Jacque Fresco

"Fully grown human being, running through the field with a ball in his hands—isn't that amazing, that it attracts that many people? Sports is insane. It's designed to occupy the time of humans who might begin to ask questions. Ballgames: football, baseball, basketball—all ballgames—, bowling was designed, as religion was designed, so that people ... When they had a day off they used to sit around and say, "How come the king has 42 rooms, a thousand wives, and all I've got is a stale loaf of bread?" So they arranged battles and scenes for people to go to. Then they had the church on their day off. And then they arranged community singing and dancing to fill in time off. That's what all these dances are about. ... It is a nothing thing, dancing. You've got to think about it: what is that shit? It's nothing at all! You understand?

Now, if a man came from Mars, and he saw a lot of people moving around like that ... He'd say, "What is that?" And you say, "Well, that's dancing." "Yes, but what IS IT? Does it improve the kidney function or anything? No? Well, I don't understand it." You understand? It's a nothing thing, like religion is a nothing thing. Okay? Now, the society you live in is full of nothing things and nothing words."

(Excerpt from a lecture)

Robert Crumb

"I’m such a negative person, and always have been. Was I born that way? I don’t know. I am constantly disgusted by reality, horrified and afraid. I cling desperately to the few things that give me some solace, that make me feel good.

I hate most of humanity. Though I might be very fond of particular individuals, humanity in general fills me with contempt and despair. I hate most of what passes for civilization. I hate the modern world. For one thing there are just too Goddamn many people. I hate the hordes, the crowds in their vast cities, with all their hateful vehicles, their noise and their constant meaningless comings and goings. I hate cars. I hate modern architecture. Every building built after 1955 should be torn down!

I despise modern music. Words cannot express how much it gets on my nerves – the false, pretentious, smug assertiveness of it. I hate business, having to deal with money. Money is one of the most hateful inventions of the human race. I hate the commodity culture, in which everything is bought and sold. No stone is left unturned. I hate the mass media, and how passively people suck up to it.

I hate having to get up in the morning and face another day of this insanity. I hate having to eat, shit, maintain the body – I hate my body. The thought of my internal functions, the organs, digestion, the brain, the nervous system, horrify me.

Nature is horrible. It’s not cute and loveable. It’s kill or be killed. It’s very dangerous out there. The natural world is filled with scary, murderous creatures and forces. I hate the whole way that nature functions. Sex is especially hateful and horrifying, the male penetrating the female, his dick goes into her hole, she’s impregnated, another being grows inside her, and then she must go through a painful ordeal as the new being pushes out of her, only to repeat the whole process in time.

Reproduction – what could be more existentially repulsive?

How I hate the courting ritual. I was always repelled by my own sex drive, which in my youth never left me alone. I was constantly driven by frustrated desires to do bizarre and unacceptable things with and to women. My soul was in constant conflict about it. I never was able to resolve it.

Old age is the only relief.

I hate the way the human psyche works, the way we are traumatized and stupidly imprinted in early childhood and have to spend the rest of our lives trying to overcome these infantile mental fixations. And we never ever fully succeed in this endeavor.

I hate organized religions. I hate governments. It’s all a lot of power games played out by ambition-driven people, and foisted on the weak, the poor, and on children. 

Most humans are bullies. Adults pick on children. Older children pick on younger children. Men bully women. The rich bully the poor. People love to dominate.

I hate the way humans worship power – one of the most disgusting of all human traits. 

I hate the human tendency towards revenge and vindictiveness. I hate the way humans are constantly trying to trick and deceive one another, to swindle, to cheat, and take unfair advantage of the innocent, the naïve and the ignorant.

I hate the vacuous, false, banal conversation that goes on among people.

Sometimes I feel suffocated; I want to flee from it.

For me, to be human is, for the most part, to hate what I am. When I suddenly realize that I am one of them, I want to scream in horror."

Thomas Mann

"And life? Life itself? Was it perhaps only an infection, a sickening of matter? Was that which one might call the original procreation of matter only a disease, a growth produced by morbid stimulation of the immaterial? The first step toward evil, toward desire and death, was taken precisely then, when there took place that first increase in the density of the spiritual, that pathologically luxuriant morbid growth, produced by the irritant of some unknown infiltration; this, in part pleasurable, in part a motion of self-defense, was the primeval stage of matter, the transition from the insubstantial to the substance. This was the Fall." (In "The Magic Mountain")

Isabelle Eberhardt

"To have a home, a family, a property or a public function, to have a definite means of livehood and to be a useful cog in the social machine, all these things seem necessary, even indispensable, to the vast majority of men, including intellectuals, and including even those who think of themselves as wholly liberated. And yet such things are only a different form of slavery that comes of contact with others, especially regulated and continued contact."

Fernando Vallejo

"Lust is allright; sex is good, it clears the mind and gives the heart joy. With whomever, with man or woman, dog or chimera. But, as long as it is not destined to reproduce, in that case it is indeed a sin."

"Not only a pregnant woman is an outrage toward ethics but also an attack on aesthetics. Motherhood degrades women, it turns them into cows. With the forgiveness of cows, my sisters."

"Heaven and happiness do not exist. These are stories told by your fathers to justify the crime of having brought you into this world. What exists is reality, harsh reality: this slaughterhouse where we came to die, to kill and by the way kill the animal, our neighbor."

E.E. Rehmus

"Human life grows cheaper with every mewling, puking infant that is born. Any form of birth control, no matter how unjust or extreme, is preferable to that tyranny exercised so criminally now by those who, in their filth, stupidity, rut and obnoxious lust, blindly and selfishly birth endlessly forth their disgusting progeny in chaotic, cancerous growth, shoving and forcing the guilty in with the innocent in this already over-stuffed planetary rat-box of accelerating madness and asphyxiation" 

Guido Morselli

"To those who are looking for a definition of life, I would propose the following: matter, when it begins to suffer."

Leo Tolstoy

"You are what you call your life; you are a temporary, random conglomeration of particles. The thing that you have been led to refer to as your life is simply the mutual interaction and alteration of these particles. This conglomeration will continue for a certain period of time; then the interaction of these particles will come to a halt, and the thing you call your life will come to an end and with it all your questions. You are a little lump of something randomly stuck together. The lump decomposes. The decomposition of this lump is known as your life. The lump falls apart, and thus the decomposition ends, as do all your questions."

Piero Camporesi

An ambivalent monster, a ‘wicked worm’ like the Prince of Darkness, the rebel and the fallen angel, or ‘worms/born to make the angelic butterfly,’ the earthworm and the caterpillar are man’s other face or, better, his image. ‘What are all men,’ wondered St Augustine, ‘born of flesh, if not worms?’ Fear of worms is in the last analysis fear of oneself. These creatures, like mankind, were born of decay; man from fetid sperm, from stale blood, fed in the womb by the same putrid blood that also produced snakes; worms of rotting blood and decomposing flesh. The difference was only superficial.

Søren Kierkegaard

"A man is born in sin, he enters this world by means of a crime, his existence is a crime - and procreation is the fall. ... way of a crime, a sin, then it is not difficult to guess where one arrives when one is born - one enters a prison, this world is a prison. And the punishment... is to exist..." 

Louis-Ferdinand Céline

"The major Christian religions didn't try to gild the lily. They didn't attempt to dull your senses. They didn't run after voters. They displayed no desire to please. Nor to wiggle their asses at you. Man, barely out of the cradle, had it laid on the line. He was immediately brought up to date: "Now hear this you putrid little monster! You'll never be anything other than a total shit... you were born a shit... Are we getting through? We'd have thought it was obvious, right... However... perhaps, if you're lucky... really lucky... but it's unlikely... there's a minuscule chance you'll be forgiven for being such a revolting, excremental, unbelievable shit... and you'll earn that by smiling at all the sorrows, travails, tests, diverse miseries, and assorted tortures that will come your way during your existence-be it short or long. Show perfect humility. You're a slave! Life, you slob, is but a bitter cup. Don't tire yourself out or look for answers in the wrong place!"

E.M Cioran

"Above all I like to see how people end. When you read about someone's life, anyone's, you see what illusions he started out with. It's very interesting to see how they fail him."

“There are no arguments. Can anyone who has reached the limit bother with arguments, causes, effects, moral considerations, and so forth? Of course not. For such a person there are only unmotivated motives for living. On the heights of despair, the passion for the absurd is the only thing that can still throw a demonic light on chaos. When all the current reasons—moral, esthetic, religious, social, and so on—no longer guide one's life, how can one sustain life without succumbing to nothingness? Only by a connection with the absurd, by love of absolute uselessness, loving something which does not have substance but which simulates an illusion of life.  I live because the mountains do not laugh and the worms do not sing.” 

Peter Wessel Zapffe

In accordance with my conception of life, I have chosen not to bring children into the world. A coin is examined, and only after careful deliberation, given to a beggar, whereas a child is flung out into the cosmic brutality without hesitation.

--

We come from an inconceivable nothingness. We stay a while in something which seems equally inconceivable, only to vanish again into the inconceivable nothingness.

--

When a human being takes his life in depression, this is a natural death of spiritual causes. The modern barbarity of 'saving' the suicidal is based on a hair-raising misapprehension of the nature of existence.

Socrates

If you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold on to it forever. 

--

H.P. Lovecraft

"The world is indeed comic, but the joke is on mankind."

--

"We are all negligible, microscopic insects of a moment; waifs astray in infinity, born yesterday and doomed to perish tomorrow for all time. We have no reason to ask the trite questions of “whence, whither, and why”, for it is only our finite, subjective, rudimentary intellects which conjure up the notion of cosmic purpose. According to all the evidence we can command, we came from chaos and will return to chaos; drifting in a blind mechanical cycle devoid of anything like a goal or object."

--

"Of course the ultimate basis of every human act is selfishness, manifested as a craving for self approval, it is easy to perceive the utter and destructive impracticability of any system exalting that crude and unmoral selfishness which has not been refined into a delicate altruism. Such a bestial relapse means the end of human harmony and cooperation, and therefore of civilization. "

--

"By my thirteenth birthday I was thoroughly impressed with man’s impermanence and insignificance, and by my seventeenth, about which time I did some particularly detailed writing on the subject, I had formed in all essential particulars my present pessimistic cosmic views. The futility of all existence began to impress and oppress me; and my references to human progress, formerly hopeful, began to decline in enthusiasm."

Ernest Becker.

Creation is a nightmare spectacular taking place on a planet that has been soaked for hundreds of millions of years in the blood of all creatures. The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it, and with its warmth giving the hope that comes with the organism’s comfort and expansiveness.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.

---------------

That the life of man is but a dream, many a man has surmised heretofore; and I, too, am everywhere pursued by this feeling. When I consider the narrow limits within which our active and inquiring faculties are confined; when I see how all our energies are wasted in providing for mere necessities, which again have no further end than to prolong a wretched existence; and then that all our satisfaction concerning certain subjects of investigation ends in nothing better than a passive resignation, whilst we amuse ourselves painting our prison-walls with bright figures and brilliant landscapes,—when I consider all this, Wilhelm, I am silent. 

Ambrose Pierce

• Birth, n. The first and direst of all disasters. 

Giacomo Leopardi

• Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.

Franz Kafka

• I was wise, if you like, because I was prepared for death at any moment, but not because I had taken care of everything that was given to me to do, rather because I had done none of it and could not even hope ever to do any of it.