You’re captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.
You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what...
You wouldn't know from experience that small children are the most powerful learning engines in the known universe.
You must absolutely and forever relinquish the idea that you know who should live and who should die on this planet.
What he had to tell them was a story
This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world's divinely appointed ruler: 'I will not LET them starve. I will not LET the drought come. I will not LET the river flood.
The theory I’m putting forward here is that storytelling is a genetic characteristic in the sense that early human hunters who were able to organize events into stories were more successful than hunte...
Is it so easy to change a cultural vision? Ease and difficulty are not the relevant measures. Here are the relevant measures: Readiness and unreadiness. If people aren’t ready for it, then no power on...
Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself. A community of a hundred million species can survive anything short of total global catastrophe. Within that hundred million will be thousands...
Arts and disciplines of that kind are fundamentally selfish; they’re all designed to benefit the pupil—not the world - Ishmael
Animists are not so much people with a religion as people with a fundamentally religious way of looking at things.
Yes,I'm afraid you're right. Trial and error isn't a bad way to learn how to build an aircraft,but it can be a disastrous way to learn how to build a civilization.
[A]ny species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion.
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
They put their shoulders to the wheel during the day, stupefy themselves with drugs or television at night, and try not to think too searchingly about the world they’re leaving their children to cope...
The obvious can sometimes be illuminating when perceived in an unhabitual way.
May the forests be with you and with your children.
Don’t wait. Writers are the only artists I know of who expect to get somewhere by waiting. Everyone knows you have to dance to be a dancer, you have to sing to be a singer, you have to act to be an ac...
You shouldn't have to settle for rabbits if what you want is deer
Where are you looking at it from? Oh. From above. From outer space. What are you doing up there? I don’t know. Why aren’t you down on the surface?