Though it may be impossible for me to describe its mechanism to you,
at least I can say that I slowly forced myself to consider that
wretched life as a deliberate necessity. Never did I seek to make of
it something other than what it was, I did not try to adorn it, to
mask it, but, on the contrary, I wanted to affirm it in its exact
sordidness, and the most sordid signs became for me signs of grandeur.

And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become
mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a
certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its
asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from,
because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great
nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to
hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable
truths.

-Antonin Artaud in “Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society”, 1947

Ours is the culture which burns heretics. The stake is one of the most characteristic emblems of this European culture. The reason is that all religious and social points of view have an inherent need to regard themselves as final and eternally valid, and all who deviate from them after having learned to know them must be regarded as traitors—not as misguided, but as traitors who consciously desire evil. Who desire to insult the state and mock God.

At the entrance to the culture which we call “our own” stand two heresy trials of spiritually gigantic format: The one in Athens and the other in Jerusalem, the trials of Socrates and Jesus, both convicted of blasphemy and threats to the State. These two great judicial murders stand as the gateway to our cultural epoch, and as omens of what would come to characterize it: the individual’s fight against the past. The battle between the individual and the mass. This conflict is the central thing, the very nerve in our culture.

- Jens Bjorneboje in “The Good Pupil”