Quotes from William Irwin Thompson

Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose.

In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise.

One way to find food for thought is to use the fork in the road, the bifurcation that marks the place of emergence in which a new line of development begins to branch off.

With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries.

The teacher of history's work should be, ideally, not simply a description of past cultures, but a performance of the culture in which we live and are increasingly taking our being.

In the domain of cops and robbers, an interdiction serves to structure a black market and a shadow economy.

The future is beyond knowing, but the present is beyond belief.