The Last Man Quotes

“The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behavior it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality. The commodity form reduces everything to quantitative equivalence. The quantitative is what it develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative.”
― Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

“And suddenly he thought, I'm the abnormal one now. Normalcy was a majority concept, the standard of many and not the standard of just one man.”
― Richard Matheson

“Nothing is so precious to a woman's heart as the glory and excellence of him she loves”
― Mary Shelley

“Is there a feeling as love at first sight ? and if there be, in what does its nature differ from love founded in long observation and slow growth? perhaps its effect are not permanent; but they are, while they last, as violent and intense. We walk the pathless mazes of society vacant of joy till we hold this clue, leading us though that labyrinth of paradise and our nature dim like to an enlightened touch sleeps in formless blank till the fire attain it”
― Marry Shelley

“Rand, Huxley, Orwell, and Bradbury foresaw much of today’s dystopian world: its spiritual and moral emptiness, its culture of consumerism, its flat-souled Last Manishness, its debasement of language, its doublethink, its illiteracy, and its bovine tolerance of authoritarian indignities. But they did not foresee the most serious and catastrophic of today’s problems: the eminent destruction of whites, and western culture.

None of them thought to deal with race at all. Why is this? Probably for the simple reason that it never occurred to any of them that whites might take slave morality so far as to actually will their own destruction. As always, the truth is stranger than fiction.”
― Jef Costello

“We placed his remains under a cypress, the upright mountain being scooped out to receive them. And then Clara said, ‘If you wish me to live, take me from hence. There is something in this scene of transcendent beauty, in these trees, and hills and waves, that for ever whisper to me, leave thy cumbrous flesh, and make a part of us. I earnestly entreat you to take me away.”
― Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Last Man

“Il faut vouloir vivre les grands problèmes, par le corps et par l’esprit”
― Georges Bataille

“Added to all this is the universal dread of reality. We "pale-faces" have it, all of us, although we are seldom, and most of us never, conscious of it. It is the spiritual weakness of the "Late" man of the higher civilizations, who lives in his cities cut off from the peasant and the soil and thereby from the natural experiencing of destiny, time, and death. He has become too wide awake, too accustomed to ponder perpetually over yesterday and tomorrow, and cannot bear that which he sees and is forced to see: the relentless course of things, senseless chance, and real history striding pitilessly through the centuries into which the individual with his tiny scrap of private life is irrevocably born at the appointed place. That is what he longs to forget, refute, or contest. He takes flight from history into solitude, into imaginary far-away systems, into some faith or another, or into suicide. Like a grotesque ostrich he buries his head in hopes, ideals, and cowardly optimism: it is so, but it ought not to be, therefore it is otherwise. We sing in the woods at night because we are afraid.”
― Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision: Germany and World-Historical Evolution

“Now, who, according to Rousseau, is the bourgeois? Most simply, following Hegel's formula, he is the man motivated by fear of violent death, the man whose primary concern is preservation or comfortable preservation. Or, to de scribe the inner workings of his soul, he is the man who, when dealing with others, thinks only of himself, and, in his understanding of himself, thinks only of others. He is a role-player. The bourgeois is contrasted by Rousseau, on the one hand, with the natural man, who is whole and simply concerned with himself, and with the citizen, on the other, whose very being consists in his relation to his city, who understands his good to be identical with the common good. The bourgeois distinguishes his own good from the common good, but his good requires society, and hence he exploits others while depending on them. He must define himself in relation to them. The bourgeois comes to be when men no longer believe that there is a common good, when the notion of the father land decays. Rousseau hints that he follows Machiavelli in attributing this decay to Christianity, which promised the heavenly fatherland and thereby took away the supports from the earthly fatherland, leaving social men who have no reason to sacrifice private desire to public duty.”
― Allan Bloom, Giants and Dwarfs: Essays, 1960-1990

“The world of the impotent sits squatting on the straw of the life of illusion. Its law is one of renunciation and defeat, submission to all forms of plunder and pillage. It is based on deliverance from the burdens of the ready-made and moral searches, to comprehend the humiliation and justify it. It is based on a readiness to undertake hereditary or future costuming in order to fell from the conflict of the present.”
― Muammar Gaddafi معمر القذافي, Escape to Hell and Other Stories

“I was born for something greater than I was- and greater I would become”
― Mary Shelley