Maria Mies, Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Divison of Labour page 208

[C]onsumerism is the drug by which women and men are made to accept otherwise inhuman, and increasingly destructive, conditions of life. The new 'needs', created by industry in its desperate effort to keep the growth model going are all of the type of addictions. The satisfaction of these addictions is no longer contributing to more happiness and human fulfilment, but to more destruction of the human essence.

Shirley Jackson, The Sundial pages 185-187

"I'm only seventeen years old," Gloria said, "and I know this much--that world out there, Fancy, that world which is all around on the other side of the wall, it isn't real. It's real inside here, we're real, but what is outside is like it's made of cardboard, or plastic, or something. Nothing out there is real. Everything is made out of something else, and it all comes apart in your hands. The people aren't real, they're nothing but endless copies of each other, all looking just alike, like paper dolls, and they live in houses full of artificial things and eat imitation food--"

"My doll house," Fancy said, amused.

"Your dolls have little cakes and roasts made of wood and painted. Well, the people out there have cakes and bread and cookies made out of pretend flour, with all kinds of things taken out of it to make it prettier for them to eat, and all kinds of things put in to make it easier for them to eat, and they eat meat which has been cooked for them already so they won't have to bother doing anything except heat it up and they read newspapers full of nonsense and lies and one day they hear that some truth is being kept from them for their own good and the next day they hear that the truth is being kept from them because it was really a lie and the next day they hear--"

Fancy laughed. "You sound like you hate everything."

"I wouldn't like being a doll in a doll house, I can tell you. I'm only seventeen years old, but I've learned a lot. All those people out there know about things like love and tenderness is what they hear in songs or read in books--that's one reason I'm glad we burned all the books here. People shouldn't be able to read them and remember nothing but lies. And you talk about dances and parties--I can tell you there's no heart to anything any more; when you dance with a boy he's only looking over your shoulder at some other boy, and the only real people left any more are the shadows on the television screens."

"If I believed you," Fancy said, "I would still mind never trying things for myself. But I won't ever believe you until I've gone out there and seen it."

"There's nothing there," Gloria said with finality. "It's a make-believe world, with nothing in it but cardboard and trouble." She thought for a minute, and then said, "If you were a liar, or a pervert, or a thief, or even just sick, there wouldn't be anything out there you couldn't have.

Fancy bent over the doll house. "Anyway," she said, "I don't care how shabby it is. I'm not afraid of bad people, and of not being safe."

"But there aren't any good people," Gloria said helplessly. "No one is anything but tired and ugly and mean. I know."

Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians page 209

Superficial, worldly people--positivist, rational, moral--ordinary humans. Millions of insignificant little men of goodwill had defied the Will of the Knights of the Powers of Darkness! In the East a lot of mechanized simpletons, in the West a bunch of spineless Puritans had been able to turn out superior quantities of tanks, aeroplanes and guns. And they possessed the atomic bomb--without knowing anything about the great hidden forces! And now, like snails after a shower, having escaped the storm of iron, here they all were--monocled judges, Professors of human rights and horizontal virtues, Doctors of mediocrity, baritones of the Salvation Army, stretcher-bearers from the Red Cross, all naïvely babbling about "brighter tomorrows"--assembled here in Nuremberg to preach elementary sermons to the Great Ones of this Earth, the militant monks who could read in the mirror of Darkness; to the Allies of Shamballah, the heirs of the Holy Grail! And they actually sent them to the gallows, and treated them like criminals or raving lunatics!

What the Nuremberg prisoners and their leaders who committed suicide could not understand was that the civilization that had just triumphed was also, and far more certainly, a spiritual civilization, a formidable movement which, from Chicago to Tashkent, was impelling humanity towards a higher destiny. What they had done was to dethrone Reason and put Magic in its place. It is true that Cartesian reason does not cover the whole of Man or the whole of his knowledge. So they had put it to sleep. But when Reason sleeps, it brings forth monsters. What had happened here was that Reason, which had not been put to sleep, but pushed to its extreme limits, was operating on a higher level, linking up with the mysteries of mind and spirit, the secrets of energy and universal harmony. Rationalism pushed to extremes breeds the Fantastic, of which the monsters engendered by Reason when asleep are only a sinister caricature.

Philip K. Dick, "Cosmogony and Cosmology" in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick (Lawrence Sutin, ed.) page 307

What can one say in favor of the suffering of living creatures in this world? Nothing. Nothing, except that it will by its nature trigger off revolt or disobedience--which in turn will lead to an abolition of this world and a return to the Godhead. It is the very gratuity of the suffering that most of all incites rebellion, incites a comprehension that something in this world is terribly, terribly wrong. That this suffering is purposeless, random, and unmerited leads ultimately to its own destruction--its and its author's. The more fully we see the pointlessness of it the more inclined we are to revolt against it. Any attempt to discern a redemptive value or purpose in the fact of suffering merely binds us more firmly to a vicious and irreal system of things--and to a brutal tyrant that is not even alive. "I do not accept this" must be our attitude... Seeking to find a purpose in suffering is like seeking to find a purpose in a counterfeit coin. The "purpose" is obvious: It is a trick, designed to deceive. If we are deceived into believing that suffering serves--must serve--some good end, then the counterfeit has managed to pass itself off and has achieved its cruel purpose.

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.

George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London page 168

Sometimes, he said, when sleeping on the Embankment, it had consoled him to look up at Mars or Jupiter and think that there were probably Embankment sleepers there. He had a curious theory about this. Life on earth, he said, is harsh because the planet is poor in the necessities of existence. Mars, with its cold climate and scanty water, must be far poorer, and life correspondingly harsher. Whereas on earth you are merely imprisoned for stealing sixpence, on Mars you are probably boiled alive. This thought cheered Bozo, I do not know why. He was a very exceptional man.

Edgar Allan Poe, "Berenicë" first two sentences

Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform.

Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles p. 29

He was less interested in television. Every week, however, his heart in his mouth, he watched The Animal Kingdom. Graceful animals like gazelles and antelopes spent their days in abject terror while lions and panthers lived out their lives in listless imbecility punctuated by explosive bursts of cruelty. They slaughtered weaker animals, dismembered and devoured the sick and the old before falling back into a brutish sleep where the only activity was that of the parasites feeding on them from within. Some of these parasites were hosts to smaller parasites, which in turn were a breeding ground for viruses. Snakes moved among the trees, their fangs bared, ready to strike at bird or mammal, only to be ripped apart by hawks. The pompous, half-witted voice of Claude Darget, filled with awe and unjustifiable admiration, narrated these atrocities. Michel trembled with indignation. But as he watched, the unshakable conviction grew that nature, taken as a whole, was a repulsive cesspit. All in all, nature deserved to be wiped out in a holocaust--and man's mission on earth was probably to do just that.