Emil Cioran Quotes

Overcrowding in the cities is producing a collective madness in which irrational violence flourishes because man needs more space in which to be than the modern city allows.

Rebellions broke out, from the full-scale political revolution of Dorr’s rebellion in Rhode Island to urban violence and protest, often by out of work whites taking out their anger on African Americans or Irish Americans. In response, leaders had to come to terms with the role of force in a democracy.

Abnormal stresses and strains tend to accentuate man's animal instincts and provoke irrational and socially disruptive behavior among the less stable individuals in the maddening crowd.

It was a time of madness, the sort of mad-hysteria that always presages war. There seems to be nothing left but war--when any population in any sort of a nation gets violently angry, civilization falls down and religion forsakes its hold on the consciences of human kind in such times of public madness.

L.A. burns, and so many other cities smolder, waiting for the hose that will flood gasoline over the coals, and we listen to politicians who fuel our hate and our narrow views and tell us it's simply a matter of getting back to basics while they sit in their beachfront properties and listen to the surf so they won't have to hear the screams of the drowning.

Every numerous assembly is a mob; everything there depends on instantaneous turns.

The trouble with America is that there are far too many wide open spaces surrounded by teeth.

A city's only ever three hot meals away from anarchy.

The madness of mobs or the insolence of soldiers, or both, when too near to each other, occasion some mischief.

I stayed in L.A. long enough to get on my feet, and then I moved back to New York. The reason I moved here was that I don't feel warm outside of a city; it's too barren in the suburbs, and L.A. is a suburb. Here, it felt active.

Before we find world peace, we gotta find peace in the war on the streets.

The world is in such a place of social unrest and there's so much violence.

New York is where it is going to begin, I think. You can see it coming. The insect experts have learned how it works with locusts. Until locust population reaches a certain density, they all act like any grasshoppers. When the critical point is reached, they turn savage and swarm, and try to eat the world. We're nearing a critical point. One day soon two strangers will bump into each other at high noon in the middle of New York. But this time they won't snarl and go on. They will stop and stare and then leap at each others

The populations of most cities around the world continue to grow. The reasonspeople congregate in cities are various and complex, and the dawn of the digital age has not put much of adamper on the human urge to congregate.

If you have no drugs, then you have revolution, and then drugs will be the only thing stopping that.

This is the contradictory desire in our utopia. We want to live in a small community with which we can identify and yet we want all the facilities of the city of millions of people. We want to have very intense urban experiences and yet we want the open space right next to us.

I think many people are not seeing the change. They're really upset with the current situation. We haven't seen a major American city go up like this in quite some time.

We are sitting on many powder kegs. Whether it's Ferguson, or St Louis, or like the other night, or Baltimore. Or different parts of Chicago.

I think when you have Baltimore, which in the first night was practically wiped out or brought back 30 years. Because the police were instructed to stand down. You can't let that happen.

No tempest or conflagration, however great, is harder to quell than mob carried away by the novelty of power.

We have a situation where we have our inner cities, African- Americans, Hispanics are living in he'll because it's so dangerous. You walk down the street, you get shot.

It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city for only the very young.

I would never be able to live in a huge city. I'd feel like one of 100,000 people doing the same thing.

You look at the violence that is taking place in the inner cities of Chicago. You take a look at Washington, D.C. We have an increase in murder within our cities. The biggest in 45 years. We have a divided nation because people like her and believe me, she has tremendous hate in her heart.

I am convinced that of all the people on the two sides of the great curtain, the space pilots are the least likely to hate each other. Like the late Erich von Holst, I believe that the tremendous and otherwise not quite explicable public interest in space flight arises from the subconscious realization that it helps to preserve peace. May it continue to do so!