Quotes from John Zerzan

Six thousand feet above men and time ...

Art is also a quasi-utopian promise of happiness, always broken.

to know time is to fear it, and to know civilized time is to be terrorstricken.

As pressures build for life to become more quantified and machine-like, so does the drive to make machines more life-like.

Admittedly, the nature of language is one of the most mysterious questions that exists for man to ponder on.

Human speech conceals far more than it confides; it blurs much more than it defines; it distances more than it connects," was George Steiner's conclusion.

David Jenkins has observed that "The impression has begun to get about that the Industrial Revolution is not going to work out after all.

Philosophy, in its very diachrony, is the consciousness of the breakup of consciousness.

It is our fall from a simplicity and fullness of life directly experienced, from the sensuous moment of knowing, which leaves a gap that the symbolic can never bridge.

a mere increase of wages will never redeem the evils of the industrial system

Artificiality and work have steadily increased since its inception and are known as culture: in domesticating animals and plants man necessarily domesticated himself.

With agriculture, art lost its variety and became standardized into geometric designs that tended to degenerate into dull, repetitive patterns, a perfect reflection of standardized, confined, rule-patterned life.

As Pierre Manent described it, the city is anything but a family or community. "In reality, it subordinates the family and the group.… It takes young men from their families living, and brings them back dead.

Symbols are more than the basic units of culture; they are screening devices to distance us from our experiences. They classify and reduce, "to do away with," in Leakey and Lewin's remarkable phrase, "the otherwise almost intolerable burden of relating one experience to another.

The amount of work per capita increases with the evolution of culture and the amount of leisure per capita decreases.

No group on earth has more leisure time than hunters and gatherers, who spend it primarily on games, conversation and relaxing.

earlier spirituality was participatory with nature, not imposing cultural values or traits upon it.

We now know that human intelligence a million years ago was equal to what it is today.

If machines can be human, humans can be machines.

To the Greeks, work was a curse and nothing else. Their name for it—ponos—has the same root as the Latin poena, sorrow

In fact, in an overwhelmingly commodified existence, consumption becomes the number one form of entertainment.

Humanitas is its Latin reference, opposed to immanis, or savage.

DeVries is correct in his judgment that duration of life dropped sharply upon contact with civilization.

Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities," wrote Jared Diamond. Malaria, probably the single greatest killer of humanity, and nearly all other infectious diseases are the heritage of agriculture.