My work is basically an outgrowth of the anger I feel about the human condition. The aspects of it that make me angry are our capacity for cruelty and the ability people have to ignore situations they don’t like.
~ Bruce Nauman

I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms.
~ Werner Herzog

What I’m interested in is happiness with a full awareness of the tragedy of life, the potential tragedy that lurks around every corner and the tragedy that actually is life.
~ Wolfgang Tillmans

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
~ Charles Darwin

Emancipatory politics always consists in making seem possible precisely that which, from within the situation, is declared to be impossible.
~ Alain Badiou

I sometimes think that there is nothing but time, that what you see and what you feel is what time looks like at that moment.
~ Paul Thek

Happiness is a byproduct of function, purpose, and conflict; those who seek happiness for itself seek victory without war.
~ W.S.Burroughs

Sometimes I am such an unbeliever, I can’t even bring myself to believe that there are people who don’t believe.
~ Sarah Vanhee

Because experience shows that there is nothing easier to instrumentalize than yesterday’s subversion.
~ Brian Holmes

Intuition is neither a feeling, an inspiration nor a disorderly sympathy but a fully developed method.
~ Gilles Deleuze

Art has no immediate future, because all art is collective and there is no more collective life.
~ Simone Weil

Life is very short, and it ought not to be spent crawling at the feet of miserable scoundrels.
~ Stendhal

Anyone who’s never experienced the pleasure of betrayal doesn’t know what pleasure is.
~ Jean Genet

It is the bliss of childhood that we are being warped most when we know it the least.
~ William Gaddis

I would like to dance with the people and with the things I’m working towards.
~ Avery F. Gordon

The art of the future is not connoisseurship, but labor itself transfigured.
~ Nikolai Tarabukin

The record, as usual, is not good. But on the other hand it is wonderful.
~ Caetano Veloso

The conflict between art and politics… cannot and must not be solved.
~ Hannah Arendt

God made everything out of nothing, but the nothing shows through.
~ Paul Valery

There is no force like guilt to create intense reality effects.
~ Jan Verwoert

I recommend paranoia, it generates a lot of creativity
~ Jeanne Randolph

I’m what happens after death, which is writing.
~ Kathy Acker

Wishes are premonitions of abilities.
~ Goethe

I am at war with the obvious.
~ William Eggleston

Awkwardness is collaborative.
~ James Guida

I accept the world.
~ Margaret Fuller