Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
We are all captives of a story.
There is no one right way to live.
Courage is the virtue of the free.
Pity is always twinged with disgust.
five severed fingers do not make a hand
The world was not made for any one species.
With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?
May the forests be with you and with your children.
You shouldn't have to settle for rabbits if what you want is deer
No story is devoid of meaning ... If you know how to look for it.
We need schools to force kids to learn things they have no use for.
The world is not going to survive very much longer as humanity's captive.
From infancy onward, children are the most fantastic learners in the world.
What's normal is for things to work. What's not normal is for things to fail.
The obvious can sometimes be illuminating when perceived in an unhabitual way.
TEACHER seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.
You never actually know how you're going to handle a problem until you actually have it.
There are times when having too much to say can be as dumbfounding as having too little.
Children don't need learning. They need access to what they want to learn outside the home.
Imagine that the gods have a care for everything that lives in the community of life on earth.
If the world was made for us, then it BELONGS to us and we can do what we damn well please with it.
Increasing food production to feed an increased population results in yet another increase in population.
Don't try to drive the homeless into places we find suitable. Help them survive in places they find suitable.
Indigenous people believe that Man belongs to the World; civilized people believe that the World belongs to Man.
Blessed are those who do whatever they can wherever they are, for no one is devoid of resources or opportunities.
If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual - "Ishmael
Animists are not so much people with a religion as people with a fundamentally religious way of looking at things.
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.
I have amazing news for you. Man is not alone on this planet. He is part of a community, upon which he depends absolutely.
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
In fact, of course, there is no secret knowledge; no one knows anything that can't be found on a shelf in the public library.
The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. … The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'.
Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable--and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way.
The world is not in any sense in danger from itself. The world is in fact not in any danger at all. It is we who are in danger.
You know how to split atoms, how to send explorers to the moon, how to splice genes, but you don't know how people ought to live.
The journey itself is going to change you, so you don’t have to worry about memorizing the route we took to accomplish that change.
We're straying from the path of salvation because we remember that we once belonged to the world and were content in that belonging.
Lies are like sleeping pills. You should only use them when you absolutely have to. They spoil everything if you make a habit of them.
[A]ny species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion.
Many of the biggest and most far-reaching investments we make in our lives are investments that have little or nothing to do with money.
Wow, just imagine missing school on the day when they were learning blue. You'd spend the rest of your life wondering what color the sky is.
And every time the Takers stamp out a Leaver culture, a wisdom ultimately tested since the birth of mankind disappears from the world beyond recall.
We're not destroying the world because we're clumsy. We're destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.
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.
No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' … That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species.
What is crucial to your survival as a race is not the redistribution of power and wealth within the prison but rather the destruction of the prison itself.
The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison.
There are indeed times when one should TRUST blindly, just as there are times when one should not. WISDOM consists in being able to tell one from the other.
And in spite of all the mastery we've attained, we don't have enough mastery to stop devastating the world, or to repair the devastation we've already wrought.
Our schools are much like our prisons: they disappoint us because they only do what they're designed to do, and it annoys us that they don't do something else!