Consensus does violence to the heterogeneity of language games. And invention is always born of dissension. Postmodern knowledge is not simply a tool of the authorities; it refines our sensitivity to differences and reinforces our ability to tolerate the incommensurable. Its principle is not the expert's homology, but the inventor's paralogy.

Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester University Press, 1984) p. xxv

Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law subverts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences thereof. For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest. Man's vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and howevermuch he comes to value his judgements ultimately he must submit them before a higher court.

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (Picador, 2010) p. 263-264

The truth about the world, he said, is that anything is possible. Had you not seen it all from birth and thereby bled it of its strangeness it would appear to you for what it is, a hat trick in a medicine show, a fevered dream, a trance bepopulate with chimeras having neither analogue nor precedent, an itinerant carnival, a migratory tentshow whose ultimate destination after many a pitch in many a muddled field is unspeakable and calamitous beyond reckoning.

The universe is no narrow thing and the order within it is not constrained by any latitude in its conception to repeat what exists in one part in any other part. Even in this world more things exist without our knowledge than with it and the order in creation which you see is that which you have put there, like a string in a maze, so that you shall not lose your way. For existence has its own order and that no man's mind can compass, that mind itself being but a fact among others.

Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (Picador, 2010) p. 258-259

To believe in God is, therefore, to doubt his existence, his manifestness, his presence. In fact, faith is the spiritual impulse which reveals the profoundest uncertainty about the existence of God (but it is the same with all theological virtues: hope is the spiritual impulse which betrays the deepest despair at the real state of things and charity the spiritual impulse which betrays the deepest contempt for others).

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.92

It is generally thought that the obsession with survival is a logical consequence of life and the right to life. But, most of the time, the two things are contradictory. Life is not a question of rights, and what follows on from life is not survival, which is artificial, but death. it is only by paying the price of a failure to live, a failure to take pleasure, a failure to die that man is assured of survival.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.87

The effects produced by the finite nature of the earth, for the first time contrasting violently with the infinity of our development, are such that our species is automatically switching over to collective suicide.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.83

If God exists, there is no need to believe in Him. If people do believe in Him, this is because the self-evidence of his existence has passed away. Thus, when people obtain the right to life, the fact is that they are no longer able to live. When nature is recognized as a subject in law, as it is by Michel Serres, we have objectified it to death, and this ecological cover merely asserts our right to go on doing so.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.80

It is not just material substances, including nuclear ones, which pose a waste problem but also the defunct ideologies, bygone utopias, dead concepts and fossilized ideas which continue to pollute our mental space. Historical and intellectual refuse pose an even more serious problem than industrial waste. Who will rid us of the sedimentations of centuries of stupidity?

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.26

The beam of memory bends, and makes every event a black hole.

Jean Baudrillard, The Illusion of the End (Polity Press, 1994) p.20

Det var icke en lögn men det har blivit. När du var ung, moder, hade du rätt, när jag blir gammal, ja, då har jag kanske orätt! Man växer inte i kapp med tiden!

August Strindberg, Mäster Olof (Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1949) p. 70

Have we not always had the deep-seated phantasy of a world that would go on without us? The poetic temptation to see the world in our absence, free of any human, all-too-human will? The intense pleasure of poetic language lies in seeing language operating on its own, in its materiality and literality, without transiting through meaning – this is what fascinates us. It is the same with anagrams or anamorphoses, with the 'figure in the carpet'. The Vanishing Point of Language.

Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (Seagull Books, 2009) p. 52

Art itself in the modern period exists only on the basis of its disappearance – not just the art of making the real disappear and supplanting it with another scene, but the art of abolishing itself in the course of its practice (Hegel). It was by doing this that it constituted an event, that it was of decisive importance. I say 'was' advisedly, for art today, though it has disappeared, doesn't know it has disappeared and – this is the worst of it – continues on its trajectory in a vegetative state.

Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (Seagull Books, 2009) p. 22

Thus, the modern world foreseen by Marx, driven on by the work of the negative, by the engine of contradiction, became, by the very excess of its fulfilment, another world in which things no longer even need their opposites to exist, in which light no longer needs shade, the feminine no longer needs the masculine (or vice versa?), good no longer needs evil – and the world no longer needs us.

It is here we see that the mode of disappearance of the human [...] is precisely the product of an internal logic, of a built-in obsolescence, of the human race's fulfilment of its most grandiose project, the Promethean project of mastering the universe, of acquiring exhaustive knowledge. We see, too, that is this which precipitates it towards its disappearance, much more quickly than animal species, by the acceleration it imparts to an evolution that no longer has anything natural about it.

Doing so not out of some death drive or some involutive, regressive disposition toward undifferentiated forms, but from an impulse to go as far as possible in the expression of all its power, all its faculties – to the point even of dreaming of abolishing death.

Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn't Everything Already Disappeared? (Seagull Books, 2009) pp. 16-19

The dynamic of modern societies rests on a perpetual flight into the future which creates an illusion of stability; it holds together an organism in a perpeptual state of transformation.

Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) p. 101

Nowadays, with the most wonderful communications equipment imaginable, we are broadcasting a culture which is at best an absence of culture, a product of chance.

Jacques Ellul, as quoted in Serge Latouche, The Westernization of the World (Polity Press, 1996) p. 97