Tracy

“Make no mistake: “progress” is the lust for power, and we must unmask its method as a sick, destructive joke. Utilizing such pretexts as “necessity,” or “economic development,” the final goal of “progress” is nothing less than the destruction of life. This destructive urge takes many forms: progress is devastating forests,exterminating animal species, extinguishing native cultures, masking and distorting the pristine landscape with the varnish of industrialism, and debasing the organic life that still survives.”
― Ludwig Klages, The Biocentric Worldview: Selected Essays and Poems of Ludwig Klages

“the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson, Self-Reliance: An Excerpt from Collected Essays, First Series

“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Like an all-devouring conflagration, ‘progress’ scours the Earth, and the place that has fallen to its flames, will flourish nevermore, so long as man still survives. The animal- and plant-species cannot renew themselves, man’s innate warmth of heart has gone, the inner springs that once nurtured the flourishing songs and sacred festivals are blocked, and there remains only a wretched and cold working day and the hollow show of noisy 'entertainment.’ There can be no doubt: we are living in the era of the downfall of the soul.”
― Ludwig Klages