Chekhov

“I feel like a donkey, with a stick in my mouth and a carrot up my ass.” ― Anton Chekhov

ROY

 

Tolstoy

“The most mentally deranged people are certainly those who see in others indications of insanity they do not notice in themselves.” ― Leo Tolstoy, The Devil

Across the Frontiers

“Not only is the Universe stranger than we think, it is stranger than we can think.”― Werner Heisenberg, Across the Frontiers

Tis the season

"Tis the season, fer Friut-Kake, egg-snog, & Nut-Sack-krackin---- Holiday-FUN!"~

PETE Best~Beatles drummer

Hunter

“A man can live on his wits and his balls for only so long.” ― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

 

 

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.” ― Friedrich Nietzsche

Candide

“Optimism," said Cacambo, "What is that?" "Alas!" replied Candide, "It is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.” ― Voltaire, Candide

Alexis de Tocqueville

“Every nation that has ended in tyranny has come to that end by way of good order. It certainly does not follow from this that peoples should scorn public peace, but neither should they be satisfied with that and nothing more. A nation that asks nothing of government but the maintenance of order is already a slave in the depths of its heart; it is a slave of its well-being, ready for the man who will put it in chains.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville

“A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.”― Alexis de Tocqueville

“We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the majority who participate.”― Thomas Jefferson

“Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of people towards one another.” ― Sigmund Freud

Totalitarianism

“Totalitarianism is not only hell, but all the dream of paradise-- the age-old dream of a world where everybody would live in harmony, united by a single common will and faith, without secrets from one another. Andre Breton, too, dreamed of this paradise when he talked about the glass house in which he longed to live. If totalitarianism did not exploit these archetypes, which are deep inside us al

l and rooted deep in all religions, it could never attract so many people, especially during the early phases of its existence. Once the dream of paradise starts to turn into reality, however, here and there people begin to crop up who stand in its way. and so the rulers of paradise must build a little gulag on the side of Eden. In the course of time this gulag grows ever bigger and more perfect, while the adjoining paradise gets even smaller and poorer.”
― Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“People who know little are usually great talkers, while folks who know much........ say little.” ― Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“When you're cold, don't expect sympathy from someone who's warm.” ― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Alfred de Vigny

“I admit that I myself am far from having a complete command of every topic I touch on, but my knowledge of my subject is always greater than the interest or the understanding of my auditors. You see, there is one very good thing about mankind; the mediocre masses make very few demands of the mediocrities of a higher order, submitting stupidly and cheerfully to their guidance” ― Alfred de Vigny, Stello

"It's a disease. Nobody thinks or feels or cares any more; nobody gets excited or believes in anything except their own comfortable little God damn mediocrity.”
― Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road

impressed by how unimpressive

“Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them. With Major Major it had been all three. Even among men lacking all distinction he inevitably stood out as a man lacking more distinction than all the rest, and people who met him were always impressed by how unimpressive he was.”― Joseph Heller, Catch-22