I'm only sorry I was born three-quarters through this self-inflicted tragedy and not at the very beginning or at the very end. I'm fucking sick of wa… - Steve Toltz

That's the wonderful thing about democracy: you can hold public office legitimately while still being despised by 49.9 percent of the suspicious eyes on the street.

Normally, there is your life, and you turn on the television and there is news, and no matter how grave it is, of how deep in the toilet the world has fallen,, or how relevant the information might be to your own existence, your life remains a separate entity from the news. You still have to wash your underpants during a war, don't you? And don't you still have to fight with your loved ones and then apologize when you don't even mean it even when there's a hole in the sky burning everything to a crisp? Of course you do. As a rule, there's no hole big enough to interrupt this interminable business of living, but there are exceptions, grim instances in the lives of a few select unlucky bastards when the news in the papers and the news in their bedrooms intersect. I tell you, it's a daunting and appalling moment when you have to read the newspapers to find out about your own struggle.

Humans are unique in this world in that, as opposed to all other animals, they have developed a consciousness so advanced that it has one awful by-product: they are the only creatures aware of their own mortality. This truth is so terrifying that from an early age humans bury it deep in their unconscious, and this has turned people into red-blooded machines, fleshy factories that manufacture meaning. The meaning they feel becomes channeled into their immortality projects - such as their children, or their gods, or their artistic works, or their businesses, or their nations - that they believe will outlive them. And here's the problem: people feel they need these beliefs in order to live but are unconsciously suicidal because of their beliefs. That's why when a person sacrifices his life for a religious cause, he has chosen to die not for a god but in the service of an unconscious primal fear. So it is this fear that causes him to die of the very thing he is afraid of. You see? The irony of their immortality projects is that while they have been designed by the unconscious to fool the person into a sense of specialness and into a bid for everlasting life, the manner in which they fret about their immortality projects is the very thing that kills them. This is where you have to be careful. This is my warning to you. My road warning. The denial of death rushes people into an early grave, and if you are not careful, they will take you with them.