Lee Hazlewood, "Pray Them Bars Away" from Cowboy in Sweden

I'm told I should be thankful
For everything I got
So thank you for rock walls
And the brave bulls, thanks a lot
And thank you for the good job
At twenty cents a day
And thank you for the break time
To pray them bars away

José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies page 292

...they call it peace to live in so many and so terrible evils, such as sacrificing their own children or making other hidden sacrifices, or staying awake all night doing mad things; and so they neither maintain cleanliness in their lives or in their marriages, but one man takes the life of another out of envy, another takes a man's wife and he has no objection, and everything is confused: blood, deaths, thefts, deceits, corruption, unfaithfulness, riots, wrongs, mutinies, forgetfulness of God, contamination of souls, changing sexes and birth, changing of marriage partners, and disorder of adulteries and filthiness, for idolatry is an abyss of all the evils.

José de Acosta, Natural and Moral History of the Indies page 134

Still more remarkable is the battle that the Indians have with whales, which is certainly a wonderful thing on the part of the Maker of all, to give people as weak as the Indians the skill and daring to attack the fiercest and most monstrous beast in the whole world and not only to battle him but to conquer and triumph so gallantly.

Maya Deren, "Notes on Ritual and Ordeal"

Originally in Film Culture no. 39; I saw it quoted in the special features of a DVD of her movies.

A ritual is characterized by the de-personalization of the individual. In some cases it is even marked by the use of masks and voluminous garments, so that the performer is virtually anonymous; and it is marked also by the participation of the community...as a homogeneous entity in which the inner patterns of relationship between the elements create, together, a larger movement of the body as a whole. The intent of such a de-personalization is not the destruction of the individual; on the contrary, it enlarges him beyond the personal dimension.

Stanislaw Lem, "Non Serviam" in A Perfect Vacuum page 172

A man may interpret the real world in a variety of ways. He may devote particular attention--intense scientific investigation--to certain facets of that world, and the knowledge he acquires then casts its own special light on the remaining portions of the world, those not considered in his priority-setting research. If first he diligently takes up mechanics, he will fashion for himself a mechanical model of the world and will see the Universe as a gigantic and perfect clock that in its inexorable movement proceeds from the past to a precisely determined future. This model is not an accurate representation of reality, and yet one can make use of it for a period of time historically long, and with it can even achieve many practical successes--the building of machines, implements, etc.

Stanislaw Lem, "Die Kultur als Fehler" in A Perfect Vacuum page 133

Animals, Klopper observes, make no distinction between feces and carrion: they steer clear of both the one and the other as the evacuations of life. For a consistent materialist the equating of a corpse with excrement ought to be just as valid; but the latter we dispose of furtively, and the former with pomp, loftily, equipping the remains with a number of costly and complicated wrappings. This is required by culture, as a system of appearances that help us reconcile ourselves to the despicable facts.

Stanislaw Lem, "Pericalypsis" in A Perfect Vacuum page 81

Our mighty civilization, he says, strives for the production of commodities as impermanent as possible in packaging as permanent as possible. The impermanent product must soon be replaced by a new one, and this is good for the economy; the permanence of the packaging, on the other hand, makes disposal difficult, and this promotes the further development of technology and organization. Thus the consumer copes with each consecutive article of junk on an individual basis, whereas for the removal of the packagings special antipollution programs are required, sanitary engineering, the coordination of efforts, planning, purification, and decontamination plants, and so on. Formerly, one could depend on it that the accumulation of garbage would be kept at a reasonable level by the forces of nature, such as the rains, the winds, rivers, and earthquakes. But at the present time what once washed and flushed away the garbage has itself become the excrement of civilization: the rivers poison us, the atmosphere burns our lungs and eyes, the winds strew industrial ashes on our heads, and as for plastic containers, since they are elastic, even earthquakes cannot deal with them. Thus the normal scenery today is civilizational droppings, and the natural reserves are a momentary exception to the rule. Against this landscape of packagings that have been sloughed off by their products, crowds bustle about, absorbed in the business of opening and consuming...