⚠️ Warning: Loud Volume ⚠️




"I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit."

— Thomas Paine

“It is said that the artist of today cannot create because Prometheuslike he is bound to the rock of economic necessity. This, however, is true of art in all ages. Michael Angelo [sic] was dependent on his patron saint, no less than the sculptor or painter of today, except that the art connoisseurs of those days were far away from the madding crowd. They felt honored to be permitted to worship at the shrine of the master.

The art protector of our time knows but one criterion, one value,—the dollar. He is not concerned about the quality of any great work, but in the quantity of dollars his purchase implies. Thus the financier in Mirbeau’s Les Affaires sont les Affaires points to some blurred arrangement in colors, saying: “See how great it is; it cost 50,000 francs.” Just like our own parvenus. The fabulous figures paid for their great art discoveries must make up for the poverty of their taste.”

— Emma Goldman,
Minorities Versus Majorities

“The most unpardonable sin in society is independence of thought. That this should be so terribly apparent in a country whose symbol is democracy, is very significant of the tremendous power of the majority.

Wendell Phillips said fifty years ago: “In our country of absolute, democratic equality, public opinion is not only omnipotent, it is omnipresent. There is no refuge from its tyranny, there is no hiding from its reach, and the result is that if you take the old Greek lantern and go about to seek among a hundred, you will not find a single American who has not, or who does not fancy at least he has, something to gain or lose in his ambition, his social life, or business, from the good opinion and the votes of those around him. And the consequence is that instead of being a mass of individuals, each one fearlessly blurting out his own conviction, as a nation compared to other nations we are a mass of cowards. More than any other people we are afraid of each other.” Evidently we have not advanced very far from the condition that confronted Wendell Phillips.”

— Emma Goldman,
Minorities Versus Majorities

"Gender is the poetry each of us makes out of the language we are taught."

— Leslie Feinberg, Trans Liberation: Beyond Pink or Blue

“Therefore turn to yourselves rather than to your gods or idols. Bring out from yourselves what is in you, bring it to the light, bring yourselves to revelation.”

……

“But one needs only admonish you of yourselves to bring you to despair at once. ‘What am I?’ each of you asks himself. An abyss of lawless and unregulated impulses, desires, wishes, passions, a chaos without light or guiding star! How am I to obtain a correct answer, if, without regard to God's commandments or to the duties which morality prescribes, without regard to the voice of reason, which in the course of history, after bitter experiences, has exalted the best and most reasonable thing into law, I simply appeal to myself? My passion would advise me to do the most senseless thing possible. – Thus each deems himself the – devil; for, if, so far as he is uncon­cerned about religion, he only deemed himself a beast, he would easily find that the beast, which does follow only its impulse (as it were, its advice), does not advise and impel itself to do the ‘most senseless’ things, but takes very correct steps. But the habit of the religious way of thinking has biased our mind so grievously that we are – terrified at ourselves in our nakedness and naturalness; it has degraded us so that we deem ourselves depraved by nature, born devils.”

— Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own

"As painful and embarrassing as it may be, the fact remains that we are confronted with a human structure that has been shaped by thousands of years of mechanistic civilization and is expressed in social helplessness and an intense desire for a führer."

— Wilhelm Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism

“Whether it be hedonism, pessimism, utilitarianism, eudemonism—all of these ideas that measure the value of things according to pleasure or suffering, that is to say, according to secondary states and side-effects, are foreground ideas, and naive. Anyone conscious of having creative energies and an artist’s conscience will look down on them not without mockery, but also not without pity. Pity for all of you! although it is not pity in your sense, to be sure. It is not pity for social ‘misery’, for ‘society’ and its sick and injured, for the perennially depraved and downtrodden who lie around us everywhere; even less is it pity for the grumbling, oppressed, rebellious ranks of slaves who are looking to be masters (which they call ‘being free’). Our pity is a more elevated, more far-sighted pity—we see how human beings are being reduced, how all of you are reducing them! And there are moments when we look at your pity especially with an indescribable anxiety, when we defend ourselves against this pity—when we find your seriousness more dangerous than any frivolity. If possible (and no ‘if possible’ can be more crazy) you want to abolish suffering! And we?—it seems that we want it to be, if anything, worse and greater than before! Well-being in your sense of the word—that certainly is no goal, it seems to us to be an end! A condition that would immediately make people ludicrous and contemptible—make us wish their downfall! The discipline of suffering, great suffering—don’t you know that this discipline alone has created all human greatness to date? The tension of the soul in unhappiness, which cultivates its strength; its horror at the sight of the great destruction; its inventiveness and bravery in bearing, enduring, interpreting, exploiting unhappiness, and whatever in the way of depth, mystery, mask, spirit, cleverness, greatness the heart has been granted—has it not been granted them through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering? In the human being, creature and creator are united: the human being is matter, fragment, excess, clay, filth, nonsense, chaos; but the human being is also creator, sculptor, hammer-hardness, observer-divinity, and the Seventh Day—do you understand this opposition? Do you understand that your pity is for the ‘creature in the human being’, that which must be formed, broken, forged, torn, burned, annealed, purified—that which necessarily has to suffer and should suffer? And our pity—do you not understand whom our reversed pity is intended for, when it resists your pity as the worst of all possible self-indulgences and weaknesses?

Pity versus pity, then!

But to repeat, there are more important problems than all those concerning pleasure and suffering and pity; and any philosophy that confines itself only to these is naive.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil (aphorism 225)

"what i pray for most is not the promised utopia of the jetsons but a world in which i can fuck whenever i want - and never get sick"

art by wuret

“All those moral codes that are addressed to individuals, aimed at their so-called ‘happiness’—what are they but behavioural guides in relation to the degree of precariousness that the individual feels about himself; recipes to counter his passions, his good and bad tendencies, if he possesses the will to power and would like to play the master; large or small titbits of shrewdness and affectation, infected with the musty smell of old home remedies and old wives’ tales. And all of them in a form that is grotesque and unreasonable (because they are addressed to ‘everyone’, because they generalize where one ought not to generalize); all of them in unconditional language, taking themselves unconditionally; all of them seasoned not only with one grain of salt, but only becoming bearable and sometimes even tempting when they learn the trick of smelling overseasoned and dangerous, above all when they smell of ‘another world’. By intellectual standards, none of this is worth very much, and it is certainly nothing like ‘science’, let alone ‘wisdom’; rather, to say it over and over again, it is shrewdness, shrewdness, shrewdness, combined with stupidity, stupidity, stupidity. It may take the form of indifference and a marble-column-coldness against the heat of emotional folly, the remedy advised by the Stoics; or then again it may be Spinoza’s laugh-no-more and weep-no-more, the destruction of the emotions by analysing and dissecting them, which he advocates with such naïveté; or else a toning down of the emotions to a harmless mean, where their satisfaction is permissible—moral Aristotelianism. It might even be morality as enjoyment of emotions intentionally diluted and spiritualized through the symbolism of art, as music, for example, or the love of God and of mankind for God’s sake (for in religion, the passions have their civil rights again, assuming that …). And finally it might even be that very welcoming, wanton devotion to the emotions as it was taught by Hafis and Goethe, a bold dropping of the reins, the exceptional case of spiritual-carnal licentia morum to be found in wise old eccentrics and drunkards who ‘can’t do much harm any more’.”

— Friedrich Nietzsche,
Beyond Good and Evil (aphorism 198)

(and also femininity)