From the start the "spirit" is afflicted with the curse of being "burdened" with matter...

―Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,
The German Ideology
(1846)

Image: Raphael Urbinas, Detail of The School of Athens depicting Plato and Aristotle (1509-1511). Fresco, Apostolic Palace, Vatican City.

I spread the whole earth out as a map before me. On no one spot of its surface could I put my finger and say, here is safety.

―Mary Shelley,
The Last Man
(1826)

Image: Johann Homann, An Accurate Map of Utopia: The Land of Cockaigne (1694). Cartography, 47 x 56 cm, Cornell University Library

For people like us who believe in physics, the separation between past, present and future has only the importance of an admittedly tenacious illusion.

―Albert Einstein,
Letter to Michele Besso's Family
(1955)

Image: Inktally

a quote from the paper: ".....no industry is exempt from the danger of helping create the conditions in which its survival is better assured, even if at the expense of the individuals for whose gain the system was supposedly contrived."

When men are forbidden to think, their thinking sanctions what simply exists. The genuinely critical need of thought to awaken from the cultural phantasmagoria is trapped, channelled, steered into the wrong consciousness.

―Theodor Adorno,
Negative Dialectics
(1966)

Image: August Rodin, The Thinker

One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.

―Virginia Woolf,
A Room of One's Own
(1929)

Image: Anne Vallayer-Coster, The White Tureen (1771). Oil on canvas, 54 cm × 62 cm, Private collection.

Technological advance is rapid. But without progress in charity, technological advance is useless.

―Aldous Huxley,
Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals
(1937)

Image: David Low, Portrait of Aldous Huxley (November 25, 1933)

Instead of wishing to be with people, to work and grow with them, we wish to use them. This is one reason why we hate each other.

―Jean Toomer,
Essentials: Definitions and Aphorisms
(1931)

Image: Odd Nerdrum, The Iron Law (1983-1984). Oil on canvas, 210 cm × 272 cm