Quotes from Curtis White

Everybody of my generation has the same memory. We were twelve or thirteen or we were twenty-one, for that matter, and we were going to be veterinarians or we were, like Ringo, going to own a hairdresser's parlor. We walked into the record store and saw the cover of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. We thought together, 'Life can be other than it has been.

The scientists that present at TED confabs needn't affirm free-market capitalism directly… so long as the implication of their thinking have free-market "consilience"… In fact, TED has become a spectacularly influential force in part through its conciliation of science and libertarian economics, which it then sells to us as entertainment.

The dissonant irony here is that the affluence that gives the Western Buddhist their privilege, and gave them the opportunity to engage Buddhism in the first place, is part of what the Buddha meant by samsara, the world of attachment and consequent suffering. In a sense, Buddhist practice in the West is dependant upon continued delusion, especially those delusion that cause us to identify with class-appropriate roles.

Usually, the embrace of deviance comes not because of some innate perversity but because of a preexisting dissatisfaction with the world as it stands acquired through alienating experiences of one sort or another.

The American City was not unlike the first great products of American industrialism itself: the Colt revolver and the Winchester rifle. Gun manufacturing taught American industry about mass production, standardization, and the virtues of interchangeable parts, and the American city that industrialism produced was itself a very big gun: standardized, hugely profitable, and morally indifferent about any victims.

United States has become essentially two economies: a first-world economy driven by technicians and their various entourages, and a third-world economy driven by immigrants and, increasingly, the forlorn folks who were formerly our pride, the salt of the earth, the hearty denizens of the American heartland. Americans in name, they have been priced out of the American economy. But from the perspective of techno-economists like

Anyone can be a teacher or professor, but not everyone can influence you to strive for excellence and make a difference in the world around you.