Quotes from Ronald Wright

Societies that do not eat people are fascinated by those that do.

Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.

John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.

If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature.

Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up.

the most compelling reason for reforming our system is that the system is in no one's interest. It is a suicide machine.

Capitalism lures us onward like the mechanical hare before the greyhounds, insisting that the economy is infinite and sharing therefore irrelevant. Just enough greyhounds catch a real hare now and then to keep the others running till they drop. In the past it was only the poor who lost this game; now it is the planet.

In times of war or crisis, power is easily stolen from the many by the few on a promise of security. The more elusive the or imaginary the foe, the better for manufacturing consent.

Soon after man shows up in new lands, the big game starts to go missing. […] A bad smell of extinction follows Home sapiens around the world. (37)

To use a computer analogy, we are running twenty-first-century software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago or more. This may explain quite a lot of what we see in the news.

Our word "lord" comes from the Old English hlaford, or "loafward," he who guarded the bread supply — and was expected to share it.

The islanders, they write: carried out for us the experiment of permitting unrestricted population growth, profligate use of resources, destruction of the environment and boundless confidence in their religion to take care of the future. The result was an ecological disaster leading to a population crash…. Do we have to repeat the experiment on [a] grand scale?… Is the human personality always the same as that of the person who felled the last tree?

Uzun zaman önce... Hiç kimse tarlalar? sabanla deÅŸmezdi Topra?? s?n?rlara bölmezdi hiç kimse Ve sular? kürekle yarmazd? K?y? dünyan?n sonuydu. Ah doÄŸuÅŸtan zeki insan, buluÅŸlar?n?n kurban? Öyle korkunç ki yarat?c?l???n, Ne iÅŸe yarar ÅŸehirleri çevreleyen ÅŸu yüksek duvarlar Ve niye savaÅŸmak için silahlar?

The perfection of hunting spelled the end of hunting as a way of life. Easy meat meant more babies. More babies meant more hunters. More hunters, sooner or later, meant less game. Most of the great human migrations across the world at this time must have been driven by want, as we bankrupted the land with our moveable feasts.

The uproar of mankind is intolerable and sleep is no longer possible …." So the gods agreed to exterminate mankind.

Benjamin Disraeli had anticipated Erewhon's fears in his novel Coningsby: The mystery of mysteries, he wrote, is to view machines making machines, a spectacle that fills the mind with curious and even awful speculation.

In times of war or crisis, power is easily stolen from the many by the few on a promise of security. The more elusive or imaginary the foe, the better for manufacturing consent.

kin, not ancestors. Our main difference from

Time and space. Castillian needs two words : ' tiempo ' and ' espacio '. Quechua has one : ' pacha '. Pacha is space, and Pacha is time, for neither exists without the other.

studies show that the world's climate has been unusually stable for the past 10,000 years- exactly the lifetime of agriculture and civilization....Steady warming will be bad enough, but the worst outcome would be a sudden overturning of the Earth's climactic balance - back to it's old regime of sweats and chills. If that happens, crops will fail everywhere and the great experiment of civilization will come to a catastrophic end.

in a report unsuccessfully hushed up by the Bush administration, the Pentagon predicts worldwide famine, anarchy, and warfare within a generation should climate change fulfill the more severe projections.

He asks wether Christians eat gold. Ari, nispa. Qoritam mikhunku. Yes, they are saying. They do eat gold.

The reform that is needed is not anti-capitalist, anti-American, or even deep environmentalist; it is simply the transition from short-term to long-term thinking.

People afraid of outsiders are easily manipulated. The warrior caste, supposedly society's protectors, often become protection racketeers. In times of war or crisis, power is easily stolen from the many by the few on a promise of security. The more elusive or imaginary the foe, the better for manufacturing consent. The Inquisition did a roaring trade against the Devil.