John Zande Quotes

Whether real or imagined, immediate or simply anticipated, fear is a vigorous source of massive confusion. ~ John Zande

In matters of potential suffering, a single 200,000 years old human being stood against a 550 million years old octopus - acutely aware of its suffering, yet unable to do much to alleviate its misery - is the structural equivalent of comparing the convoluted majesty of the International Space Station to a child's paper and stick kite, and to then stand the octopus against the far more ancient 1.5 billion years old protozoa is to weigh the complexity of the kite to a dust mote caught up in a lazy afternoon breeze. ~ John Zande

To an omniscient being, nothing in all of Creation can be original, fashionable, or even distinct, as every event, thought, action, adventure and discovery is occurring simultaneously in one stretched-out moment. To be omniscient means to have never felt even the slightest twang of curiosity, for there can be no unexpected twists if every outcome to every drama and experiment is already known. Without the capacity for curiosity it is, therefore, impossible for the omniscient being to be interested in anything, let alone be attentive to His own pleasure, as pleasure is inaccessible if all of Creation is, from His great perspective, perfectly flat and of a uniform temperature. ~ John Zande

Who but the unblemished, pristine archetype of malevolence would shake and shove and rattle the child's crib when all the child wants to do is sleep? ~ John Zande

John Stuart Mill, "nearly all the things which men are hanged or imprisoned for doing to one another, are nature's every day performances."104 ~ John Zande

It is a certified kind of blindness - official, and in many diabolical ways, inescapable. ~ John Zande

For the perversely minded, simply killing the trinkets of your greatest amusement and nutritional satisfaction produces at best only temporary elation, a dazzling sensation that is over in a flash, but to permit your prey to fear calamity and to live through catastrophes large and small, to hope and to weep and to lament, to feel anguish over things lost, to regret things found, and to suffer with physical discomfort, emotional injuries and psychological lesions is the wellhead of enduring pleasure. ~ John Zande

To possess and exercise omniscience is to never have sensed temperature, experienced a single emotion, or practiced a single vice. It is to have never been amazed, concerned, analytical, or sympathetic. By exercising omniscience, an Omni-maximum being could not move, be moved, or inspired. Such a being could not interfere, empathise, interject, alter, adjust, or give advice. Ever. Such a being could not devise a plan, hear music, imagine a story, or recognise art or deviancy in any guise, for it could never differentiate creativity from cold reality. Such a being could not know doubt, desire, success, or failure. It could not, therefore, know itself, and if it is incapable of that, then it is incapable of experiencing pleasure. ~ John Zande

When deeply ashamed minds scream to the air, "But we can change! This time we can change!" the Omnimalevolent Creator calmly replies, "Good. ~ John Zande

He - the Creator - did not move on the darkness, vanquishing it and by doing so annihilating His supernal hearth, His residence, rather this universe was fashioned from within and by the material that had never known a morning. Darkness is the parent, the cinderblock, the mortar, and the paint. From this shadow-material colours were shaped and this universe was stretched out, but it will forever be of its parent, dependent and loyal to the end. ~ John Zande

With biological and neurological complexity entirely new families of affectionate fears, devoted threats and dedicated displeasures are birthed, and then with socioeconomic and cultural complexity comes a fresh ocean of new and unique illnesses. ~ John Zande

The greatest of all humiliations is that disgrace delivered without a word being spoken, or a hand ever raised. ~ John Zande

The universe, she sees, exists as it does to not simply humble, but abuse, denigrate, and humiliate the minds it was so expertly commissioned to birth. This is malevolence on an unfathomable scale, expressed through immeasurable waste stretched out between distances and times that cannot be understood. It is cruel, but not hateful, depraved, but not vengeful. This is considered pain, carefully presented in careless proportions to blister and disgrace anyone - or anything - that might momentarily dare to ever privately contemplate it is in control. ~ John Zande

Charles Baudelaire would have the curious believe that the finest trick the Devil ever performed was in persuading the world that he did not exist. Baudelaire was mistaken. There was no persuasion. ~ John Zande

Walter Cassels, "Ignorance and superstition created miracles; knowledge has for ever annihilated them. ~ John Zande

There is no lie. The world is presented as it is. Nothing is concealed, except for perhaps the identity of the Creator, which is not so much a lie as it is a reasonable omission. No view is, however, disguised. No composition of the natural landscape is purposefully twisted or deformed so as to deliberately deceive, and no function of the natural world is dressed in sweet deception. No scream is muffled, no laceration sanitised, and the pain of hunger and thirst are naked for all to see and be sickened by. Diseases of every ghastly flavour are on loathsome display, the blights of parasitism are laid bare, and the crippling agonies of old age are public property. The terror of predation is revealed in every anguished look, the fear of infanticide written on every mother's face, and the misery of earthquakes, landslides, cyclones, floods, volcanoes, tsunamis, droughts, heat waves, and wild fires conferred uncensored upon stunned and appropriately intimidated audiences. ~ John Zande

There is no "good," just passages and pathways to greater depths of pain brought to bear as markets diversify and specialise. In thinking he is winning - be it through miraculous medical advancements, enlightened self-interest which fosters a degree of social stability, or a planet wide agricultural revolution - man is in fact throwing himself into heightened states of artfully dressed turmoil: mayhem which could only thrill a Creator disposed to being thrilled at such sweet turbulences. ~ John Zande

What is the universe but a treacherous perversion of scale? ~ John Zande

Life in turn organises itself along deep, observable tendrils that do not speak of discrete, careful, artistic intervention, rather scream of haphazard chance and the emergency of survival. ~ John Zande

Without an alternative world against which he can measure, compare and contrast his own, without an example of what natural perfection would actually look like, sound like, smell and taste like, the thinking man - the inquisitive risen ape - is rendered fundamentally incapable of ever faithfully auditing the cell he calls his garden, and with that disability entrenched, his blindness is near complete. The world is as it is. Things are the way they are. You make do with what you have, lust for the things you do not, cut off your arm - if you must - to save your life , and strive for some future you desire, or at the very least believe possible, because in the final analysis, "I don't want to be here," means very, very little if there is nowhere else to be. ~ John Zande

Where the theologian is forced to rescue an incompetent spirit who has, for one imaginative reason or another, lost total control of his creation, the gospel of the malevolent hand stands unchaste, uncontaminated, and inviolable. ~ John Zande

Can a reasonable man ever truly question the nobility of the heat engine he calls his body? What option does he have but to heap praise on his form, to self-adore, to admire, and to hold it up as the greatest statement of beauty in a beautiful garden? What, though, is to be admired in such a frighteningly fragile machine; a perilously needy contraption laced with kilometres of liquid and electrical conduits prone to leaks, rot, clogs, and short-circuits? What is there to be proud of in a machine that has an eight hour battery life and is predetermined to spend half its existence in a defenceless, catatonic coma? What is to be revered in a mechanism let loose in a sealed off room where almost everything - including its single source of light and warmth - makes it sick, but whose immune system functions by late entry crisis-response imitation? Where is the awe in a contrivance that freezes and dies if placed a little over here, or overheats and dies if placed a little over there? Where is the wonder in an instrument that is crushed to a pulp if dropped a little down there, or boiled away to nothing if lifted a little up there? Where is the marvel in an appliance where three-quarters of the planet's surface will drown it, and three-quarters of the atmosphere will asphyxiate it? What is there to be cherished in a machine born innately greedy and so utterly useless that it has to wait three years for its neural networks to hook-up and come online before it even begins to get a hin ~ John Zande

Ubiquity is the master pacifier, a potent anaesthetic and persuasive desensitiser, and through the universality of His works - where both predator and prey, wicked and good suffer enormously without favouritism or bias in a universe whose laws know no sympathy - the wicked architect has ensured the curious and the distrusting will seek out any alternative explanation for that which they do not wish to recognise , or better still, not see the depravity at all. ~ John Zande

Creation, by its very nature, is an exercise in savage prejudices and uncommon bigotries. ~ John Zande

Does not knowing an alternative make this dangerously thin, exquisitely brutal, compulsorily homicidal fishbowl right, or good? ~ John Zande

No Creator could, after all, ever be found in a universe where the Creator does not even know He is the Creator. Such would be the perfect deception, the ultimate camouflage, ensuring there is nothing - ever - to accuse of injustice, and if there is nothing to accuse then there is nothing to rebel against. ~ John Zande

Is it conceivable, the Impartial Observer asks, that a caring Creator - the Good Father - who is fond of laughter, delighted by happiness and has the best interests of life forever in the fore, arrange his great masterpiece in such a way that obscene levels of meaningless suffering are not just allowed for, but underpin everything? ~ John Zande

Naturally, it is inevitable that conscious, curious, self-orientated minds will eventually double back on their awareness and confront the existential questions of where, what, who, and why am I? and the urge of any self-respecting mind is to assign some positive meaning to its being, but has a rational justification ever been established for this proclamation? ~ John Zande

Indeed, could any sincere, honest observer foresee a time in this world when an organism's success might in fact be dependent on its politeness in asking permission to consume another organism? ~ John Zande

No one but The Owner of All Infernal Names can faithfully claim to know if He is pleased more by the total aggregate of suffering distributed across all of His creation, or whether He is more circumspect and discerning in His pleasure taking, savouring discreet yet increasingly potent, increasingly more complex parcels of sophisticated and intimate misery. Whether it is a matter of quantity over quality, the enormity of the marketplace or the specialisation of product groups and services within that marketplace, or a depraved combination of both, no human mind can determine, or perhaps ever comprehend. ~ John Zande

Love, certainly, might be a momentarily strong force capable of moving individuals in strange and remarkable ways, but given sufficient time and the relentless weathering effects of repetition it will always and ultimately diffuse into boredom and melancholy. ~ John Zande

Beyond his recyclable chemicals, what possible utility could The Owner of All Infernal Names find in a soldier whose body (or what remains of it) lays inert at room temperature? ~ John Zande

From heat and protons, to hearts, central nervous systems, minds and cluster bombs, this is Creation's single compulsion, its one and only passion; a relentless, arguably reckless passage from a state of ancestral simplicity to contemporary complexity, where complexity - and the specialisation it affords - parents a wretched and forever diversifying family of more devoted fears and faithful anxieties, more pervasive ailments and skilful parasites, more virulent toxins, more capable diseases, and more affectionate expressions of pain, ruin, psychosis and loss. In the simplest possible statement: Creation is a vast entanglement apparatus - a complexity machine - whose single-minded mindless state of employment is geared entirely towards a greater potency and efficiency in the delivery and experience of misery and confusion, not harmony and peaceful accord. ~ John Zande

if sentient life recognised the futility of its existence, if it recognised that it had been born on the line and was eternally bonded to the perverted servitude of another who does not - and will never - hold council to discuss emancipation, then it is inevitable that birth rates among all self-aware creatures would plummet as reproduction itself would be viewed as an unconscionable and outrageous act of unforgivable selfishness. Being freely acting, morally autonomous, and presented with an insufferable reality, complex conscious life would find no option but to rebel, and to rebel completely by deploying the only weapon it had against the architect of its unforgiving world: a massive denial of service; self-administered, intentional extinction. Revolutionary suicide. ~ John Zande

Ultimately, true evil finds its greatest expression in nurturing good, for just as long as men and beast alike convince themselves that the good can outweigh the evil, then growth across the fields of suffering is not only guaranteed, but it will be, until the Creator chooses otherwise, self-sustaining. ~ John Zande

Could a benevolent designer, a craftsman who is mindful of harmony and joy, pleased by plenty and safety, tolerate such an abysmal existence for its most precious expressions of creation? ~ John Zande

This world inside which sentience has awoken, uninvited, is the stuff of all nightmares, a living daymare, a defiled experiment draped in ethical ugliness, and is it therefore any surprise that a child's first reaction upon discovering themselves alive inside it is to scream in absolute horror? ~ John Zande

Misery cannot be counterfeited. ~ John Zande

A ship must be floated and launched before it can be drowned and sunk. ~ John Zande

Only the most reckless, self-indulgent of men would deny Aquinas's conclusion, God. Albeit a concealed one, the presence of an overmind is self-evident and necessary, yet in the same breath, only the most negligent and asinine would terminate the enquiry at such a premature rung, believing as the theologian William Paley believed that the earthly design is inherently beneficial. ~ John Zande

Birthed in a riotous sea of heat and violence, this world was never good, never peaceful, never without suffering, pain and anxiety. There was never an armistice between all living and not-so living things, nor can evidence be found to suggest there ever was - or still is - a loosely balanced war tumbling across Creation with the advantage swinging between the forces of light and happiness, and those of darkness and misery. Fire has always burned flesh, water has always drowned babies, and Creation has only ever exhibited but one impulse, one motive, one direction: towards increasing complexity, where complexity - across all systems, animate and inanimate - corresponds precisely to the degree and depth of potential suffering available to those contingent things whose participation in Creation was never solicited. ~ John Zande

In the case of a single nineteen year old infantry soldier mangled in the devastating blast of a carefully laid roadside bomb, some fifty or even sixty years of exigent torment - some 500,000 hours of constant, inescapable misery - has been created out of virtually nothing, far exceeding the total output of brutal (albeit dazzling) terror felt by another less fortunate soldier in the seconds before his body is irreparably torn apart by shrapnel and his life is extinguished on a poorly defined battlefield, his account closed forever. ~ John Zande

The common baron caterpillar did not, for example, anticipate the benefits of camouflage. Elephants no sooner considered in advance the potential rewards of growing large ears than the artic rabbit contemplated the profit of shrinking theirs. Encystment was not a survival strategy devised by protozoa, bacteria, and many species of nematodes because they foretasted some future hardship and made preparations when times were good and danger was rare. Ancestral wildebeest did not carefully plot out their species' enormous migratory patterns because of an innate love of travel and a fondness of new vistas. ~ John Zande

In a sentence: Nature beatified the neurotic. A tendency to make quick albeit mostly false associations was deemed more evolutionarily beneficial than more reliable but equally more time-consuming rational cynicism. ~ John Zande

Before there was light there was only darkness. Before there was light there was only what the Greek poet Hesiod called the "yawning nothingness," and from within this perfect eclipse the uncaused First Cause moved, constructively interfering with a portion of that eternal void which existed before space and time were named with a temperature. This unending, infinite bleakness - a blackness that the authors of the Vedas collectively identified as a type of swirling chaos, a darkness concealed in darkness - is the Creator's ancestral home. It is where He resides, within what human minds can only comprehend as the deepest of detestable disorders. That, to Him, is home. ~ John Zande

That universal prayer which has been nervously whispered, spoken, chanted, shouted and even screamed towards the air in every known language and now misplaced dialect since time immemorial, Deliver us from evil, has never, and will never be answered. One cannot, after all, be 'delivered' from one's source. ~ John Zande

...if any single religion were in fact true, the Observer would have - indeed _should have_ already seen that religion emerge naturally and entirely unassisted wherever human beings were found, regardless of their isolation or epoch. It's deity (or deities) would wear a single hat, carry a single name and speak a single language audible to the deaf, coherent to infants, understood by the demented, and intelligible to the senile. [...] No religion has however emerged twice anywhere on the planet [...] not a solitary person in history has arrived independently at Mithraism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Scientology or Judaism without if first being taught to them. ~ John Zande

It is a triumph of the Omnimalevolent Creator's design. As technique is improved, joy declines. Inevitably, talent degenerates too. ~ John Zande

Without need for excuse or elaborate theodicies, malevolence explains the world that is, and by the strength and rigidity of this explanation an imprint - an outline - of the Creator who cherishes His anonymity is revealed. ~ John Zande

Suffering, therefore, is not merely the abrupt delivery of violence and death. Its greatest and most valuable expression is in dashed hopes, ruined dreams, perennial pain, torment, confusion, misunderstanding, prolonged anxiety, recovery, repair, exhaustion, and, eventually, full bodily capitulation in a drama where warm survivors, not cold victims, are more valuable to the Omnimalevolent Creator. ~ John Zande

The very concept of a loving personal creator was only ever a secondary invention, a grinning wicker man thrown together in antiquity and stood in place as a chimerical response to a world whose everyday works betray the fantasy in every possible way. ~ John Zande

To change formlessness to form requires massive discrimination. ~ John Zande

The Christian narrative states that a maximally powerful, maximally good, all-knowing aseitic being consciously created everything, including man who short-circuited shortly after. This failure resulted in the immediate separation of all earthly things, including man, from the Creator: the Middle Eastern deity named, Yhwh. The objective of life, according to the Christian narrative, is to return to communion with Yhwh. Failure to do so in a finite space of time (a single lifetime of indeterminate duration and unequal resources) will result in Yhwh tossing the individual into an abyss he created for his finest and most beautiful creation, an angel named Lucifer (Ezekiel 28:12,13), who also short-circuited sometime earlier. This is considered by Christians to be the ultimate punishment: an eternal separation from the god, Yhwh.

This narrative is wholesale nonsense.

As a theology (and scaffolding for a tremendously flawed accompanying theodicy), it is an extravagant work of self-annihilating absurdity. As a maximally good, aseitic being, everything was once part of perfection. That's what aseity means. There was no-thing that was not already perfect. To argue otherwise is to concede Yhwh was not, in fact, perfect. Creation, therefore, destroyed this eternal harmony, this purity, and by this fact alone, the act of Creation can only be called maximally evil. Creation separated things from the perfect goodness. Creation expelled goodness and cast it into a sta ~ John Zande

My family are all storytellers, and I think I inherited a lot more of that gene than other people in my family. I guess I was fun to have around. ~ John C. Reilly

Before we receive any knowledge of God's Fatherly good will for us, the blood of Christ must intercede for us and restore us to God's favor. Besides, ~ John Calvin

There are few things in life worse than a long-winded lawyer. ~ John Grisham

It is better to lose your life than to waste it. ~ John Piper

I recognize that folks in the press love to see Republican-on-Republican violence, and so you want me to say something bad about Donald Trump, or bad about John McCain or bad about anyone else, i'm not going to do it. ~ Ted Cruz

Nature builds up her refined and invisible architecture, with a delicacy eluding our conception, yet with a symmetry and beauty which we are never weary of admiring. ~ John Herschel

Never forget: first God delivered the Israelites from Egypt, then he gave them the law. God's people were not redeemed by observing the law, but they were redeemed so they might obey the law. "By this we know that we have come to know him, if we keep his commandments" (1 John 2:3). We can talk all day long about our love for God, but if we do not keep his commandments we are liars and the truth is not in us (v. 4). ~ Kevin DeYoung

I want to make sure that, not only in the Republican Party but in the body politic as a whole, people are aware of threats that remain to the United States. ~ John Bolton

It's true though, that the impulse to give freely to the world seems to be at the bottom of the well of human intentions where the purest and clearest water arises. To be able to offer back what the world has given you, but shaped a little by your touch - that makes a true life. ~ John Tarrant

I saw Hamlet Prince of Denmark played; but now the old plays begin to disgust this refined age. ~ John Evelyn

They spend their time looking forward to the past. ~ John Osborne

There's no reason whatsoever to drink eight glasses of water a day unless you, for whatever reason, particularly like the taste of water ~ John Green

The only thing that walks back from the tomb with the mourners and refuses to be buried is the character of a man. This is true. What a man is survives him. It can never be buried. -J. R. MILLER ~ John C. Maxwell

A jail is just like a nutshell with a worm in it, the worm will always get out. ~ John Dillinger

There is rough work to be done, and rough men must do it; there is gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must do it. ~ John Ruskin

Beasts abstract not. ~ John Locke

I don't like creating software anymore. It's too exact. It's like karate; there's no room for error. ~ John Maeda

Did you never run for shelter in a storm, and find fruit which you expected not? Did you never go to God for safeguard, driven by outward storms, and there find unexpected fruit? ~ John Owen

If you bring somebody into the band you are going to be with them a lot whether it's in the studio, on the tour bus, or at dinner every night; you want somebody you enjoy being around. You don't want an annoying guy . ~ John Petrucci

I realised I'd spent a lot of time in my poetry trying to find a way of talking about that whereof we cannot speak. ~ John Burnside

Not very many people can draw who are illustrators today. ~ John Kricfalusi

You're going to have things to repent, boy,' Mr. John had told Nick. 'That's one of the best things there is. You can always decide whether to repent them or not. But the thing is to have them. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

Look here," said Will. "When a man comes to me for advice about an idea, I know he doesn't
want advice. He wants me to agree with him. And if I want to keep his friendship I tell him his idea is
fine and go ahead. But I like you and you're a friend of my family, so I'm going to stick my neck out. ~ John Steinbeck

The more morally truthful your life's vision becomes, the more secure your life will become. ~ John Marino

The church changes the world not by making converts but by making disciples. ~ John Wesley

After 'The Blues Brothers,' I wanted to do a good musical number with real dancers and shoot it correctly. ~ John Landis

Once in a very blue moon, John Tallow imagined his younger self standing down the timeline of his present life, bare toes curling in teenage beach sand, looking ahead to today and watching his future life collapse in on itself like a dying star. His future life becoming small and dark and dense, its gravity apparently grim and inescapable.
Once in a very blue moon, John Tallow spent some cash on a bottle of vodka and drank it at home within an hour. ~ Warren Ellis

Any real accomplishment in the world reflects the efforts of a lot of people ... For an individual to claim personal responsibility was the height of arrogance. ~ John J. Gilligan

In the middle classes the gifted son of a family is always the poorest
usually a writer or artist with no sense for speculation
and in a family of peasants, where the average comfort is just over penury, the gifted son sinks also, and is soon a tramp on the roadside. ~ John Millington Synge

In the divine Scriptures, there are shallows and there are deeps; shallows where the lamb may wade, and deeps where the elephant may swim. ~ John Owen

It's hard to get movie studios to pay a lot of money for movies that don't have robots or explosions. ~ John Green

I digress, but here's the rub: The dead are visible only in the terrible lidless eye of memory. The living, thank heaven, retain the ability to surprise and to disappoint. Your Hazel is alive, Waters, and you mustn't impose your will upon another's decision, particularly a decision arrived at thoughtfully. She wishes to spare you pain, and you should let her. You may not find young Hazel's logic persuasive, but I have trod through this vale of tears longer than you, and from where I'm sitting, she's not a lunatic. ~ John Green

When a hacker gains access to any corporate data, the value of that data depends on which server, or sometimes a single person's computer, that the hacker gains access to. ~ John McAfee

I want to get lean and mean, keep it minimalist. ~ John Cale

I love animals. They give so much to you and demand so little. And you can trust them. ~ Olivia Newton-John