For most people, the fact that a statement is false constitutes in itself a reason, however weak and easily overridden, not to make the statement. For Saint Augustine’s pure liar it is, on the contrary, a reason in favor of making it. For the bullshitter it is in itself neither a reason in favor nor a reason against. Both in lying and in telling the truth people are guided by their beliefs concerning the way things are. These guide them as they endeavor either to describe the world correctly or to describe it deceitfully. For this reason, telling lies does not tend to unfit a person for telling the truth in the same way that bullshitting tends to. Through excessive indulgence in the latter activity, which involves making assertions without paying attention to anything except what it suits one to say, a person’s normal habit of attending to the ways things are may become attenuated or lost. Someone who lies and someone who tells the truth are playing on opposite sides, so to speak, in the same game. Each responds to the facts as he understands them, although the response of the one is guided by the authority of the truth, while the response of the other defies that authority and refuses to meet its demands. The bullshitter ignores these demands altogether. He does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.

One who is concerned to report or to conceal the facts assumes that there are indeed facts that are in some way both determinate and knowable. His interest in telling the truth or in lying presupposes that there is a difference between getting things wrong and getting them right, and that it is at least occasionally possible to tell the difference. Someone who ceases to believe in the possibility of identifying certain statements as true and others as false can have only two alternatives. The first is to desist both from efforts to tell the truth and from efforts to deceive. This would mean refraining from making any assertion whatever about the facts. The second alternative is to continue making assertions that purport to describe the way things are, but that cannot be anything except bullshit.

-Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit

A friend once told me that those who choose a love that can never be fulfilled will be hounded by a rage that can never be extinguished.

-Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

If the world itself is a horror then there is nothing to fix and the only thing you could be protected from would be the contemplation of it.

-Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris

We are not much. We are confused and brilliant and stupid, lost clumps of living ash.

-Janna Levin, A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines

And of course it’s true that any number of these books were penned in lieu of burning down the world—which was their author’s true desire.

-Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

I think you know how dumb a person is with an IQ of one hundred. … Well half the people are dumber than that.

-Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

I think you know how dumb a person is with an IQ of one hundred. … Well half the people are dumber than that.

-Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

You first have to revise the question. To ask why is to ask for a motive or a purpose. And a motive has to arise from an apparatus capable of framing an intention, which is normally what we call a mind. Thus the question why is always really the question who.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God

… the great unforgivable crime of the monotheistic religions has been to encourage the conflation of authority and benevolence, of heirachy and justice.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God

… So when the sides were drawn between the powerful and the downtrodden there never had been any question about where I stood.

Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God