Vade Retro

I live in London with my wife, Arcadia Noir... she's responsible for my pictures (and many other things). I'm into goth/industrial music but am not depressed or angry (unless I hear Bush or Blair talking about Palestine, Iraq or Afghanistan). I also speak French and Spanish. I believe it's important to constantly strive to improve ourselves and the lives of those around us.
Here are some lines which I found inspirational, insightful or amusing. And I wish I'd thought of them first.
G O D
"God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." VOLTAIRE
"If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent Him." VOLTAIRE
"He was an embittered atheist - the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him." GEORGE ORWELL
"'God is Love', we are taught as children to believe. But when we first begin to get some inkling of how He loves us, we are repelled; it seems so cold, indeed, not love at all as we understand the word." W. H. AUDEN
"I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability." ALBERT CAMUS
"I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time." NIETZSCHE
"Is man one of God's mistakes? Or is God one of man's mistakes?" NIETZSCHE
G O V E R N M E N T
"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past." GEORGE ORWELL
"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." GEORGE ORWELL
"In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia." GEORGE ORWELL
"The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history." GEORGE ORWELL
"It is dangerous to be right in matters on which the established authorities are wrong." VOLTAIRE
"All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth." NIETZSCHE
W A R
"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength." GEORGE ORWELL
"War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it." GEORGE ORWELL
"All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting." GEORGE ORWELL
"Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac." GEORGE ORWELL
"All murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets." VOLTAIRE
"Resistance is feasible even for those who are not heroes by nature, and it is an obligation, I believe, for those who fear the consequences and detest the reality of the attempt to impose American hegemony." NOAM CHOMSKY
"I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones." EINSTEIN
S O C I E T Y
"The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the masses. If you try you will be lonely often and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself." NIETZSCHE
"You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, the only way, it does not exist." NIETZSCHE
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
"If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have paradise in a few years." BERTRAND RUSSELL
"The amount of women in London who flirt with their own husbands is perfectly scandalous. It looks so bad. It is simply washing one's clean linen in public." OSCAR WILDE
S O C I A L I S M & C A P I T A L I S M
"Advocates of capitalism are very apt to appeal to the sacred principles of liberty, which are embodied in one maxim: The fortunate must not be restrained in the exercise of tyranny over the unfortunate." BERTRAND RUSSELL
"Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality." GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
"No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer." GEORGE ORWELL
"All I know is I'm not a Marxist." KARL MARX
"Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people." KARL MARX
E X I S T E N C E
"All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream." EDGAR ALLEN POE
"Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species." NIETZSCHE
"Existence really is an imperfect tense that never becomes a present." NIETZSCHE
"Life at its noblest leaves mere happiness far behind; and indeed cannot endure it. Happiness is not the object of life: life has no object: it is an end in itself; and courage consists in the readiness to sacrifice happiness for an intenser quality of life." GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
"Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards." KIERKEGAARD