Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere in the universe that creation came to an end with the birth of man? Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere out there that man was the climax toward which...
Children don't need learning. They need access to what they want to learn outside the home.
Borders are always tricky, intriguing things. [...] Feral children fascinate because they stand at the border of the animal world. Gorillas and dolphins fascinate because they stand at the border of t...
Are you telling me my entire life has been a dream?Not your life, Greg, your past.
And every time the Takers stamp out a Leaver culture, a wisdom ultimately tested since the birth of mankind disappears from the world beyond recall.
All the major world religions (always excluding animism, of course), are founded on these notions: that man and man alone was the desired object of creation, that man occupies a preeminent place in th...
Once again I was thunderstruck—but this time by a feeling of profound relief, for I had been redeemed from oblivion. More, the error that caused me to live as an unwitting impostor for so many years h...
[E]ducation is a thing you get past and forget about as quickly as possible. This is particularly true of elementary and secondary education, of course…. I began to remember what it had been like: the...
Would the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God have sent his only-begotten son to save those beetles and their household mites, Jared? No. But the god of this place has as great a care for them as for any othe...
Why is it that no one is excited? I hear people talking in the laundromat about the end of the world, and they're no more excited than if they were comparing detergents. People talk about the destruct...
What's normal is for things to work. What's not normal is for things to fail.
What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it, written as well as you, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere...
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 had been taken from The Wild and brought together in one place, because, for some strange reason, people found us interesting.
Tribal people get more out of life.
To each is given its moment in the blaze, its spark to be surrendered to another when it is sent, so that the blaze may go on. None may deny its spark to the general blaze and live forever. Each is se...
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...
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...
There is enormous pressure on you to take a place in the story your culture is enacting in the world— any place at all.
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...