William Ophuls > Quotes

“We are hurtling toward a day of ecological reckoning. We should have acted many years ago to contain the damage and build a bridge to a different kind of civilization. Now we are faced with an increased population, worse pollution, dwindling resources, progressive biological destruction, much greater complexity, compounding debt, and enormous inertia in the system—a nexus of problems that have no separate solutions, only an aggregate solution requiring a total revolution in our way of life.”
― William Ophuls, Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences

“This is the tragedy of civilization: its very “greatness”—its panoply of wealth and power—turns against it and brings it down.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
― William Ophuls, Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences

“Wise men say, and not without reason, that whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever will be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results. Niccolò Machiavelli1”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“Mental and physical illness proliferates. The majority lives for bread and circuses; worships celebrities instead of divinities; takes its bearings from below rather than above; throws off social and moral restraints, especially on sexuality; shirks duties but insists on entitlements; and so forth.7”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“democracy as we have known it is entering a perfect storm that threatens to obliterate politics as usual. To the extent that it is possible to have a strategy for such a storm, it clearly cannot be rational persuasion or the reiteration of scientific facts. (Only about ten percent of the American population is truly “attentive” and therefore even available for persuasion by such means; the situation elsewhere is better, but not by enough to alter the case.) To speak more generally, the problems created by instrumental rationality will not be solved by it, but rather with a vision of a nobler future that appeals to Pascal’s reasons of the heart—in other words, by something tantamount to religious conversion.”
― William Ophuls, Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences

“Wealth and power have never been long permanent in any place…. [T]hey travel over the face of the earth, something like a caravan of merchants. On their arrival everything is found green and fresh; while they remain, all is bustle and abundance, and, when gone, all is left trampled down, barren, and bare. William Playfair1”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“If men could learn from history, what lessons it might teach us! But passion and party blind our eyes, and the light which experience gives is a lantern on the stern, which shines only on the waves behind us!”
― William Ophuls, Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences

“…civilization is effectively hardwired for self-destruction.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“As generals have learned, even the best war plans rarely survive first contact with the enemy, but having planned is essential, because it forces you to imagine different scenarios and to prepare for the worst. In other words, planning is an inoculation against stupefaction and panic, so when things do not go according to plan, you are less likely to lose your head and quicker to make the necessary adjustments”
― William Ophuls, Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences

“Thus unless the progression toward greater complexity is interrupted by outside forces, they must eventually reach the point of breakdown.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“As Will Durant noted, “From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“Civilizations are trapped in a vicious circle. They must keep solving the problems of complexity, for that is the price of civilized existence, but every solution creates new, ever more difficult problems, which then require new, ever more demanding solutions.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within,” said Will Durant.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“Would a panel of the wise—Confucius, Gautama Buddha, Jesus of Nazareth, Lao Tzu, Rumi, and Socrates—conceivably approve of our current way of life?”
― William Ophuls, Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences

“technology has a shadow side—it destroys more than it creates.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“If men were angels, no government would be
necessary. — James Madison, Federalist Paper No. 51 Whatever their proximate causes, the grave problems afflicting humanity in the 21st century are ultimately the result of a lack of governance. Ergo, the solution to those problems is to be found in appropriate governance, not in mere treaties between sovereign nations or in social or technological fixes.”
― William Ophuls, Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences

“The essential meaning of entropy for human life was well stated by Carl Jung: “Everything better is purchased at the price of something worse.”
― William Ophuls, Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences

“Jean-Jacques Rousseau pinpointed the fundamental contradiction of a life devoted to consumption by saying, ”For the impulse of appetite alone is slavery, and obedience to the law one has prescribed for oneself is freedom.”
― William Ophuls, Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences

“Mostly leaving aside the established and respectable print media, which reach only the ten percent and have been more or less overtaken by events, those who want to alter the current trajectory toward democratic demise must wage information war in a digital media environment increasingly poisoned by fear, anger, and hatred, not to mention the disinformation and kompromat for which it is so perfectly suited. In effect, change makers need to become propagandists themselves, but for a vision of a saner and more humane future. How to go for heart and gut without abandoning reason or stooping to lies and deception is the riddle they must solve. And it must be solved or chance and duress will dictate a future that no one wants.”
― William Ophuls, Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences

“In essence, immoderate greatness exemplifies what the ancient Greeks would have called hubris: “overbearing pride or presumption.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“Addressing one problem creates new ones; not addressing small problems turns them into big ones.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“Humanity will undoubtedly survive. Civilization as we know it will not.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“An upsurge of irrationality is a mortal threat to democratic polity. Political truth is always biased to some extent, but there is a profound and crucial difference between limited rationality and complete irrationality, relative objectivity and pure fantasy, demonstrable facts and blatant lies. A sane information environment is a precondition for a workable democracy. Once reality has been hijacked, there can be no reasonable basis for either voting or legislating.”
― William Ophuls, Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences

“Indeed, civilization is a kind of Moloch whose demands for material and human sacrifice grow in proportion to its greatness.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“Anthropologists have long noted that the initial response of primal peoples to radically changed circumstances is not adaptation, but a “revitalization movement”—that is, a fanatical, last-ditch, and often self-destructive effort to preserve the old ways—and the more successful the culture has been in the past, the more likely it is to resist change.”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“Thus the end of progress is necessarily the beginning of decline.9”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail

“bull contents himself with one meadow, and one forest is enough for a thousand elephants; but the little body of a man devours more than all other living creatures. Seneca1”
― William Ophuls, Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail