The ship was sinking---and sinking fast. The captain told the passengers and crew, We've got to get the lifeboats in the water right away. But the crew said, First we have to end capitalist oppression...
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...
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...
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...
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 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 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.
Donald Trump can do a lot of things I can't, but he can no more get out of the prison than I can
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...
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.
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...
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...
The world is not going to survive very much longer as humanity’s captive.
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.