A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage. —   Alexis de Tocqueville

Marcel Dzama’s On the banks of the red river (2008)

A Botswanan Fisherman

The Sun

Enigmatic in its capacity,

The celestial emperor watches,

Over everything and everyone,

All there ever was and will be.

I wish I was on that boat.

He said to me once when we were talking of the so-called horrors of the Middle Ages: ‘These horrors were really non-existent. A man of the Middle Ages would detest the whole mode of our present day life as something far more than horrible and cruel, far more than barbarous. Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition, has its own characters, its own weakness and its own strength. Its beauties and cruelties; it accepts certain sufferings as a matter of course, puts up patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering, to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man of the Classical age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate miserably just as the savage does in the midst of our civilization. Now there are times when a whole generation is caught in the way between two ages, between two modes of life and thus loses the feeling for itself, for the self-evident, for all morals, for being safe and innocent. Naturally, everyone does not feel this equally strongly. A nature such as Nietzsche’s had to suffer our present ills more than a generation in advance. What he had to go through alone and misunderstood, thousands suffer today.’ —  

Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse.

My favourite 5 albums:

1. Astral Weeks by Van Morrison
2. Californication by Red Hot Chili Peppers
3. Unplugged in New York by Nirvana
4. Takk by Sigur Ros
5. Up the Bracket by The Libertines

Honourable mentions: One by One by Foo Fighters, Elephant by White Stripes and White Album by The Beatles.

I posed this question to a friend of mine in a pub recently, as I am prone to asking ridiculous questions. His reply changed with every mention of a new album, just as mine probably has even now 5 minutes after having compiled the list. But despite this, Astral Weeks shan’t ever be moved from its lofty position, come what may.