This law … defines the limits of competition in the community of life. You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny...
We made it back to the airport without getting mugged, stoned, shot at, pounced on, bombed, shelled, garroted, gassed, pitched into, caught in a cross fire, sniped at, blockaded, napalmed, or trip-wir...
There is a difference between the inmates of your criminal prisons and the inmates of your cultural prison: The former understand that the distribution of wealth and power inside the prison had nothin...
The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison. [...] Naturally a well-run prison must have...
Diversity, not uniformity, is what works.
I'm not an anthropology buff, but I've read enough of it to know that the Zuni don't think that their way is the way for everyone, and that the Navajo don't think their way is the way for everyone. Ea...
It is in fact an orderly community. The green plants are food for the plant eaters, which are food for the predators, and some of those predators are food for still other predators. And what's left ov...
All paths lie together in the hand of god like a web endlessly woven, and yours and mine are no greater or less than the beetle's or the squirrel's or the sparrow's. All are held together.
Because the tribe is its members, the tribe is what its members want it to be—nothing more and nothing less.
[N]ow we have a clearer idea what this story is all about: The world was made for man, and man was made to rule it.
Wherever you go..., you'll see Heaven and Hell on every side... in . Look for them and you'll soon know them. There on your left, Hell shuffles by, carrying a reluctant, gloomy chicken, his only comra...
The greatest discovery any alien anthropologist could make about our culture is our overriding response to failure:
A castaway in the sea was going down for the third time when he caught sight of a passing ship. Gathering his last strength, he waved frantically and called for help. Someone on board peered at him sc...
PharaohsIt took Khufu twenty-three years to build his Great Pyramid at Giza, where some eleven hundred stone blocks, each weighing about two and a half tons, had to be quarried, moved, and set in plac...
There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at o...
The journey itself is going to change you, so you don’t have to worry about memorizing the route we took to accomplish that change.
Westereners often think that the East is one vast Buddhist temple, which is rather like thinking the West is one vast Carthusian monastery. If the [Western people who like Buddhism] were to visit the...
If the world was made for us, then it BELONGS to us and we can do what we damn well please with it.
This is considered almost holy work by farmers and ranchers. Kill off everything you can't eat. Kill off anything that eats what you eat. Kill off anything that doesn't feed what you eat.It IS holy wo...
Has it ever occurred to you to wonder if the history we teach our children is a lie?