I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work. Or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickle’s-worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do. And there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe. And our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad. Worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy so we don’t go out any more. We sit in the house and slowly the world we’re living in is getting smaller. And all we say is, Please, at least leave us alone in our living-rooms. Let me have my toaster, and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone. Well I’m not going to leave you alone. I want you to get mad. I don’t want you to protest. I won’t want you to ride. I don’t want you to write to your Congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is first you’ve got to get mad. You’ve got to say, I’m a human being. Goddamnit. My life has value! ibid.
We’re in a lot of trouble ... because you people and sixty-two million other Americans are listening to me right now. Because less than 3% of you people read books. Because less than 15% of you read newspapers. Because the only truth you know is what you get over of this tube. Right now there is a whole – an entire – generation that never knew anything that didn’t come out of this tube! This tube is the gospel! The ultimate revelation! This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers. This tube is the most awesome god-damned force in the whole godless world, and woe is us if it ever falls into the hands of the wrong people ... And when the twelfth largest company in the world controls the most awesome god-damned propaganda for us in the whole godless world, who knows what shit will be paid to the truth on this network! So you listen to me. Listen to me. Television is not the truth. Television is a god-damned amusement park; television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troop of acrobats, story-tellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion-tamers and football players – we’re in the boredom-killing business. So if you want the truth go to God. Go to your gurus. Go to yourselves! Because that’s the only place you’re ever going to find any real truth. But, man, you’re never going to get any truth from us. We‘ll tell you anything you want to hear. We’ll lie like hell ... We’ll tell you any shit you want to hear. We deal in illusions, man! None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day night after night all ages, colors, creeds, where are you now? You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that you’re own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like a tube. You eat like a tube. You raise your children like a tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God’s name: you people are the reality. We are the illusion. ibid.
It is the individual that’s finished. It is the single solitary human being that’s finished. It is every single one of you out there that’s finished. Because this is no longer a nation of independent individuals. It’s a nation of some two-hundred-odd million transistorised, deodorised, whiter-than-white, steel-belted bodies ... The whole world is becoming humanoid, creatures that look human but aren’t ... The whole world’s people are becoming mass-produced, programmed, numbered … ibid.
You are television incarnate, Diana. Indifferent to suffering. Insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death. All the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of Time & Space into split seconds, instant replays. You are madness, Diana. Virulent madness. And everything you touch dies with you. But not me. Not as long as I can feel pleasure, pain. And love. ibid.
I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn't, than live my life as if there isn't and die to find out there is. Albert Camus
Without work, all life goes rotten, but when work is soulless, life stifles and dies. Albert Camus
What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying. Albert Camus, The Myth of Susyphus and Other Essays
... the swindle of life and the treachery of a God that can create disease and misery and crime – create things that men would be condemned for creating – that men would be ashamed to create. Mark Twain, cited Isabel Lyon journal 2nd February 1906
All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure. Mark Twain
Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen. Mark Twain
Good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience: this is the ideal life. Mark Twain
A man can have but one life and one death,
One heaven, one hell. Robert Browning, In a Balcony
I will have nothing to do with your immortality; we are miserable enough in this life, without the absurdity of speculating upon another. Lord Byron, letter to Francis Hodgson 3 September 1811
But life will suit
Itself to Sorrow’s most detested fruit,
Like to the apples on the Dead Sea’s shore,
All ashes to the taste. Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me; and to me,
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture. ibid.
How little do we know that which we are!
How less what we may be! Lord Byron, Don Juan
Every day confirms my opinion on the superiority of a vicious life – and if Virtue is not its own reward I don’t know any other stipend annexed to it. Lord Byron
Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery. It is far better to be free, to leave the forts and barricades of fear, to stand erect and face the future with a smile. It is far better to give yourself sometimes to negligence, to drift with wave and tide, with the blind force of the world, to think and dream, to forget the chains and limitations of the breathing life, to forget purpose and object, to lounge in the picture gallery of the brain, to feel once more the clasps and kisses of the past, to bring life’s morning back, to see again the forms and faces of the dead, to paint fair pictures for the coming years, to forget all Gods, their promises and threats, to feel within your veins life’s joyous stream and hear the martial music, the rhythmic beating of your fearless heart. And then to rouse yourself to do all useful things, to reach with thought and deed the ideal in your brain, to give your fancies wing, that they, like chemist bees, may find art’s nectar in the weeds of common things, to look with trained and steady eyes for facts, to find the subtle threads that join the distant with the now, to increase knowledge, to take burdens from the weak, to develop the brain, to defend the right, to make a palace for the soul. This is real religion. This is real worship. Robert G Ingersoll, What is Religion? 1899
We can be as honest as we are ignorant. If we are, when asked what is beyond the horizon of the known, we must say that we do not know. We can tell the truth, and we can enjoy the blessed freedom that the brave have won. We can destroy the monsters of superstition, the hissing snakes of ignorance and fear. We can drive from our minds the frightful things that tear and wound with beak and fang. We can civilize our fellow men. We can fill our lives with generous deeds, with loving words, with art and song, and all the ecstasies of love. We can flood our years with sunshine – with the divine climate of kindness, and we can drain to the last drop the golden cup of joy. Robert G Ingersoll
Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities. We strive in vain to look beyond the heights. We cry aloud, and the only answer is the echo of our wailing cry. From the voiceless lips of the unreplying dead there comes no word; but in the night of death hope sees a star and listening love can hear the rustle of a wing. Robert G Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses
I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides. Carl Sagan, In the Valley of the Shadow, cited Parade magazine 10 March 1996; viz also Carl Sagan, Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium 1997 p245
Perhaps we have after all decided to choose Life. Professor Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: Who Speaks For Earth? 1979
Belief matters a good deal less than how you live your life ... By no means all religion is fundamentalist, extreme, exclusive and damaging. At its best it’s something modest, inspiring and sustaining. Rabbi Julia Neuberger & Spivey & Scrutton v Hichens & Dawkins & Grayling 2008
We have less control over our lives than we might like to think. Richard Dawkins, Sex, Death & the Meaning of Life III, Channel 4 2012
There’s no doubt that people do find a Darwinian view of life bleak and unsympathetic. But it’s still true, and we can’t get away from that. And further, in any case, there is a sort of happiness, there’s a sort of bliss, in understanding the elegance with which the world is put together. And Darwinian Natural Selection is a supremely elegant idea; it really does make everything fall into place and make sense. And I find great consolation, great happiness, in that level of understanding. Richard Dawkins, The Genius of Charles Darwin part III, Channel 4 2008