“ Dickens enjoyed human beings as he found them, unregenerate, peculiar and incorrigibly themselves. ”
From being a movement aiming for universal freedom, communism turned into a system of universal despotism. That is the logic of utopia.
~ John N. Gray
Today we have made a fetish of choice, but a chosen death is forbidden. Perhaps what distinguishes humans from other animals is that humans have learnt to cling more abjectly to life.
Where affluence is the rule, the true threat is the loss of desire,(...) What is new is not that prosperity depends on stimulating demand. It is that it cannot continue without inventing new vices
If there is anything unique about the human animal, it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience.