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 no one right way to live.
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 world is not going to survive very much longer as humanity’s captive.
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 relevant measures are not ease and difficulty. The relevant measures are readiness and unreadiness. If the time isn’t right for a new idea, no power on earth can make it catch on, but if the time...
The first time I read the ad, I choked and cursed and spat and threw the paper to the floor.
The current controversy over God’s sex doesn’t strike anyone as being the least bit primitive. If God is going to be like us, then there must be sexual equipment of one kind or the other, even though...
People think I am being modest when I tell them I know absolutely nothing about art. But if they show me a piece of student work, I won't have the slightest idea whether it's art or even good. What I...
One never thinks, Oh, I’d better look for some food. Food is everywhere, and one picks it up almost absent-mindedly, as one takes a breath of air. In fact, one does not think of feeding as a distinct...
No number has ever done it for us. Not a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand. Even millions don't do it, and so every single year we pay our legislators to come up with more. But no matter how...
My death is the life of another, and I will stand again in the windswept grasses and look through the eyes of the fox and take the air with the eagle and run in the track of the deer.
It's the idea that people living close to nature tend to be noble. It's seeing all those sunsets that does it. You can't watch a sunset and then go off and set fire to your neighbor's tepee. Living cl...
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 have amazing news for you. Man is not alone on this planet. He is part of a community, upon which he depends absolutely.
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.
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...
[T]he price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the w...
What is crucial to your survival as a race is not the redistribution of power and wealth within the prison but rather the destruction of the prison itself.