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...
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...
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...
If the world is saved, it will not be saved by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all.
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...
How easy it is first to leap to a false conclusion about someone and then to view everything he does in light of that conclusion.
Far and away the most futile admonition Christ ever offered was when he said, ‘Have no care for tomorrow. Don’t worry about whether you’re going to have something to eat. Look at the birds of the air....
But charisma only wins people’s attention. Once you have their attention, you have to have something to tell them.
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?
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 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
This is what creationists say of evolution, that it’s only a theory, it hasn’t been proved, as though this in itself is grounds for dismissal. This misrepresents the point of formulating a theory, whi...
The tribal life wasn't something humans sat down and figured out. It was the gift of natural selection, a proven success—not perfection but hard to improve on. Hierarchalism, on the other hand, has pr...
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...
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.
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.
Donald Trump can do a lot of things I can't, but he can no more get out of the prison than I can
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.