“Without diversity, the mind tends to create autonomous and hallucinatory experience,” (Paul Shepard, Man in the Landscape).
“Civilization originates in conquest abroad and repression at home,” (Stanley Diamond, In Search of the Primitive).
“Faith is the dominant idea of Western civilization...we cannot surrender the notion of progress without destroying the rationale for our entire civilization...we cling to this progressivism as we would to our sanity. It is the notion of progress that mediates our alienation, and makes it possible for us to construct a reality which we do not actually experience,” (Diamond, In Search of the Primitive, 39).
“As the cricket’s soft hum is to us, so are we to the trees, as are they to the rocks and the hills,” (Gary Snyder).
“The relentless complexity of the world is off to the side of the trail,” (Gary Snyder, Practice of the Wild, p 155).
“The specific tendency of all Western mechanics is towards an intellectual conquest by measurement,” (Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West).
“We did not have the mania for statistics that white people do,” (James Kaywaykla, Warm Springs/Mescalero Apache).
“That is the essence of the Agricultural Revolution: the ability to keep more people alive under worse conditions,” (Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens).
“If man had originally inhabited a world as blankly uniform as a high rise housing development, as featureless as a parking lot, as destitute of life as an automated factory, it is doubtful that he would have had a sufficiently varied experience to retain images, mold language, or acquire ideas,” (L Mumford, The Myth of the Machine).
“I think white people are so afraid of the world they created that they don’t want to see, feel, smell, or hear it. The feeling of rain and snow on your face, being numbed by an icy wind and thawing out before a smoking fire, coming out of a hot sweat bath and plunging into a cold stream, these things make you feel alive, but you don’t want them anymore. Living in boxes which shut out the heat of summer and chill of winter, living inside a body that no longer has a scent, hearing a noise from the hi-fi instead of listening to the sounds of nature, watching some actor on TV having a make believe experience when you no longer experience anything for yourself, eating food without taste - that’s your way. It’s no good,” (John Fire Lame Deer).
“Nowadays clever people study sun spots through giant telescopes, and your man-made little stars zoom around the earth as if they were late on the job. You have even landed on the moon and left a few plastic bags of urine there and a few chewing gum wrappers. But I think the Indian knew the sun and the moon much better in those long forgotten days, were much closer to them,” (John Fire Lame Deer).
“When white man find land, Indians running it, no taxes, no debt, plenty buffalo, plenty beaver, clean water. Women did all the work, Medicine man free. Indian man spend all day hunting and fishing; all night having sex…only white man dumb enough to think he could improve a system like that,” (Chief Two Eagles).
“When someone’s wearing a mask, they’re gonna tell you the truth. When someone’s not wearing a mask, it’s highly unlikely,” (Bob Dylan, pre-Covid pandemic, and unrelated to it).
“We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered,” (MLK).
“The lust for possessions is a disease among them,” (Chief Sitting Bull).
“Life proceeds through tension, not through repose. Therefore seeking tension is seeking life,” (anon).
“Sometimes I get sick of everything. Cars, doors, stoplights, artificial lights, automated gadgetry, grocery stores, gas stations, buildings, faucets, packaging, phones, talking, words, egos, competition, fighting, loving, waiting, going too fast. It is then that I dream about hiding in the shadowy underbrush and turning back into a wild animal,” (anon).
“In America, life seems to move faster than anywhere else on the globe and each generation is promised more than it will get: which creates, in each generation, a furious bewildered rage, the rage of people who cannot find solid ground beneath their feet,” (James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son).
“Ecoterrorism is what happens when habitat is turned into money.” (1:16:45 “Wrenched” Documentary on Ed Abbey).
“It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners,” (A Camus).
“Submission to a powerful authority is one of the avenues by which people escape from their feeling of aloneness and limitation,” (Erich Fromm, Psychoanalysis and Religion).
“When you mix science and politics, you get politics,” (John Barry, author of The Great Influenza, on the Covid-19 Pandemic, 7/14/2020 [https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/opinion/coronavirus-shutdown.html])
"I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here, ruining people is considered sport,” (part of the suicide note of Vince Foster, friend and lawyer to the Clintons, 7/20/1993).
"There is no God, but don't tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night,” (Voltaire).
"Doubt is not a pleasant condition, but certainty is an absurd one,” (Voltaire).
“There lives more faith in honest doubt, than in half the creeds,” (Alfred North Tennyson).
“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect,” (Mark Twain).
“The irrational constitutes a significant portion of normal behavior. It is time for western man to accustom himself to that fact.” (Edward T Hall, Beyond Culture, 216).
“The widespread acceptance of the nonreligious attitude in modern western societies has placed agnostic man in a difficult situation. Although he has carried to the extreme the desacralization process, he cannot free himself entirely from the past. His ancient religious nature always persists in his deepest being, ready to be reactivated, because he is haunted by the very realities he tries to deny,” (Rene Dubos, So Human an Animal, 113)
“A sense of continuity with the past and with the rest of creation is a form of religious experience essential to sanity,” (Rene Dubos, So Human an Animal, 201).
“Since all aspects of human life reflect environmental influences, it is a moral obligation for the scientific community to devote itself in earnest to the study of ecological systems, both those of nature and those created by man,” (Rene Dubos, So Human an Animal, 219).
"When I’m academic circles, I don’t talk about mystical experience; I talk about ecological awareness…same thing,” (Alan Watts).
“The virtue of uncertainty is not a comfortable idea, but then a citizen based democracy is built upon participation, which is the very expression of permanent discomfort. The corporatist system depends upon the citizen’s desire for inner comfort. Equilibrium is dependent upon our recognition of reality, which is the acceptance of permanent psychic discomfort. And the acceptance of psychic discomfort is the acceptance of consciousness,” (John Ralston Saul, The Unconscious Civilization, 190).
“The ever-recurrent phenomena of history do not have reasonable causes,” (Lorenz, On Aggression, p 236).
“Our schizophrenic societies progress by knowledge, but survive on inspiration derived from the very beliefs which that knowledge erodes,” (E.O. Wilson, On Human Nature, p 172).
“The idea of history as progress made it possible fully to comprehend the culturally earlier as the morally inferior,” (Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization, p 104).
“You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do,” (Jung).
“You don’t ever have to do anything sensational for people to love you,” (Mr. Rogers, at Dartmouth commencement speech, 2002).
“By virtue of what you always are, have been, and will be, there is no need whatsoever to defend yourself or prove yourself,“ (Alan Watts, introduction to Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects).
“Human reality and meaning is found in stories, not in statistics,” (anon).
“The sterility of the bourgeois world will end in suicide or a new form of creative participation. This is the “theme of our times,” in Ortega y Gasset’s phrase; it is the substance of our dreams and the meaning of our acts,” (Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude).
“Either the world becomes more liberal and tolerant, or we blow each other up,” (anon).
“Service to others is the rent you pay for your room here on earth,” (Muhammad Ali).
“Causes only multiply themselves. They lead to chaos,” (Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing).
“Things separate from their stories have no meaning,” (Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing).
“Silence is not the absence of something, but the presence of everything,” (Gordon Hempton).
“History is created by the elites…It is bent to their service…It is a way in which we try to explain the unexplainable. It is the way in which we give order and reason to things that are neither orderly or reasonable…It is our own actions that terrorize us, and therefore, in order to deal with this, in order to make meaning of it, we construct and create religion, scapegoats, sacred places, as a way of escaping all of it,” (Teofilo F. Ruiz, The Terror of History Lectures, Lecture 24: the Survival of the Past.)