The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.

Just like how most if not all poor boys look up to and aspire to someday be rich men, most if not all underdeveloped and developing countries look up to and aspire to someday be developed countries.

I want my life to be a battle cry, a war zone, an arrow pointed and loosed into the heart of domination: patriarchy, imperialism, industrialization, every system of power and sadism.

Everybody in those days was a foreigner, no matter where they were born; as industrial modernization had its way with people and places, no one was native to the transformation of the United States from an agricultural economy to the foremost industrial power in the world--the factory being both the cause and the effect of an act of becoming, the likes of which nobody had ever seen before.

There was no doubt about it: the City was the culmination of man’s mastery over the environment. Not space travel, not the fifty colonized worlds that were now so haughtily independent, but the City.

In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.

Most of human history had been industry versus nature, with industry winning.

The whole discussion now underway on revolutionary forms in Russia and in China boils down to the judgement to be made of the historical phenomenon of the 'appearance' of industrialism and mechanisation in huge areas of the world previously dominated by landed and precapitalist forms of production.Constructing industrialism and mechanising things is supposedly the same as building socialism whenever central and 'national' plans are made. This is the mistaken thesis.

Yes, it's vital to make lifestyle choices to mitigate damage caused by being a member of industrialized civilization, but to assign primary responsibility to oneself, and to focus primarily on making oneself better, is an immense copout, an abrogation of responsibility.

I wish I could tell you how lonely I am. How cold and harsh it is here. Everywhere there is conflict and unkindness. I think God has forsaken this place. I believe I have seen hell and it's white, it's snow-white.