Ryan > Ryan's Quotes

“I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“...along with the other animals, the stones, the trees, and the clouds, we ourselves are characters within a huge story that is visibly unfolding all around us, participants within the vast imagination, or Dreaming, of the world.”
― David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World

“Activism begins with you, Democracy begins with you, get out there, get active! Tag, you're it”
― Thom Hartmann

“We pass through this world but once. Few tragedies can be more extensive than the stunting of life, few injustices deeper than the denial of an opportunity to strive or even to hope, by a limit imposed from without, but falsely identified as lying within.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man

“We have become, by the power of a glorious evolutionary accident called intelligence, the stewards of life's continuity on earth. We did not ask for this role, but we cannot abjure it. We may not be suited to it, but here we are.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Flamingo's Smile: Reflections in Natural History

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
― Stephen Jay Gould, The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History

“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.”
― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

“There is no one right way to live.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

“But why? Why do you need prophets to tell you how you ought to live? Why do you need anyone to tell you how you ought to live”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael

“I have amazing news for you. Man is not alone on this planet. He is part of a community, upon which he depends absolutely.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“The world must live. We are only one species among billions. The gods don't love us any more than they love spiders or bears or whales or water lilies.”
― Daniel Quinn

“Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable--and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way.”
― Daniel Quinn

“The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. … The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“America does not want change, except from the cash register at Wal-Mart.”
― James Howard Kunstler

“Community is not something you have, like pizza. Now is it something you can buy. It's a living organism based on a web of interdependencies- which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green.”
― James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-Made Landscape

“I don't want to be overly dramatic about it, but I think people more and more wonder, is this living, or are we just going through the motions? What's happening? Is everything being leached out of life? Is the whole texture and values and everything kind of draining away?”
― John Zerzan

“Culture has lead us to betray our own aboriginal spirit and wholeness, into an ever-worsening realm of synthetic, isolating, impoverishing estrangement. Which is not to say that there are no more everyday pleasures, without which we would loose our humanness. But as our plight deepens, we glimpse how much must be erased for our redemption.”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“Those in power have made it so we have to pay simply to exist on the planet. We have to pay for a place to sleep, and we have to pay for food. If we don't, people with guns come and force us to pay. That's violent.”
― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization

“Within this culture wealth is measured by one's ability to consume and destroy.”
― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization

“For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.”
― Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe

“To pretend that civilization can exist without destroying its own landbase and the landbases and cultures of others is to be entirely ignorant of history, biology, thermodynamics, morality, and self-preservation.”
― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization

“Many Indians have told me that the most basic difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that Westerners view the world as dead, and not as filled with speaking, thinking, feeling subjects as worthy and valuable as themselves.”
― Derrick Jensen (The Culture of Make Believe)

“Premise Eight: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system.”
― Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization

“The task we all face as human beings ... is to find and become who we are. The task teachers face is to find their own way of teaching, one that manifests who they are.”
― Derrick Jensen

“If you consider what are called the virtues in mankind, you will find their growth is assisted by education and cultivation.”
― Xenophon

“Immorality, no less than morality, has at all times found support in religion.”
― Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion

“It sounds like a fairy-tale, but not only that; this story of what man by his science and practical inventions has achieved on this earth, where he first appeared as a weakly member of the animal kingdom, and on which each individual of his species must ever again appear as a helpless infant... is a direct fulfilment of all, or of most, of the dearest wishes in his fairy-tales. All these possessions he has acquired through culture. Long ago he formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods. Whatever seemed unattainable to his desires - or forbidden to him - he attributed to these gods. One may say, therefore, that these gods were the ideals of his culture. Now he has himself approached very near to realizing this ideal, he has nearly become a god himself. But only, it is true, in the way that ideals are usually realized in the general experience of humanity. Not completely; in some respects not at all, in others only by halves. Man has become a god by means of artificial limbs, so to speak, quite magnificent when equipped with all his accessory organs; but they do not grow on him and they still give him trouble at times... Future ages will produce further great advances in this realm of culture, probably inconceivable now, and will increase man's likeness to a god still more.”
― Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

“He does not believe that does not live according to his belief.”
― Sigmund Freud

“A fear of weapons is a sign of retarded sexual and emotional maturity.”
― Don B. Kates Jr.

“Beware the fury of a patient man”
― Tom Clancy