Quoting Things: TPK

"We've changed the way we think of ourselves as citizens. We don't think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities. We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries--we're actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation's responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie."

"Corporations are machines for producing profit; that's what they're ingeniously designed to do. It's ridiculous to ascribe civic obligations or moral responsibilities to corporations. But the whole dark genius of corporations is that they allow for individual reward without individual obligation. The workers' obligations are to the executives, and the executives' obligations are to the CEO, and the CEO's obligation is to the Board of Directors, and the Board's obligation is to the stockholders, who are also the same customers the corporation will screw over at the very earliest opportunity in the name of profit, which profits are distributed as dividends to the very stockholders/customers they've been fucking over in their own name. It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility. [...] With corporations I have no problem with government enforcement of statutes and regulatory policy serving a conscience function. What my problem is is the way it seems that we as individual citizens have adopted a corporate attitude. That our ultimate obligation is to ourselves. That unless it's illegal or there are direct personal consequences for ourselves, any activity is okay."

"I think what's changed somehow is they don't think of themselves as personally responsible. They don't think of it like that their personal, individual going and buying a ticket for The Exorcist is what adds to the demand that keeps the corporate machines coming out with more and more violent movies to satisfy the demand."

"And it was 1840 or '41 that de Tocqueville published his book about Americans, and he says somewhere that one thing about democracies and their individualism is that they by their very nature corrode the citizen's sense of true community, of having real true fellow citizens whose interests and concerns were the same as his. This is a kind of ghastly irony, if you think about it, since a form of government engineered to produce equality makes it citizens so individualistic and self-absorbed they end up solipsists, navel-gazers."

"He frequently had this feeling: What if there was something essentially wrong with Claude Sylvanshine that wasn't wrong with other people? What if he was simply ill-suited, the way some people are born without limbs or certain organs? The neurology of failure. What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair, and all his so-called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?"

Here is a picture of a cute armadillo: