Maureen

“As for the public, the PR man, like the advertising expert and others who deal with people in the lump, including a number of would-be-statesmen and redeemers-at-large, conceive of that body as composed of non-ideographic units which are to be regarded not as ourselves but as, ultimately, gadgets of electrochemical circuitry operated by a push-button system of remote control. In fact, in dealing with the public in a purely technological society, the very notion of self is bypassed by various appeals to an undifferentiated unconscious, such appeals often having little or no relation to the vendible object or idea; in this connection history gives us to contemplate the fact that the psychologist J.B. Watson, the founder of American behaviorism, wound up in the advertising business. So history may become parable.”
― Robert Penn Warren, Democracy and Poetry

“As for me, I lived for more than three months in one of the cheapest of those spy-hole-ridden bedrooms. I completed my education there. Through three or four tiny holes, which must have been bored by some neglected genius of espionage, I watched people when they thought they were alone. I saw things which walls and the darkness were made to conceal; I heard things which no man was supposed to hear. It was degrading, but impossible to resist. I stooped. I stooped to the keyhole of hell, and I learned the secrets of the damned. - from "The Devil that Troubled the Chessboard”
― Gerald Kersh

“I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves in spring. I love the blue sky. I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I've long ceased perhaps to have faith in them. Yet from habit one's heart prizes them.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

“Why, it seemed to me I had lost the most of myself; and there was left only a brain which played with ideas, and a body that went delicately down pleasant ways. And I could not believe as my fellows believed, nor could I love them, nor could I detect anything in aught they said or did save their exceeding folly: for I had lost their cordial common faith of what use they made of half-hours and months and years... I had lost faith in the importance of my own actions, too. There was a little time of which the passing might be made endurable; beyond gaped unpredictable darkness: and that was all there was of certainty anywhere.”
― James Branch Cabell, Jurgen