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.
Unlike the God whose name begins with a capital letter, our gods are not all-powerful, Louis. Can you imagine that? Any one of them can be vanquished by a flamethrower or a bulldozer or a bomb—silence...
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...
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 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 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...
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 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...
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.
If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual - Ishmael
For example, children in school are never encouraged to want the material rewards of success. Success is something to be sought for its own sake, certainly not for any wealth it might bring.
You need to take a step back from the problem in order to see it in global perspective. At present there are five and a half billion of you here, and, though millions of you are starving, you’re produ...
You die because you think the gods are looking after you. That's ok for animals, but you should know better.We should not trust the gods with our lives?Definitely not. You should trust *yourselves* wi...
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.
What about Saint Francis? Saint Francis relied on the bounty of farmers, not the bounty of God. Even the most fundamental of the fundamentalists plug their ears when Jesus starts talking about birds o...
We all know what the business of government is: making and enforcing regulations. Governments approach all problems as problems of making and enforcing regulations. They reduce all problems to things...