Alan Moore

In fact, let us not mince words… the management is terrible! We’ve had a string of embezzlers, frauds, liars, and lunatics making a string of catastrophic decisions. This is plain fact. But who elected them? It was you! You who appointed these people! You who gave them the power to make decisions for you! While I’ll admit that anyone can make a mistake once, to go on making the same lethal errors century after century seems to me to be nothing short of deliberate. You have encouraged these malicious incompetents, who have made your working life a shambles. You have accepted without question their senseless orders. You have allowed them to fill your workplace with dangerous and unproven machines. All you had to say was “No.” You have no spine. You have no pride. You are no longer an asset to the company.

PENNY RIMBAUD

We all exist in a day-to-day reality of lies and deceit, and nobody will ever make any sense of it. That's why we need to allow for tenderness, for silence, for contemplation. We need to find our own soul within all this mess. We've let ourselves become commodities, pawns in the marketplace. The only way we can get out of that is to realise that our personality, the very thing we think we are, is no more than a costume of ideas. We all like to think we're someone special, so we mouth the right words, dress up in the right gear, but it's all projection, all so fucking irrelevant.

But for all that, I believe people want to connect. Deep down they're tired of being no more than an idea of themselves. That's why people look for more, that's why they have sex, why they smoke dope, why they go on binges. They probably won't find the answer that way, but all the same, they want to connect. People want to know that they're alive, but let's face it, in a consumer society, that's no easy job.

Alfred Noyes-The Unknown God

"The modern world was not alive to the tremendous Reality that encompassed it. We were surrounded by an immeasurable abyss of darkness and splendor. We built our empires on a pellet of dust revolving around a ball of fire in unfathomable space. Life, that Sphynx, with the human face and the body of a brute, asked us new riddles every hour. Matter itself was dissolving under the scrutiny of Science; and yet, in our daily lives, we were becoming a race of somnambulists, whose very breathing, in train and bus and car, was timed to the movement of the wheels; and the more perfectly, and even alertly, we clicked through our automatic affairs on the surface of things, the more complete was our insensibility to the utterly inscrutable mystery that anything should be in existence at all."

Erich Fromm

"Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total: it pervades the relationship of man to his work, to the things he consumes, to the state, to his fellow man, and to himself. Man has created a world of man-made things as it never has existed before. He has constructed a complex social machine to administer the technical machine he has built. Yet this whole creation of his stands over and above him. He does not feel himself as a creator and center, but as the servant of a Golem, which his hands have built. The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which he unleashes, the more powerless he feels himself as a human being. He is owned by his creations, and his lost ownership of himself."

Wilhelm Reich

"THE EXIT IS CLEARLY VISIBLE TO ALL TRAPPED IN THE HOLE. YET NOBODY SEEMS TO SEE IT. EVERYBODY KNOWS WHERE THE EXIT IS. YET NOBODY SEEMS TO MAKE A MOVE TOWARD IT. MORE: WHOEVER MOVES TOWARD THE EXIT, OR WHOEVER POINTS TOWARD IT IS DECLARED CRAZY OR A CRIMINAL OR A SINNER TO BURN IN HELL.

It turns out the trouble is not with the trap or even with finding the exit. The trouble is WITHIN THE TRAPPED ONES."