Chuck Klosterman

I once loved a girl who almost loved me, but not as much as she loved John Cusack.

Perhaps we humans are still in command, and perhaps there really will be a conventional robot war in the not-so-distant future. If so, let's roll. I'm ready. My toaster will never be the boss of me. Get ready to make me some Pop-Tarts, bitch.

The desire to be cool is__ltimately__he desire to be rescued.

The drive to Santa Fe on I-25 is midly zen. There are public road signs that say "Gusty Winds May Exist". This seems more like lazy philosophy than travel advice.

We are losing the ability to understand anything that's even vaguely complex.

We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we've learned is either wrong or irrelevant. A big part of our mind can handle this; a smaller, deeper part cannot. And it's that smaller part that matters more, because that part of our mind is who we really are (whether we like it or not).

Art and love are the same thing: It__ the process of seeing yourself in things that are not you.

... the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along.

...but the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along.

There is not, in a material sense, any benefit to being right about a future you will not experience. But there are intrinsic benefits to constantly probing the possibility that our assumptions about the future might be wrong: humility and wonder.

...I've spent the last fifteen years of my life railing against the game of soccer, an exercise that has been lauded as "the sport of the future" since 1977. Thankfully, that future dystopia has never come.

We are always dying, all the time. That's what living is; living is dying, little by little. It is a sequenced collection of individualized deaths.

When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago--and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail--it's disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you do. It's astonishing to consider all the things from your past that used to happen all the time but (a) never happen anymore, and (b) never even cross your mind. It's almost like those things didn't happen. Or maybe it seems like they just happened to someone else. To someone you don't really know. To someone you just hung out with for one night, and now you can't even remember her name.

Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age.

As recently as the grunge era, there remained a bohemian cachet in casually mentioning that you didn__ own a TV. But nobody thinks like that anymore. Today, claiming you don__ own a TV simply means you__e poor (or maybe depressed). In one ten-year span, high-end television usurped the cultural positions of film, rock, and literary fiction.

Hitler is the human catch-all for all other terrible humans.

I__e had the great pleasure of meeting Newt Gingrich and having a chat with the fellow on a staircase,_ ex__ex Pistols vocalist John Lydon once told Rolling Stone. __ found him completely dishonest and totally likable, because he doesn__ care.

And the quality all these reasonable failures share is an inability to accept that the statue quo is temporary.