Mike

“The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realisable.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“I am here not only to evade for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it’s possible, the bare bones of existence, the elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description.”
― Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness

“The proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another.”
― George Orwell, 1984

“No, the founders of our culture didn't just fall into a lifestyle of total dependence on agriculture, they had to whip themselves into it, and the whip they used was this meme: Growing all your own food is the best way to live. Nothing less could imaginably have done this amazing trick.”
― Daniel Quinn, Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure