The world will not be saved by old minds with new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by new minds—with no programs.
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.
The tribal life doesn't turn people into saints; it enables ordinary people to make a living together with a minimum of stress year after year, generation after generation.
The sign stopped me-- or rather, this text stopped me. Words are my profession; I seized these and demanded that they explain themselves, that they cease to be ambiguous.
The ship was sinking---and sinking fast. The captain told the passengers and crew, We've got to get the lifeboats in the water right away. But the crew said, First we have to end capitalist oppression...
The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it. Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans and t...
The civilized want people to make their living individually, and they want them to live separately, behind locked doors—one family to a house, each house fully stocked with refrigerators, television s...
The God of revealed religions—and by this I mean religions like yours, Taker religions—is a profoundly inarticulate God. No matter how many times he tries, he can’t make himself clearly or completely...
One thing I know people will say to me is ‘Are you suggesting we go back to being hunter-gatherers?’ That of course is an inane idea, Ishmael said. The Leaver life-style isn’t about hunting and gather...
Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again to the people of your culture, you’ll never stop being conscious of it. Wherever...
No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' … That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species.
Man's place is to be the first . . . . [I]t's man's place to be the teacher of all the rest who are capable of becoming what he's become.
It's not MAN who is the scourge of the world, it's a single culture. One culture out of hundreds of thousands of cultures. Our culture.
It applies to all species without distinction.
In fact, of course, there is no secret knowledge; no one knows anything that can't be found on a shelf in the public library.
If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual.
If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual - Ishmael
If you alone found out what the lie was, then you're probably right—it would make no great difference. But if you ALL found out what the lie was, it might conceivably make a very great difference inde...
I prefer to think about problems the way engineers do. If a valve doesn’t work, they don’t say, Well, we must have valves, so let’s try two valves. If a valve doesn’t work, they say, Well, what would...
I can’t shake the crazy feeling that there is some small thing that we’re being lied to about.