"I do believe in the possibility of creating a new social model. The only thing is that we now have to begin afresh. The unions, the labour halls, decentralization, the federative system—are all gone. The perverse use that has been made of them has destroyed them. The matter is all the more urgent because all our political forms are exhausted and practically nonexistent. Our parliamentary and electoral system and our political parties are just as futile as dictatorships are intolerable. Nothing is left. And this nothing is increasingly aggressive, totalitarian, and omnipresent. Our experience today is the strange one of empty political institutions in which no one has any confidence any more, of a system of government which functions only in the interests of a political class, and at the same time of the almost infinite growth of power, authority, and social control which makes any one of our democracies a more authoritarian mechanism than the Napoleonic state."

From Anarchy and Christianity, Jacques Ellul.

"Every political revolution must be preceded by a revolution of consciousness, one that gives death back to life. The revolution must create an awareness of the fact that life is only truly alive when there is an exchange with death."

From 'Capitalism and the Death Drive', Byung-Chul Han

"Violence is closely connected to the awareness of death, which is exclusively human. The economy of violence is ruled by a logic of accumulation. The more violence you exert, the more powerful you feel. Accumulated killing power produces a feeling of growth, force, power - of invulnerability and immortality. The narcissistic enjoyment human beings take in sadistic violence is based on just this increase in power. Killing protects against death.”

From 'Capitalism and the Death Drive', Byung-Chul Han

"At its worst, 'corporate multiculturalism' is an attitude that patronizes imported diversity while ignoring its own backyard.”

Mike Davis talking about how a city (LA) can invest major capital into becoming a cultural epicentre while also defunding arts programming that might benefit people who actually live there.

"If you want storehouses, you have them in the stomachs of the poor."

St Basil on saving your money.