In effect, you're saying that if you knew how you oughtt to live, then the flaw is man could be controlled. If you knew how you ought to live, you wouldn't be forever screwing up the world. perhaps in...
What I said in Ishmael stands: There is no One Right Way to live. What we find among Leaver peoples is that each has a way that works well for them. We may not like one particular way, we may think it...
We don’t need prophets to tell us how to live; we can find out for ourselves by consulting what’s actually there.
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
WHAT you DO NOT KNOW YOURSELF, you CANNOT TEACH ANOTHER.
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 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 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...
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
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...
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.
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'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.
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...
If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual.
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.