Garbage collectors don’t “make a difference” in the sense that today’s young people are constantly encouraged to do. They will never be featured on a major media platform for their innovative contribution to society. But most of us are far removed from what it means to live in a filthy street and can hardly imagine what it would mean to rely on individual initiative to remove household waste.

— Zena Hitz, Lost in Thought

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence – and likewise this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and likewise this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence will be turned over again and again, and you with it, you speck of dust!’

— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science

The official line is that we all have rights and live in a democracy. Other unfortunates who aren’t free like we are have to live in police states. These victims obey orders or else, no matter how arbitrary. The authorities keep them under regular surveillance. State bureaucrats control even the smallest details of everyday life. The officials who push them around are answerable only to higher-ups, public or private. Either way, dissent or disobedience are punished. Informers report regularly to the authorities. All this is supposed to be a very bad thing. And so it is, although it is nothing but a description of the modern workplace.

— Bob Black, The Abolition of Work and other essays

belief is caused by nothing deeper that contingent historical circumstance

— Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Richard Rorty

There is no getting away from it; the Christian rule is, ‘Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence.’ Now this is so difficult and so contrary to our instincts, that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct, as it now is, has gone wrong.

— C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity