication.” Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power — Byung-Chul Han and Erik Butler

““While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” Timequake — Kurt Vonnegut

“a philistine English periodical, the Spectator,” Capital: Volume I — Karl Marx

“If things were no longer going on the way they should be, didn’t that mean anything could happen?” Jerusalem — Alan Moore

“The rate of surplus-value is therefore an exact expression for the degree of exploitation of labour-power by capital, or of the worker by the capitalist.” Capital: Volume I — Karl Marx

“Murray says it is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.” White Noise — Don DeLillo