Post Your 'Favorite' Disturbing Quotes Here

[keith99]

Any kind. They don't have to be half as dark as this one.

From a note passed by Klaus Bonhoeffer before his sentencing by a 'peoples court':

I am not afraid of being hanged. But I don't want to see those faces again . . . so much depravity . . . I'd rather die than see those faces again. I have seen the Devil, and I can't forget it.

From Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Eberhard Bethge (page 832)

 

[Ada Lovelace]

“If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange — meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with color and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil.”
― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange

 

[Ada Lovelace]

My post was posted twice! So weird!

Okay. So here's a replacement quote.

“In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in his cosmic loneliness.

And God said, "Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done." And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close to mud as man sat, looked around, and spoke. "What is the purpose of all this?" he asked politely.

"Everything must have a purpose?" asked God.

"Certainly," said man.

"Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this," said God.

And He went away.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle

 

[keith99]

“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as "bad luck.”


― Robert A. Heinlein

 

[JackofSpades]

I think beginning of the atomic age sparked kinda many quotes of that cathegory:

"And just at that instance there rose from the bowels of the earth a light not of this world, the light of many suns in one."
- William Laurence, NY times

"I am become Shiva, the destroyer of worlds."
- Oppenheimer

“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
- Einstein

 

[Ada Lovelace]

“We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.”
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

 

[keith99]

I swear I found this one before Artemis's post above. I may eventually find the quote I was looking for:

"He becomes whatever is required of him. Not a conscious process, I don't think. Piotr expects a loyal retainer, and Bothari plays the part, deadpan as you please. Vorrutyer wanted a monster, and Bothari became his torturer. And victim. I demanded a good soldier, and he became one for me. You . . ." his voice softened, "you are the only person I know who looks at Bothari and sees a hero. So he becomes one for you. He clings to you because you create him a greater man than he ever dreamed of being."
—Aral Vorkosigan, Barrayar, to Cordelia about Bothari


Cordelia is Aral Vorkosigan's wife. When they met they were on opposite sides in a war and in other dangers. Aral is able to find some degree of safety from factions who want them both dead and instructs Sgt. Bothari that Cordelia is his prisoner and no one else is to interrogate or harm her. Years later when Bothari has been corrupted a second time by Vorrupter and is instructed to rape Cordelia one small spark emerges. Instead Bothari kills Vorrutyer saying only 'Vorkosigan's Prisoner'.

 

[TillICollapse]

I've always loved the opening of War of the Worlds. There is something dark about it that has always caught my attention. I have the entire original broadcast on my iPod

"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us." - H.G. Wells

 

[TillICollapse]

"Between the idea, and the reality, between the motion and the act, falls the shadow ..."

- T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

 

[TillICollapse]

I've seen Macbeth performed more times than I can remember.

"By the pricking of my thumbs, Something wicked this way comes."

- Shakespeare, "Macbeth"

 

[TillICollapse]

One more

"Every act of creation is first an act of destruction."

- Pablo Picasso

 

[essentialsaltes]

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

--HPL, "The Call of Cthulhu"

 

[essentialsaltes]

"More weight."

 

[BL2KTN]

Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks.

 

[Mystman]

"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. ...

I was gonna post that

a close second, I've always found this pretty disturbing, not so much for the message (which might be expected from the time period), but the way it's presented:

"If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers; 7Namely, of the gods of the people which are round about you, nigh unto thee, or far off from thee, from the one end of the earth even unto the other end of the earth; 8Thou shalt not consent unto him, nor hearken unto him; neither shall thine eye pity him, neither shalt thou spare, neither shalt thou conceal him: 9But thou shalt surely kill him; thine hand shall be first upon him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people. 10And thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die; because he hath sought to thrust thee away from the LORD thy God ..." -Deuteronomy 13

 

[Ada Lovelace]

“Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.”
― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

 

[KEBO12345]

To be a human being is to be an infinite eternal spirit
in a finite body. At the essence of your being is a contradiction in terms...
You are finite yet infinite.

Life is full of mysteries. You dont know where you came from
before you came here. you don;t know where you will be going
when you leave. Nor do you know what you are supposed to be doing
with your time on the planet. You don't know nor do your fellow
humans however deep their convictions.

Its enough to make even the most confident person feel a little
insecure. A very natural reaction involves fabricating a liferaft of opinion
and assumption in order to afford some protection from the waves of uncertainty
threatening to engulf us.

Not inspired by a human author , but by a guardian servant.

 

[JackofSpades]

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

- Orwell, Animal Farm

 

[Received]

I'd consider myself a realist, alright? But in philosophical terms I'm what's called a pessimist... I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself - we are creatures that should not exist by natural law... We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, that accretion of sensory experience and feelings, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everbody's nobody... I think the honorable thing for our species to do is to deny our programming. Stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction - one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal. -- Rust Cohle, True Detective (show)​

I don't think they can get much darker than this.

 

[KEBO12345]

I'd consider myself a realist, alright? But in philosophical terms I'm what's called a pessimist... I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware. Nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself - we are creatures that should not exist by natural law... We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, that accretion of sensory experience and feelings, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everbody's nobody... I think the honorable thing for our species to do is to deny our programming. Stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction - one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal. -- Rust Cohle, True Detective (show)​

I don't think they can get much darker than this.

Hi, just a comment on this quote....

Cohle was doing so well and then lost it at the end.
Now that the effects of a mammal ego on the steroids of reflectivity has gone
viral, it is too late to reverse the contagion on a species level.
The evolutionary Y node still presents itself on the individual choice level.
We all have the choice to personally wake up from that sleep rather than
resigning our personal futures to what everyone else is doing.

.............................................................................