Top 35 Eugene Thacker Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “A new ignorance is on the horizon, an ignorance borne not of a lack of knowledge but of too much knowledge, too much data, too many theories, too little time.”

— Eugene Thacker

2. “Pessimism is the night-side of thought, a melodrama of the futility of the brain, a lyricism written in the graveyard of philosophy.”

— Eugene Thacker

3. “Whenever it occurs, however it occurs, pessimism has but one effect: it introduces humility into thought. It undermines the innumerable, self-aggrandizing postures that constitute the human being. Pessimism is the humility of the species that has named itself, thought furtively stumbling upon its own limitations on black wings of futility.”

— Eugene Thacker

4. “Our own era is one haunted by the shadow of futurity, precisely because there is no future.”

— Eugene Thacker

5. “The ethereal nature of mists means that while they may appear solid and to have distinct forms, they are also immaterial, and can readily become formless.”

— Eugene Thacker

6. “Traditionally, the Socratic tradition in philosophy has a therapeutic function, which is to dispel the horrors of the unknown through reasoned argument. What cannot be tolerated in this tradition is the possibility of a world that cannot be known, or a world that is indifferent to our elaborate knowledge-producing schemes.”

— Eugene Thacker

7. “We have to entertain the possibility that there is no reason for something existing; or that the split between subject and object is only our name for something equally accidental we call knowledge; or, an even more difficult thought, that while there may be some order to the self and the cosmos, to the microcosm and macrocosm, it is an order that is absolutely indifferent to our existence, and of which we can have only a negative awareness.”

— Eugene Thacker

8. “Two kinds of pessimism: “The end is near” and “Will this never end?”

— Eugene Thacker

9. “In a culture that prizes the can-do, self-starter attitude, to be a pessimist is simply to be a complainer – if you’re not part of the solution, then you’re part of the problem. To live in such a culture is to constantly live in the shadow of an obligatory optimism, a novel type of coercion that is pathologized early on in child education in the assessment: “Does not like to play with others.”

— Eugene Thacker

10. “To the culture of the early Renaissance, the demon presents a limit to the empiricism of the unknown, something that can only be verified through contradictions – an absent manifestation, an unnatural creature, a demonic malady.”

— Eugene Thacker

11. “The question that runs through these disputatio is the following: What if “horror” has less to do with a fear of death, and more to do with the dread of life?”

— Eugene Thacker

12. “What Kant refers to as depression is simply this stark realization: that thought is only incidentally human. It would take a later generation of philosophers to derive the conclusion of this: that thought thinks us, not the reverse. Legend.”

— Eugene Thacker

13. “Whether we can “save” the planet is one question – whether the planet needs saving is another.”

— Eugene Thacker

14. “In short, when the non-human world manifests itself to us in these ambivalent ways, more often than not our response is to recuperate that non-human world into whatever the dominant, human-centric worldview is at the time.”

— Eugene Thacker

15. “What if depression – reason’s failure to achieve self-mastery – is not the failure of reason but instead the result of reason? What if human reason works “too well,” and brings us to conclusions that are anathema to the existence of human beings? What we would have is a “cold rationalism,” shoring up the anthropocentric conceits of the philosophical endeavor, showing us an anonymous, faceless world impervious to our hopes and desires.”

— Eugene Thacker

16. “There is no surer sign of pessimism than an overly-optimistic person.”

— Eugene Thacker

17. “Happiness is the feeling you have just before something goes wrong.”

— Eugene Thacker

18. “An oft-mentioned example in this regard is the Medieval practice of catapulting corpses. The primal scene in this regard is the 14th century Italian trading post at Caffa, on the northern border of the Black Sea. Ongoing skirmishes between Italian merchants and Muslim locals led, in one instance, to the catapulting of plague-ridden corpses by the latter, over the fortress walls of the former.87.”

— Eugene Thacker

19. “What is repulsive about children – all children – is not that they are not yet adults, but that they are already adults – whining, self-absorbed, demanding attention, unable to care for themselves, throwing tantrums when things don’t go their way. Far from what we tell ourselves, children are the most concise expressions of humanity. At least children are unaware of this.”

— Eugene Thacker

20. “When solutions produce problems, when thought flounders in the absence of order, unity, and purpose, when healthy skepticism turns into pathological sarcasm – this is usually when pessimism enters the fray.”

— Eugene Thacker

21. “For every un-universe, then, an un-philosophy that must also negate itself.”

— Eugene Thacker

22. “The more we learn about the planet, the stranger it becomes to us.”

— Eugene Thacker

23. “A crying baby is the purest expression of the inanity of being human.”

— Eugene Thacker

24. “It seems to have no motive, no vendetta, no program of action, other than simply that of “being ooze.”

— Eugene Thacker

25. “One who has ceased being irritated by others, but who remains a misanthrope.”

— Eugene Thacker

26. “It is often said that the more spiritual a person becomes, the more unassuming they are. Eventually, they vanish entirely.”

— Eugene Thacker

27. “The most devastating thing about suffering is that it is relative. There is always someone who hurts more, someone who hurts less.”

— Eugene Thacker

28. “There will always be someone who will see the futility of your actions. There will always be someone who is irritated by what you do, whatever you do. In this way we participate in a kind of shared, communal pessimism.”

— Eugene Thacker

29. “For optimists, the most perplexing question is how one becomes a pessimist – if one is not born one. For the pessimist, the question is how each person, by virtue of being born, is not already a pessimist.”

— Eugene Thacker

30. “The indifference of the everyday gets the better of us all.”

— Eugene Thacker

31. “Kierkegaard famously wrote “my sorrow is my castle.” Unfortunately not all of us have as much space.”

— Eugene Thacker

32. “How is it possible to feel nothing but unmitigated spite for so many different kinds of people?”

— Eugene Thacker

33. “A bit of philosophizing leads to a wonderment of life. A lot of philosophizing leads to a contempt of it.”

— Eugene Thacker

34. “Human culture: a kind of incessant ringing in the ears.”

— Eugene Thacker

35. “There are times when I feel that the only real aptitude of our species is that we can ruin anything.”

— Eugene Thacker

36. “Everything does work out in the end, one way or another.”

— Eugene Thacker

37. “Contrary to what the great works of literature tell us, living in the modern city is neither heroic nor tragic – nor even comedic. It’s simply pedantic.”

— Eugene Thacker