In the Soviet Union, government controls industry. In the United States, industry controls government. That is the principal structural difference between the two great oligarchies of our time.
Why administrators are respected and schoolteachers are not: An administrator is paid a lot for doing very little, while a teacher is paid very little for doing a lot.
Grown men do not need leaders.
The ideal society can be described, quite simply, as that in which no man has the power of means to coerce others.
At some point we must draw a line across the ground of our home and our being, drive a spear into the land and say to the bulldozers, earthmovers, government and corporations, "thus far and no further." If we do not, we shall later feel, instead of pride, the regret of Thoreau, that good but overly-bookish man, who wrote, near the end of his life, "If I repent of anything it is likely to be my good behaviour.
Why can't we simply borrow what is useful to us from Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, especially Zen, as we borrow from Christianity, science, American Indian traditions and world literature in general, including philosophy, and let the rest go hang? Borrow what we need but rely principally upon our own senses, common sense and daily living experience.
So I lived alone. The first thing I did was take off my pants. Naturally.
By the age of forty, a man is responsible for his face. And his fate.
In this glare of brilliant emptiness, in this arid intensity of pure heat, in the heart of a weird solitude, great silence and grand desolution, all things recede to distrances out of reach, relecting light but impossible to touch, annihilating all thought and all that men have made to a spasm of whirling dust far out on the golden desert.
If we had the power of ten Shakespeares or a dozen Mozarts, we could not produce anything half so marvelous as one ordinary human child.
All men are brothers, we like to say, half-wishing sometimes in secret it were not true. But perhaps it is true. And is the evolutionary line from protozoan to Spinoza any less certain? That also may be true. We are obliged, therefore, to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to hear, that all living things on earth are kindred.
I do not believe in personal immortality; it seems so unnecessary. Show me one man who deserves to live forever.
Life is hard? True - but let's love it anyhow, though it breaks every bone in our bodies.
America My Country: last nation on earth to abolish human slavery; first of all nations to drop the nuclear bomb on our fellow human beings.
It's true: Every time you kill an elk, you're saving some cow's life.
Let us praise the noble turkey vulture: No one envies him; he harms nobody; and he contemplates our little world from a most serene and noble height.
Taxation: how the sheep are shorn.
Belief in the supernatural reflects a failure of the imagination.
Where all pretend to be thinking alike, it's likely that no one is thinking at all.
Might does not make right but it sure makes what is.
In the modern technoindustrial culture, it is possible to proceed from infancy into senility without ever knowing manhood.
Beware of your wishes: They will probably come true.
Humans were free before the word freedom became necessary.
Not all questions can be answered.
As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases.
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