{"quotes":[{"text":"Getting wasted is never a waste of time.","author":"Jonathan Heatt","tags":["drinking","fun","hedonism","life"],"id":35779,"author_id":"Jonathan+Heatt"},{"text":"I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it.","author":"Rita Mae Brown","tags":["carpe-diem","enjoy-life","hedonism","life","pleasure"],"id":105058,"author_id":"Rita+Mae+Brown"},{"text":"Men in the vehement pursuit of happiness grasp at the first object which offers to them any prospect of satisfaction, but immediately they turn an introspective eye and ask, ‘Am I happy?’ and at once from their innermost being a voice answers distinctly, ‘No, you are as poor and as miserable as before.' Then they think it was the object that deceived them and turn precipitately to another. But the second holds as little satisfaction as the first…Wandering then through life restless and tormented, at each successive station they think that happiness dwells at the next, but when they reach it happiness is no longer there. In whatever position they may find themselves there is always another one which they discern from afar, and which but to touch, they think, is to find the wished delight, but when the goal is reached discontent has followed on the way stands in haunting constancy before them.","author":"Johann Gottlieb Fichte","tags":["happiness","hedonism","misery","striving"],"id":113167,"author_id":"Johann+Gottlieb+Fichte"},{"text":"The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how genetic engineering and nanotechnology will abolish suffering in all sentient life. This project is ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and ethically mandatory. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they once served the fitness of our genes. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. The world's last aversive experience will be a precisely dateable event.","author":"David Pearce","tags":["ethics","feasibility","fitness","future","genes","genetic-engineering","hedonism","philosophy","rationality","reason","science","suffering","technology"],"id":151087,"author_id":"David+Pearce"},{"text":"Many things in this period have been hard to bear, or hard to take seriously. My own profession went into a protracted swoon during the Reagan-Bush-Thatcher decade, and shows scant sign of recovering a critical faculty—or indeed any faculty whatever, unless it is one of induced enthusiasm for a plausible consensus President. (We shall see whether it counts as progress for the same parrots to learn a new word.) And my own cohort, the left, shared in the general dispiriting move towards apolitical, atonal postmodernism. Regarding something magnificent, like the long-overdue and still endangered South African revolution (a jagged fit in the supposedly smooth pattern of axiomatic progress), one could see that Ariadne’s thread had a robust reddish tinge, and that potential citizens had not all deconstructed themselves into Xhosa, Zulu, Cape Coloured or ‘Eurocentric’; had in other words resisted the sectarian lesson that the masters of apartheid tried to teach them. Elsewhere, though, it seemed all at once as if competitive solipsism was the signifier of the ‘radical’; a stress on the salience not even of the individual, but of the trait, and from that atomization into the lump of the category. Surely one thing to be learned from the lapsed totalitarian system was the unwholesome relationship between the cult of the masses and the adoration of the supreme personality. Yet introspective voyaging seemed to coexist with dull group-think wherever one peered about among the formerly ‘committ.","author":"Christopher Hitchens","tags":["apartheid","apoliticism","argument","atheism","berlin","bought-priesthood","cape-coloureds","cold-war","communism","conviction","critical-thinking","enlightenment","euphemism","eurocentricism","faith","film","george-hw-bush","george-orwell","german-people","germany","groupthink","hedonism","humanism","individualism","irony","journalism","left-wing-politics","lies","literary-criticism","literature","los-angeles","margaret-thatcher","monotheism","munich","orthodoxy","personality-politics","politics","polytheism","populism","postmodernism","potus","progress","radical-politics","religion","right-wing-politics","ronald-reagan","russia","science","sectarianism","self-love","self-pity","socialism","solipsism","south-africa","soviet-union","thomas-mann","totalitarianism","tribalism","truth","united-states","xhosa-people","zulu-people"],"id":151951,"author_id":"Christopher+Hitchens"},{"text":"There is a certain mysticism in the Christian's affirmation of the physical universe. There is a confidence that whatever is discovered conforms with Jesus Christ and is a manifestation of His will.","author":"Gene Edward Veith Jr.","tags":["creation","hedonism","mysticism","sovereignty-of-god"],"id":154307,"author_id":"Gene+Edward+Veith+Jr."},{"text":"The true value of man is shown when with all freedom possible, he sets himself limits.","author":"Anonymous","tags":["freedom","hedonism","limits","value"],"id":182626,"author_id":"Anonymous"},{"text":"Of the thousands who have paid homage to virtue, barely one has thought to inspect the pedestal on which it stands.","author":"Frances Wright","tags":["epicureanism","epicurus","hedonism","humanism","philosophy","pleasure","virtue"],"id":204671,"author_id":"Frances+Wright"},{"text":"I decided that life rationally considered seemed pointless and futile, but it is still interesting in a variety of ways, including the study of science. So why not carry on, following the path of scientific hedonism? Besides, I did not have the courage for the more rational procedure of suicide.","author":"Robert S. Mulliken","tags":["courage","funny","hedonism","humor","interesting","life","meaning","meaning-of-life","molecular-orbital-theory","nobel-laureate","purpose","purpose-of-life","rationality","science","scientific-hedonism","scientist","study","study-of-science","suicide"],"id":207578,"author_id":"Robert+S.+Mulliken"},{"text":"My body is not a temple. It’s a skip,.","author":"Jolie Booth","tags":["hedonism","self-improvement"],"id":217207,"author_id":"Jolie+Booth"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":21,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}