Karl Marx recognized that workers without a choice are workers in chains. But his idea of breaking chains was for us to depose the pharaohs and then build the pyramids for ourselves, as if building py...
If there are forty thousand people in an area that can only support thirty thousand, it's no kindness to bring in food from the outside to maintain them at forty thousand. That just guarantees that th...
I went out and had a drink. I needed to talk to someone, and solitary drinkers are lucky in this regard— they always have someone to talk to.
I have amazing news for you. Man is not alone on this planet. He is part of a community, upon which he depends absolutely.
For someone bent on achievement, education is a thing you get past and forget about as quickly as possible.
Everyone in your culture knows this. Man was born to turn the world into paradise, but tragically he was born flawed. And so his paradise has always been spoiled by stupidty, greed, destructiveness, a...
A system based on exchanging products inevitably channels wealth to a few, and no governmental change will ever be able to correct that. It isn’t a defect of the system, it’s intrinsic to the
A battered wife will invest all her feelings of self-worth in her battering husband. She has totally accepted her husband’s valuation of her, and this is why she stays: She hopes to redeem herself in...
He began to speak to me, not in the jocular way of visitors to the menagerie but rather as one speaks to the wind or to the waves crashing on a beach, uttering that which must be said but which must n...
[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...
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 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...
The creatures who act as though they belong to the world follow the peace-keeping law, and because they follow that law, they give the creatures around them a chance to grow toward whatever it’s possi...
Simple things are almost always the hardest to explain, Julie. Showing someone how to tie a shoelace is easy. Explaining it is almost impossible.
No invention ever comes into being fully developed in a single step, from nothing.Ten thousand inventions had to be in place before Edison could invent the electric light-bulb.
I think what you're groping for is that people need more than to feel scolded, more than to be made to feel stupid and guilty. They need more than a vision of doom. They need a vision of the world and...
At first all was well. In fact, all was terrific. The Takers were pedaling away and the wings of their craft were flapping beautifully. They felt wonderful, exhilarated. They were experiencing the fre...
What humanity came up with and held on to during its first three million years was a social organization that worked well for people. It didn't work well for products, for motorboats and can openers a...
We're not destroying the world because we're clumsy. We're destroying the worldbecause we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.
I’ve said that if there are still people here in 200 years, they won't be living the way we do, because if people go on living the way we do, there will BE no people here in 200 years. I stand by ever...