Nihilistic Quotes

Why should a great and powerful nation like the United States allow its relationship with more than a billion Muslims around the world to be defined by the narrow hatred and nihilistic actions of an exceptionally small minority of Muslims? ~ John O. Brennan

In the American way of life pleasure involves comfort, convenience, and sexual stimulation. Pleasure, so defined, has little to do with the past and views the future as no more than a repetition of a hedonistically driven present. This market morality stigmatizes others as objects for personal pleasure or bodily stimulation. The reduction of individuals to objects of pleasure is especially evident in the culture industries
television, radio, video, music. Like all Americans, African Americans are influenced greatly by the images of comfort. These images contribute to the predominance of the market-inspired way of life over all others and thereby edge out nonmarket values
love, care, service to others
handed down by preceding generations. The predominance of this way of life among those living in poverty-ridden conditions, with a limited capacity to ward of self-contempt and self-hatred, results in the possible triumph of the nihilistic threat in black America. ~ Cornel West

What is at stake is civilization and humanity, nothing less. The idea that everything is permitted, as Nietzsche put it, rests on the premise of nihilism and has nihilistic implications. I will not pretend that the case against nihilism and for civilization is an easy one to make. We are here confronting the most fundamental of philosophical questions, on the deepest levels. In short, the matter of pornography and obscenity is not a trivial one, and only superficial minds can take a bland and untroubled view of it. ~ Irving Kristol

We talk often about being in a media-saturated society, and we are surrounded by image streams. But it's nihilistic. There's a real randomness to all of it. ~ Cynthia Daignault

Though violent action is sometimes associated with nihilism, what makes such activity nihilistic, it seems, is the belief that ultimately nothing will come out of it. When nihlists throw themselves into activity it is with the understanding that its only goal is the expression and dissipation of their life's energy. Any creative product will eventually be consumed by decay. Since there is nothing that humans can do to mend the separation between themselves and reality, they can never actualize their supreme standards of worth and value. This world must remain substandard no matter what we do to try and change the situation. ~ John Marmysz

But it must be seen that the term 'catastrophe' has this 'catastrophic' meaning of the end and annihilation only in a linear vision of accumulation and productive finality that the system imposes on us. Etymologically, the term only signifies the curvature, the winding down to the bottom of a cycle leading to what can be called the 'horizon of the event,' to the horizon of meaning, beyond which we cannot go. Beyond it, nothing takes place that has meaning for us - but it suffices to exceed this ultimatum of meaning in order that catastrophe itself no longer appear as the last, nihilistic day of reckoning, such as it functions in our current collective fantasy. ~ Jean Baudrillard

Here's my answer to the very real existential crisis that grips me midway through everything I've ever tried to do: I think stories help us fight the nihilistic urges that constantly threaten to consume us. ~ John Green

I was always just there. In a perpetual nihilistic malaise of ennui and lots of other SAT words. ~ Aaron Goldfarb

I have a nihilistic attitude so it's like, the new gay ... it's popular. ~ Gerard Way

His puppets have a nihilistic spirit, if you'd understand what I meant by that. Sometimes his puppets won't perform at all. He just lets them sit there, watching us. Then he has them look at each other and then back at us until it feels as if they have information, some kind of dreadful information about each and every one of us, and you begin to wish they'd decide to keep their mouths shut forever. ~ Helen Oyeyemi

I personally don't live a nihilistic life, I don't have any use for it. ~ Tommy Lee Jones

Evil is ancient, unchanging, and with us always. The more postmodern the West becomes - affluent, leisured, nursed on moral equivalence, utopian pacifism, and multicultural relativism - the more premodern the evil among us seems to arise in nihilistic response. ~ Victor Davis Hanson

Nihilistic passion, adding to
falsehood and injustice, destroys in its fury its original demands and thus deprives rebellion of its most
cogent reasons. It kills in the fond conviction that this world is dedicated to death. The consequence of
rebellion, on the contrary, is to refuse to legitimize murder because rebellion, in principle, is a protest
against death. ~ Albert Camus

If you take 100 breast-cancer samples, 100 types of cancer have 100 different hallmarks of mutated genes. You could be nihilistic and say, 'Oh, God, we'll never be able to tackle this!' But there are deep, systematic, organizational principles at work in all that diversity. ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

If you don't believe what other people believe, then they'll accuse you of being nihilistic. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

But it's not only: What are you going to do about touring, it's: What are you going to do with your life? Is there a point to what we do? I think there is. Making music, creating beautiful things. We have to be in love with the good and the beautiful. If we are not, then you're in a nihilistic state. ~ Lou Reed

I am as sure as I am of the fact of Christ's reign, that a comprehensive and centralised system of national education, separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief and of anti-social nihilistic ethics, social and political, which this sin-rent world has ever seen. ~ Archibald Alexander Hodge

The GOP's thirst for confrontation and crisis is symptomatic of a destructive and nihilistic streak that has overtaken our political system. When one party repudiates the whole concept of compromise, it is inevitable that the government will lurch from one crisis to another. ~ Mike Lofgren

At one time I was a nihilistic punk with a mohican and a ring in my nose. I think in the course of time I'll find a middle ground, but I also carry that sense of responsibility. I'm in a position to defeat stereotypes. ~ Michelle Shocked

Terror is an artery.
Running unfailing channels of bloodied thoroughfares by dint of the wilds beyond our knowing. Fluctuations and murmurs are audible within the splintered leeway of our preserve as a consequence of interstices modeled in such brutality. This appended artery offers no direction; idle and at times desultory. Bloodstained tracks and avenues guide casualties.
Terror, like death, is not complicated, nor is it simple. It is but routine - natural. To call it otherwise is to parsimoniously say that birth is effortless, hurricanes are facile, and earthquakes are meek when they are a lot more.
Myths, parables, and allegories lie in the construct of terror. Kings have fallen and succeeded in the yarns of terror. Simple men have been turned into heroes due to terror. Villains have been great orchestrators in the art of terror, allowing sole individuals and denizens to feel their makings. A soul never needed God to feel terror. The most nihilistic can undergo such a dreadful emotion. Animals are perfect examples of this. They are well-equipped creations to the world of terror and death, holding no cognizance to deity or creator.
Terror is quite exclusive as it is a function of the mind, conducted by the intersections and throughways of nerves and bounded to that alone. Although it approaches with university, like hunger or sickness, it is selfish by fashion and segregating in nature. But death is quite opposite… death is all embracing. Disregarded ~ J.C. Whitfield

Hakeem: A wise man once said that suffering produces perseverance, character; and character, hope.
Andre: Since when did spouting masochism make one wise? And the sacraments of a bitter existence? Who deemed that a vaunted prize? Nihilistic philosophy only births more pain. It's fruitless to espouse folly, repackage it as wisdom, and spew it in a wise man's name. ~ Booker T. Mattison

Drugs are nihilistic: they undermine all values and radically overturn all our ideas about good and evil, what is just and what is unjust, what is permitted and what is forbidden. ~ Octavio Paz

What is causing this mysterious perpetual air of inconvenience to slowly engulf the evening. It is not merely emptiness but an awakening in itself about nothingness.
Leave behind what was never yours and accept the fact that momentary pleasures and hideous treasures will perish too soon; so will your pride be snatched away by nothing. Mathematicians often say an instance tends to infinity. But, in actual sense, is anything even close to infinity?
Nullify yourself and disappear into zero, for that is what we call the beginning; the beginning of the end. ~ Ranjani Ramachandran

The hope that fuels the pursuit of endless economic growth – that billions of consumers in India & China will one day enjoy the lifestyles of Europeans and Americans – is as absurd & dangerous a fantasy as anything dreamt up by Al-Qaeda. It condemns the global environment to early destruction & looks set to create reservoirs of nihilistic rage & disappointment among hundreds of millions of have-nots – the bitter outcome of the universal triumph of Western Modernity, which turns the revenge of the East into something darkly ambiguous, and all its victories truly Pyrrhic. ~ Pankaj Mishra

The loss of a hierarchy of values is dangerous for two reasons, as Nietzsche sees it. Without such a hierarchy values prove anchorless, unstable, and shifting. It is not that all values have disappeared under nihilistic conditions; we may, on the contrary, witness a proliferation of competing values, but the relation of these values to each other is unsecured. And from this follows a second danger that without a hierarchy of values there can be no human greatness. We will not be capable of achievements that require deep, long-term, unwavering commitment. We can see what Nietzsche has in mind from our own contemporary culture which displays precisely such a loss of a hierarchy of values and is thus already nihilistic in Nietzsche's sense. In this culture of ours the most trite and trivial counts in consequence as much as the greatest and most profound. Triviality itself has, indeed, become a value for us and all values have become trivial. What is acclaimed today is discarded tomorrow. Our values have been reduced to fashions and as such to something of no consequence. ~ Hans D. Sluga

Nihilism in American comedy came along way before 'The Simpsons.' There was a fairly nihilistic point of view to 'Saturday Night Live,' for instance, back in the beginning, and a lot of really dark comedy had a really anti-sentimental take on life. ~ Matt Groening

Sex is mathematics. Individuality no longer an issue. What does intelligence signify? Define reason. Desire - meaningless. Intellect is not a cure. Justice is dead. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

At first he found it amusing. He coined a law intended to have the humor of a Parkinson's law that "The number of rational hypotheses
that can explain any given phenomenon is infinite." It pleased him never to run out of hypotheses. Even when his experimental work
seemed dead-end in every conceivable way, he knew that if he just sat down and muddled about it long enough, sure enough, another
hypothesis would come along. And it always did. It was only months after he had coined the law that he began to have some doubts
about the humor or benefits of it.
If true, that law is not a minor flaw in scientific reasoning. The law is completely nihilistic. It is a catastrophic logical disproof of the
general validity of all scientific method!
If the purpose of scientific method is to select from among a multitude of hypotheses, and if the number of hypotheses grows faster
than experimental method can handle, then it is clear that all hypotheses can never be tested. If all hypotheses cannot be tested, then the
results of any experiment are inconclusive and the entire scientific method falls short of its goal of establishing proven knowledge ~ Robert M. Pirsig

The saying "no self, no problem" probably comes from Zen. In their cultures, where Buddhism is kind of taken for granted, as well as karma, causality, former and future life, and the possibility for becoming enlightened, then it's safe to skirt the danger of nihilism, which would be, I don't exist because Buddha said I have no self, and therefore I have no problem because I don't exist. That would be a bad misunderstanding. But in those cultures, it would not be as easy to have that understanding as it would be here in the west, where we really are nihilistic. ~ Robert Thurman

I don't find R.E.M. to be nihilistic. There is a constant undertone of joyous optimism. I'm not going to kill myself to Patti Smith or R.E.M. ~ Michael Stipe

Don't you ever save me again. Do you hear me, you hotheaded little incendiary? Don't help me, rescue me, offer me succor, or do me a favor. Do you understand, you nihilistic dynamitard! Don't you dare ever save me again! ~ Joanna Jordan

If you look at some shows that have an ugly feel to them, or a nihilistic sort of feel to them, you'll usually find a group of cynical, unhappy, miserable people behind the production. If you see a show that's rather boring, or a cookie-cutter factory show, you'll usually find some pretty uninteresting, boring people behind it. ~ Michelle Forbes

That my philosophy of life is, as far as possible, one of enjoyment. I'm not nihilistic. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

If we present a man with a concept of man which is not true, we may well corrupt him. When we present man as an automaton of reflexes, as a mind-machine, as a bundle of instincts, as a pawn of drives and reactions, as a mere product of instinct, heredity and environment, we feed the nihilism to which modern man is, in any case, prone.
I became acquainted with the last stage of that corruption in my second concentration camp, Auschwitz. The gas chambers of Auschwitz were the ultimate consequence of the theory that man is nothing but the product of heredity and environment; or as the Nazi liked to say, 'of Blood and Soil.' I am absolutely convinced that the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Maidanek were ultimately prepared not in some Ministry or other in Berlin, but rather at the desks and lecture halls of nihilistic scientists and philosophers. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

Mis-information is rampant in this great age of mass-information. While we have more access to learning than ever before in the history of the world, we're actually getting dumber it seems. The amount of (mis)information at everyone's fingertips has lured us into a false sense of knowing. Whether it be information about science, politics, or theology, our society is suffering from an inability to research, process, filter, and apply. At the same time we seem entirely oblivious to the zeitgeist (spirit of the age) that is nihilistic and libertine, making everything relative and subjective. And Satan himself rushes to blur our vision, stirring up the dust of confusion. The church must respond by teaching the critical faculties of logic and spiritual discernment, embedded in a cohesive framework of fides quaerens intellectum (faith seeking understanding). We must obtain a reasonable faith that is consistent with historic Christianity and relevant for our post-modern age. Otherwise, those rejecting the blatant errors of religious fundamentalism will be susceptible to every wind of false doctrine and repackaged heresy imaginable. They will leave the orthodox faith and accept something that vaguely resembles Christianity, but in reality is a vile concoction of demonic lies. ~ David D. Flowers

Conformity is one of the nihilistic temptations of rebellion which dominate a large part of our intellectual history. It demonstrates how the rebel who takes to action is tempted to succumb, if he forgets his origins, to the most absolute conformity. And so it explains the twentieth century. Lautreamont, who is usually hailed as the bard of pure rebellion, on the contrary proclaims the advent of the taste for intellectual servitude which flourishes in the contemporary world. ~ Albert Camus

I think people have always misinterpreted my self-destructive nature as nihilistic, because if you don't care about the world, you can't create art. I am misanthropic and self-loathing, but never nihilistic. And I think I act far worse off-stage than onstage. ~ Marilyn Manson

It was a uniform that signified that one was a kind of downtown aesthete; not necessarily nihilistic, but a monk in the bohemian order. ~ David Byrne

The rather difficult antagonists towards the Church consist not nearly of the cruel and heartless, nihilistic intellectuals who hate God and humanity, but the well-meaning spirits who for the most part lack an understanding of the Spirit. ~ Criss Jami

I attacked those Western playwrights who use their influence and affluence to preach to the world the nihilistic doctrine that life is pointless and irrationally destructive, and that there is nothing we can do about it. Until everyone is fed, clothed, housed and taught, until human beings have equal leisure to contemplate the overwhelming fact of mortality, we should not (I argued) indulge in the luxury of privileged despair. ~ Kenneth Tynan

The attitude of letting go, of letting things be as they are, of non-attachment, does not imply a condition of reactive distancing or detachment, and is not to be confused with passivity, dissociative behaviors, or attempts to separate yourself even the tiniest bit from reality. It is not a pathological condition of withdrawal adopted to protect yourself. Nor is it nihilistic. It is exactly opposite: a supremely healthy condition of heart and mind. It means embracing the whole of reality in a new way. ~ Jon Kabat-Zinn

The punk scene in NY was so gritty and nihilistic & I was like ooh I want to do that ~ Jessica Hagedorn

The romance that has surrounded the Beat generation since the mid-Sixties has acted as a kind of sentimental glaze, obscuring its fundamentally nihilistic impulse under a heap of bogus rhetoric about liberation, spontaneity, and 'startling oases of creativity', Notwithstanding their recent media media make-over, the Beats were not Promethean iconoclasts. They were drug-abusing sexual predators and infantilized narcissists whose shamelessness helped dupe a confused and gullible public into believing that their utterances were works of genius. We have to thank Lisa Phillips and the Whitney for inadvertently reminding us of this with such vividness. If nothing else, 'Beat Culture and the New America' showed that the Beats were not simply artistic charlatans; the were -- and, in the case of those who are still with us, they remain -- moral simpletons, whose destructive influence helped fuel the cultural catastrophe with which we are now living. ~ Roger Kimball

People complain about the obscurity of poetry, especially if they're assigned to write about it, but actually poetry is rather straightforward compared to ordinary conversation with people you don't know well which tends to be jumpy repartee, crooked, coded, allusive to no effect, firmly repressed, locked up in irony, steadfastly refusing to share genuine experience--think of conversation at office parties or conversation between teenage children and parents, or between teenagers themselves, or between men, or between bitter spouces: rarely in ordinary conversation do people speak from the heart and mean what they say. How often in the past week did anyone offer you something from the heart? It's there in poetry. Forget everything you ever read about poetry, it doesn't matter--poetry is the last preserve of honest speech and the outspoken heart. All that I wrote about it as a grad student I hereby recant and abjure--all that matters about poetry to me is directness and clarity and truthfulness. All that is twittery and lit'ry: no thanks, pal. A person could perish of entertainment, especially comedy, so much of it casually nihilistic, hateful, glittering, cold, and in the end clueless. People in nusing homes die watching late-night television and if I were one of them, I'd be grateful when the darkness descends. Thank God if the pastor comes and offers a psalm and a prayer, and they can attain a glimmer of clarity at the end. ~ Garrison Keillor

You can look at Bad Religion, and, really, almost everything I've ever done was an exercise in creativity. I've always had a desire to challenge and question authority, and that's where the fire inside comes from. I challenged authority out of a desire to make things better, not to be nihilistic about it. ~ Greg Graffin

Purely historical thought is nihilistic; it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history. ~ Albert Camus

I'm nihilistic, antagonistic, violent, horrible - but not obliterated, yet. I just refuse to be beaten down. I think it's stubborness that keeps me going. ~ Lydia Lunch

As for the belief that humanity is mostly good, Secular humanism, when in that alignment, always presumes the existence of a higher power, or some god-like influence on man. Because it then becomes the belief that people are generally good and should be protected from the wiles of religion, as though this dark, vague and ignorant force once fell from the heavens, latched onto the purer hearts and minds of men and women, and, in all its forms, controlled and polluted the whole of human history. He says, 'When we defeat religion, humanity will be free.' But, if he were duly consistent, if he were really at all as secular as he claims, he might as well admit to what is actually an underlying brand of nihilistic cynicism: 'When we defeat humans, humanity will be free. ~ Criss Jami

There are some arenas so corrupt that the only clean acts possible are nihilistic. ~ Richard K. Morgan

... Like having to be able to say to yourself, 'I am pretending to sit here reading Albert Camus's The Fall for the Literature of Alienation midterm, but actually I'm really concentrating on listening to Steve try to impress this girl over the phone, and I am feeling embarrassment and contempt for him, and am thinking he's a poser, and at the same time I am also uncomfortably aware of times that I've also tried to project the idea of myself as hip and cynical so as to impress someone, meaning that not only do I sort of dislike Steve, which in all honesty I do, but part of the reason I dislike him is that when I listen to him on the phone it makes me see similarities and realize things about myself that embarrass me, but I don't know how to quit doing them - like, if I quit trying to seem nihilistic, even just to myself, then what would happen, what would I be like? ~ David Foster Wallace

There is no religion and no philosophy that can give us a comprehensive answer to the whole of our problems, and the abandonment and isolation of the individual who is given no answer, or only inadequate answers, to his question lead to a situation in which more and more cheap, obvious solutions and answers are sought and provided. As, everywhere and in all departments of life, there are contradictory schools and parties, and an equal number of contradictory answers, one of the most frequent reactions is that modern man ceases to ask questions and takes refuge in a conception that considers only the most obvious, superficial aspects, and becomes skeptical, nihilistic, and egocentric. Or, alternatively, he tries to solve all his problems by plunging headlong into a collective situation and a collective conviction, and seeks to redeem himself in this way. ~ Erich Neumann

The major enemy of black survival in America has been and is neither oppression nor exploitation but rather the nihilistic threat - that is, loss of hope and absence of meaning. For as long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive. The self-fulfilling prophecy of the nihilistic threat is that without hope there can be no future, that without meaning there can be no struggle. ~ Cornel West

I am as sure as I am of Christ's reign that a comprehensive and centralized system of national education, separated from religion, as is now commonly proposed, will prove the most appalling enginery for the propagation of anti-Christian and atheistic unbelief, and of anti-social nihilistic ethics, individual, social and political, which this sin-rent world has never seen. ~ Archibald Alexander Hodge

Black holes are pretty scary when you ponder them. They seem nihilistic, infinitely destructive on an inconceivable scale, notwithstanding the ideas of Hawking radiation. ~ James Marsh

Gang shootings - as indiscriminate as they often are - still don't have the nihilistic intent of rampages. Rather, they are rooted in an exceedingly strong sense of group loyalty and revenge, and bystanders sometimes get killed in the process. ~ Sebastian Junger

The radical hermeneutic of suspicion that characterizes all of post-modernity is essentially nihilistic, denying the very possibility of creative or healing love. In the cross and resurrection of Jesus we find the answer: the God who made the world is revealed in terms of a self-giving love that no hermeneutic of suspicion can ever touch, in a Self that found itself by giving itself away, in a Story that was never manipulative but always healing and recreating, and in a Reality that can truly be known, indeed to know which is to discover a new dimension of knowledge, the dimension of loving and being loved. ~ N. T. Wright

Destroying your enemies - even destroying a planet - was understandable. But this wasn't simple destruction. It was annihilation; obliteration. The very fabric of the Force had been shredded. Anyone capable of turning an entire planet into a nihilistic abomination had to be completely mad. ~ Drew Karpyshyn

Black Power is a nihilistic philosophy born out of the conviction that the Negro can't win ... the view that American society is so hopelessly corrupt and enmeshed in evil that there is no possibility of salvation from within. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

I wouldn't encourage any kid to become an Elfquest junkie, or any other kind of junkie. Proportion is what we're talking about. We were just talking about that earlier. Proportion in all ways, in storytelling; any story that has an ax to grind is going to burn itself eventually, like the nihilistic comics that Richard was talking about earlier. ~ Cherie Wilkerson

At what point do we admit that the NFL's true economic function is to channel our desire for athletic heroism into an engine of nihilistic greed? ~ Steve Almond

I am superhero! I am the Nihilist! My superpowers include logical detachment, emotional invincibility, and the ability to blend in anywhere. I work alone and am never compromised by romantic entanglements, and I don't have a costume because who the fuck cares? ~ Lianne Oelke

Why don't I like crowds? I suppose the worst possible thing I could say is that I don't like people, and that crowds are just collections of people. That seems like a very nihilistic way to look at the world. ~ Chuck Klosterman

My view of writing "Coldest Girl in Coldtown" was to take every single thing that I loved from every vampire book I had ever read and dump it into one book
everything I like
trying to evoke some of the decadence ... Vampires are a high-class monster: They want to dress up. They want to drink a lot of absinthe, or force their victims to drink a lot of absinthe. They have big parties and have elegant rituals. I think that's a thing we associate with vampires
they are the royalty of our monsters. We expect them to be rich, we expect them to be well-dressed. I wanted to have some of that be true because I like it, and have some of it not be true because it's kind of weird.
I wanted to put in the idea of infection, which I was really interested in and which was a big feature of the vampire books I read growing up. And, the fear and desire for infection
the way in which our urge towards loving vampires is nihilistic. Our fear of them is our survival instincts kicking in. ~ Holly Black

It has been the strange fate of Tibet, once one of the most isolated places on earth, to function as a laboratory for the most ambitious and ruthless human experiments of the modern era: the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and now a state-imposed capitalism. After having suffered totalitarian communism, Tibetans now confront a dissolute capitalism, one that seeks arrogantly, and often violently, to turn all of the world's diverse humanity into middle-class consumers. But it seems wrong to think of Tibetans, as many outsiders do, as helpless victims of large, impersonal forces.
It is no accident that the Tibetans seem to have survived the large-scale Communist attempt at social engineering rather better than most people in China itself. This is at least partly due to their Buddhist belief in the primacy of empathy and compassion. And faced with an aggressively secular materialism, they may still prove, almost alone in the world, how religion, usually dismissed, and not just by Mao, as "poison," can be a source of cultural identity and moral values; how it can become a means of political protest without blinding the devout with hatred and prejudice; how it can help not only heal the shocks and pain of history- the pain that has led people elsewhere in the world into nihilistic rage- but also create a rational and ethical national culture, what may make a freer Tibet, whenever it comes about, better prepared for its state of freedom than most societies. ~ Pankaj Mishra

In theory, multiculturalism is something we should all celebrate; unfortunately, in practice, multiculturalism means multi-morality ... The only antidote to such nihilistic thinking is ethical monotheism, the belief in one universal code of ethics. Differing cultures glorify humanity, but differing moralities destroy it. We must teach what Professor Viktor Frankl concluded after surviving Auschwitz: There are only two races of human beings, the decent and the indecent. That is how the world is divided: not between rich and poor, men and women, North and South, black and white, the powerful and the powerless, or any other nonmoral division that too many contemporary liberals have been advocating. ~ Dennis Prager

In all of its operations, cinema ceaselessly strives, and fails, to make present a world hopelessly beyond grasp. For this reason cinema is, in its very nature, a nihilistic medium. ~ John Marmysz

Good parenting, from my perspective, is like building a three-foot retaining wall against a four-foot wave. The kids have to make up that extra foot. That wave wants to drag them into an undertow where sound judgment is suspended, where the valueless, uncaring, and ultimately nihilistic cool reigns. ~ Greg Gutfeld