“When the socialists show that the division of property among present-day mankind is the outcome of countless acts of injustice and violence, and in summa repudiate any obligation towards something having so unjust a foundation, they are seeing only one aspect of the matter. The entire past of the old culture was erected upon force, slavery, deception, error; but we, the heirs and inheritors of all these past things, cannot decree our own abolition and may not wish away a single part of them. The disposition to injustice inhabits the souls of the non-possessors too, they are no better than the possessors and have no moral prerogative over them, for their own ancestors were at some time or other possessors. What is needed is not a forcible redistribution but a gradual transformation of mind: the sense of justice must grow greater in everyone, the instinct for violence weaker.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (trans. Hollingdale)
“The prison system makes no effort to help the mentally ill. There are no therapy sessions, no treatments, no cutting-edge drugs. The only thing they do is shoot them full of Thorazine if they start to get riled up. You can spot a man doing the Thorazine shuffle from a mile away. His every action takes ten times longer than it should, because it takes him a Herculean effort to move.” — Damien Echols, Life After Death
“The mentally handicapped are executed on a regular basis while the politicians all give speeches about being tough on crime. I’ve never come across a single murderer who possessed the mental faculties required to fully comprehend the horror of what they have done. They are not emotionally developed enough to feel empathy. They live lives of nightmare, yet are not even capable of realizing that. They are the dregs of humanity, both by birth and choice. Prison and the prison mentality are not what society has been led to believe they are. These people cannot even take care of themselves, and they suffer from every health problem imaginable. There are no attractive murderers here. It’s like the ugliness inside them manages to transform their facial features so that the outside resembles the inside. There are no conversations here. There are threats, taunts, and screams, but a conversation is an impossibility. Concepts such as love, honor, and self-respect are as foreign to this place as French cuisine.” — Damien Echols, Life After Death
“No routine or spiritual practice in the world will dim the reality of daily life on Death Row. A normal person does not commit murder. For almost seventeen years I’ve waited for someone to walk through the door whom I could have a conversation with, but it just doesn’t happen. The people here are all mentally defective in ways that range from mild retardation to extreme schizophrenia. Others are stuck in some no-man’s-land between sanity and delusion. There are no criminal geniuses walking these halls. Most not only are culturally illiterate, but also can barely manage to express themselves in English. I have never met a prisoner with a college education, and I can count the high school graduates on one hand. Nearly all lived in absolute poverty, and most were abused in one way or another. Not a single one of them is capable of functioning normally in society, and it’s not a skill they’re likely to learn when locked in a cell among others who are as bad or worse. I’ve yet to see any sign of ‘rehabilitation,’ or any program designed to bring about that aim. Most of the people you meet in prison have been here repeatedly. Some have been to prison three or four times before making it to Death Row. They claim to hate and despise everything about prison, but they always come back. It’s like they’re collecting frequent flyer miles in hell. They themselves can’t explain it, falling back on excuses such as ‘It’s hard to stay out once you’re in.’ Why? How? It’s hard to refrain from snatching an old woman’s purse? It’s somehow difficult to prevent yourself from committing rape? Somehow you accidentally found yourself burglarizing a house or stealing a car?” — Damien Echols, Life After Death
“I was taken into a broom closet filled with cleaning supplies, and was handed a stack of papers while two cops stood staring at me. My brain was so numb I could comprehend only about one-fifth of what I was reading, but at least now I knew who had made the confession. The name written at the top was ‘Jessie Misskelley.’ My first thought was, Did he really do it? Followed quickly by, Why did he say I did it? Even in my shell-shocked state I could tell something about his ‘confession’ wasn’t right. For one thing, every line seemed to contradict the one before it. Any idiot could plainly see he was just agreeing with everything the cops said. That’s when I knew why the judge didn’t want to read it our loud. Anyone with even an average IQ could see it was a setup. The whole thing seemed shady.
“It’s no great wonder to me how the cops could make Jessie say the things they wanted him to say. If they treated him anything like they did me, then it’s quite amazing that he didn’t have a nervous breakdown. They used both physical and psychological torture to break me down. One minute they’d threaten to kill you, and the next they’d behave as if they were your best friends in the world, and that everything they were doing was for your own good. They shoved me into walls, spit at me, and never let up for a moment. When one of them got tired, another came in to take his place. By the time I’d been allowed to go home after previous interrogations I’d had a migraine headache, and I’d been through periods of dry heaving and vomiting. I survived because when pushed hard enough I acted like an asshole, just like the cops themselves. My point is that we were just kids. Teenagers. And they tortured us. How could someone like Jessie, with the intellect of a child, be expected to go through that and come out whole?
“It makes me sick and fills me with disgust to think about how the public trusts these people, who are in charge of upholding the law yet torture kids and the mentally handicapped. People in this country believe the corrupted are the exception. They’re not. Anyone who has had in-depth dealings with them knows it’s the rule. I’ve been asked many times if I’m angry with Jessie for accusing me. The answer is no, because it’s not Jessie’s fault. It’s the fault of the weak and lazy ‘civil servants’ who abuse the authority placed in their hands by people who trust them. I’m angry with police who would rather torture a retarded kid than look for a murderer. I’m angry with corrupt judges and prosecutors who would ruin the lives of three innocent people in order to protect their jobs and further their own political ambitions. We were nothing but poor trailer trash to them, and they thought no one would even miss us. They thought they could take our lives and the matter would end there, all swept under the rug.” — Damien Echols, Life After Death (emphasis in original)
“In this part of the world all shrines are built to honor the great spirit of mediocrity. The celebrations are for mediocre events, and everyone praises a mediocre god. Heads upon pillows dream mediocre dreams and loins all give birth to mediocre offspring. At the end of a pointless life awaits a mediocre death. Love comes wrapped in a bland little package and fulfillment of the biological urge leads to swift decline. There are no monuments to greatness in this land of stupor. Down here in the deep, dark South we know and live with the real world. Candy-Land idealism is quietly suffocated in the relentless humidity. This is the world where fist meets face. This is where the calluses on a man’s hand are bigger than his conscience, and dreams get drowned in sweat and tears. Mutually assured destruction rides the roads on gun racks in the back windows of pickup trucks. The goodness of human nature gets packed away with childhood toys, and the only third eye I have is the one I use to watch my back. Everyone puts on their Sunday best and pays tribute to religion’s slaughterhouse and then dines on a cannibal communion. People put their backs to the stone in the field and push until their entrails rupture, and they drag their meals from the earth with bleeding hands. Education is foreign to the sunburned beasts of burden, and the painkiller comes in black-labeled Tennessee bottles. No one here moves quickly, but everyone moves with absolute certainty.” – Damien Echols, Life After Death (emphasis in original)
“That year was one of the poorest my family ever lived through. There was much excitement one day about a week before Christmas when three older men in suits showed up at our door carrying boxes and bags of food. I think they were either Shriners or Masons, but I can’t remember. I do remember my mother hugging them all and thanking them over and over while my sister and I ran around their legs like hungry cats, anxious to see what treats were in those sacks. My mother was crying uncontrollably and kept hugging those men. They didn’t say much, just told her she was welcome and left as quickly as they came. This was our Christmas dinner. We received gifts from such groups more than once. Most often it was the Salvation Army.
“My father was deeply ashamed for having to accept a handout. That’s something that gets drilled into the heads of white males in the South from the moment they can speak—never accept anything that you haven’t earned for yourself. Having to accept the handout deeply wounded my father in some way that pushed him close to the edge of an emotional cliff. I wasn’t old enough to really understand it; I just knew that my dad was acting strange, and that he was chewing his nails so viciously that sometimes it looked like he was going to put his whole hand in his mouth. Now I know it’s because a man who accepted a handout wasn’t really seen as being much of a man—especially by the man himself. Any man with two working arms and legs who signed up on welfare wasn’t seen very differently from a thief, a liar, or a rapist.” – Damien Echols, Life After Death
“The Socialists desire to create a comfortable life for as many as possible. If the enduring homeland of this comfortable life, the perfect state, were really to be attained, then the comfortable life would destroy the soil out of which great intellect and the powerful individual in general grows: by which I mean great energy. If this state is achieved mankind will have become too feeble still to be able to produce the genius. Ought one therefore not to desire that life should retain its violent character and savage forces and energies continue to be called up again and again? The warm, sympathizing heart will, of course, desire precisely the abolition of that savage and violent character of life, and the warmest heart one can imagine would long for it the most passionately: and yet precisely this passion would nonetheless have derived its fire, its warmth, indeed its very existence from that savage and violent character of life; the warmest heart thus desires the abolition of its own foundation, the destruction of itself.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)
“There will always have to be bad writers, for they answer to the taste of the immature, undeveloped age-group; these have their requirements as well as do the mature. If human life were longer, the number of mature individuals would preponderate or at least be equal to that of the immature; as things are, however, most by far die too young, that is to say there are always many more undeveloped intellects with bad taste. These, moreover, desire that their requirements be satisfied with the greater vehemence of youth, and they demand bad authors and get them.” — Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (emphasis in original; trans. Hollingdale)
“The truth is that pornography is just a sad affair all round (and its industrial dimensions are an inescapable modern theme). It is there because men—in their hundreds of millions—want it to be there. Killing pornography is like killing the messenger.” – Martin Amis, The War Against Cliché
“In the history of women, there is probably no matter, apart from contraception, more important than literacy. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, access to power required knowledge of the world. This could not be gained without reading and writing, skills that were granted to men long before they were to women. Deprived of them, women were condemned to stay home with the livestock, or, if they were lucky, with the servants. (Alternatively, they may have been the servants.) Compared with men, they led mediocre lives. In thinking about wisdom, it helps to read about wisdom—about Solomon or Socrates or whomever. Likewise, goodness and happiness and love. To decide whether you have them, or want to make the sacrifices necessary to get them, it is useful to read about them. Without such introspection, women seemed stupid; therefore, they were considered unfit for education; therefore, they weren’t given an education; therefore they seemed stupid.” – Joan Acocella, “Turning the Page”
“Wherever money achieves preeminence, i.e. cities, it radically reshapes the perceptions, beliefs, attitudes, and behavior of the people who use it to organize their social relations not as ties but exchanges. The minds of intellectually sophisticated metropolitans become quite literally minds of money, full of the thoughts and judgments money would have, if it could have them.” — Erwin Montgomery, “The Withdrawal Method”
“Exaggeration in every sense is as essential to newspaper writing as it is to the writing of plays: for the point is to make as much as possible of every occurrence. So that all newspaper writers are, for the sake of their trade, alarmists: this is their way of making themselves interesting. What they really do, however, is resemble little dogs who, as soon as anything whatever moves, start up a loud barking. It is necessary, therefore, not to pay too much attention to their alarms, and to realize in general that the newspaper is a magnifying glass, and this only at best: for very often it is no more than a shadow-play on the wall.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms (trans. Hollingdale)
“The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public.—A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Books and Writing” (emphasis in original, trans. Hollingdale)
“Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It’s as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Books and Writing” (trans. Hollingdale)
“The system is rigged. Look around. Oil companies guzzle down billions in profits. Billionaires pay lower tax rates than their secretaries. And Wall Street C.E.O.s—the same ones who wrecked our economy and destroyed millions of jobs—still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors, and acting like we should thank them.” – Senator Elizabeth Warren (quoted by Jeffrey Toobin in “The Professor”)
“Government gets used to protect those who have already made it. That becomes the game. And so we had the big crash and I thought, O.K.! We tested the alternative theory. Cut taxes, reduce regulations and financial services, and see what happens to the economy. We ran a thirty-year test on that and it was a disaster.” – Senator Elizabeth Warren (quoted by Jeffrey Toobin in “The Professor”)
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there, good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to the market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.” – Senator Elizabeth Warren (quoted by Jeffrey Toobin in “The Professor”)
“There is no absurdity so palpable that one could not fix it firmly in the head of every man on earth provided one began to imprint it before his sixth year by ceaselessly rehearsing it before him with solemn earnestness.” – Arthur Schopenhauer, “On Psychology” (trans. Hollingdale)
“The capitalist world, and in particular the heart of it, the world of buying and selling, offers almost nothing a young man wants: the instincts of youth are at variance with the demands of business, and especially with those of clerking. What young man is by nature diligent, sober, and regular in his habits? Respectful to ‘superiors’ and humble before wealth? Sincerely able to devote himself to what he finds boring? One in ten thousand, perhaps. Bur for the great majority a ‘job’ is, depending on temperament, a torment or a tedious irrelevance which has to be endured day after day in order that, during one’s so-called ‘free time,’ one will be allowed to get on with living. The situation is the most commonplace in the world. I believe it is the cause of that settled cynicism with which nine out of ten regard the ‘social order’: they know that, short of a total revolution in the conduct of human affairs, any conceivable social order will for the great majority mean the boredom of routine, the damming up of their natural energies and the frustration of their natural desires.” – R. J. Hollingdale, Arthur Schopenhauer: Essays and Aphorisms
“The most important predictor of obesity remains income level. Fast-food companies are dropping obscene amounts on advertising in low-income communities of color, and are targeting children. African-American kids see at least 50 percent more fast-food ads than do white children their age. A full 25 percent of all Spanish-language fast-food advertising in the U.S. is from McDonalds, and the average Latino will see about 290 McDonalds ads a year. In 2006, 9 percent of Upper East Side residents were obese, compared with 21 percent and 30 percent in East and Central Harlem and North and Central Brooklyn, two of the poorest stretches of New York City. Only 5 percent of Upper East Side residents had diabetes, compared to 10 percent and 15 percent in Harlem and Brooklyn. In these neighborhoods, between 1985 and 2000, the cost of fruits and vegetables increased by 40 percent while the price of junk food and soft drinks decreased by 15 percent and 25 percent respectively.” – Karla Cornejo Villavicencio, “Seeing Red”
“Capitalism is itself a kind of social technology, one capable of organizing and managing a massive and complex division of labor without concentrating power over the system at any one point. But it is a technology that is much better suited to some tasks than others. When maximizing the output of commodities with the least input of human labor is posed as society’s main problem, capitalism’s defenders can point to it as an historically unsurpassed technology for this purpose.
“If, however, the main problem is to maintain the ability of the Earth to support an advanced civilization, and to ensure that the bounty of that civilization is shared out equitably, then the situation looks quite different. Since the system responds only to price signals, internalizing the externalities of ecological degradation entails an unceasing campaign of enclosures and commodification, in which every aspect of the natural world must be parceled up into pieces of private property, from carbon credits to fishing rights. And this same reliance on prices ensures that legitimacy of a person’s desires will always be equated with the money at their disposal, and the machine will reproduce a world that caters to the whims of rich countries and rich people. This is ever more of a problem when wage work is still the normal way of making a living, and yet less and less labor is actually required in production.” – Peter Frase, “Sowing Scarcity”
“Most people who think they are practicing law are actually making binders, and my guess is that most people who think they are doing whatever important thing they are doing are making binders. The binders from law firms go to a locker in a warehouse in a parking lot in an office park off an exit of a turnpike off a highway off an interstate in New Jersey, never to be looked at again. No one ever read them in the first place. But some client was billed for the hourly work.” — Elizabeth Wurzel, from The Cut
“If it is to remain something meaningful, philosophy does not have to limit itself to describing things, it has to make things happen, it has to effectuate a change. That’s why the locus of philosophy, the place where it dwells, is not the books, nor the academic papers, but the body of the philosopher. Philosophy does not exist properly unless it is embodied in a human being; in a sense, philosophy is word become flesh.” – Costica Bradatan, “Philosophy as an Art of Living” (emphases in original)
“It is a dangerous thing to suddenly deprive a man of hope–he can turn violent. It is important to kill hope slowly, so that the loser has time to adjust unconsciously to the loss.” – Alasdair Gray, Lanark (emphasis in original)
“Neither goodness nor generosity nor courtesy can exist, any more than friendship can, if they are not sought of and for themselves, but are cultivated only for the sake of sensual pleasure or personal advantage.” – Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis (trans. Miller)
“We lose the subject of animals when we move out of childhood. In childhood animals are all around us, and then we throw them out. In childhood they’re everywhere, the stuff of our stories and our art and our songs, of our clothes and blankets, of toys and games. Then in adulthood they’re distant symbols or objects. They’re rudely ejected from our domain. They’re frivolous or infantile, suddenly. They’re what we eat or maybe pets. Sometimes they’re what we kill. But this makes no sense. This impoverishes our imaginations. When we turn away from animals as though they’re only childish things, we make our world colder and more narrow. We rob ourselves of beauty and understanding. We rob ourselves of the capacity for empathy.” – Lydia Millet (interviewed by Morten Hoi Jensen in Bookforum)
“When most people leave school they have to live by work which can’t be liked for its own sake and whose practical application is outside their grasp. Unless they learn to work obediently because they’re told to, and for no other reason, they’ll be unfit for human society.” – Alasdair Gray, Lanark
“A man once said in Auschwitz that indifference is the greatest sin of the 20th Century. Well, I think it is the greatest sin of the 21st Century as well. We need to shake off this indifference, the destructive tolerance of evil.” – Jim Caviezel, quoted in the production notes for The Stoning of Soraya M.