Whenever a Taker couple talk about how wonderful it would be to have a big family, they're reenacting this scene behind the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They're saying to themselves, 'Of co...
We don’t need prophets to tell us how to live; we can find out for ourselves by consulting what’s actually there.
The world is a very, very fine place. It wasn't a mess. It didn't need to be conquered and ruled by man. In other words, the world doesn't belong to man - but it does need man to belong to it. creatu...
The rules that govern competition between species are (and must be) very different from the rules that govern competition within species.
The community of life that we see here at any given time isn't just a random collection. It's a collection of successes. It's the remainder that is left over when the failures have disappeared.
Slavery became a huge, international business, and of course would remain one down to the present moment. It’s estimated that at the midpoint of the fifth century every third or fourth person in Athen...
Only slaves love being powerful. HANS ERICH NOSSACK
Making food a commodity to be owned was one of the great innovations of our culture. No other culture in history has ever put food under lock and key—and putting it there is the cornerstone of our eco...
It has happened that a species has tried to live in violation of the Law of Limited Competition. Or rather it has happened one time, in one human culture—ours. That’s what our agricultural revolution...
In Ishmael I articulated a living mythology that is so integral to our culture that it’s never examined or even noticed by anyone. It’s like the sound of blood rushing through your veins—you hear it s...
I don't think there's any loneliness greater than the loneliness to be found in a bad marriage. In solitary confinement, everyone knows you're lonely and feels sorry for you. In a bad marriage lonelin...
Hunter-gatherers no more live on the knife-edge of survival than wolves or lions or sparrows or rabbits. Man was as well adapted to life on this planet as any other species, and the idea that he lived...
Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself. A community of a hundred million species can survive almost anything short of a global catastrophe.
Children don't need learning. They need access to what they want to learn outside the home.
To you, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism look very different, but to me they look the same. Many of you would say that something like Buddhism doesn't even belong on the list, sinc...
With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?
We’ve discovered that any species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion.
We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don't have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free. MARSHALL SAHLINS
Tribal people get more out of life.
This story takes place a half a billion years ago-an inconceivably long time ago, when this planet would be all but recognizable to you. Nothing at all stirred on the land except the wind and the dust...