You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd.
You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation.
It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires
and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization
which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced.
In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of
personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and
check the free play of your powers.
That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.
-- Octave Mirbeau
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