The white man regards the universe as a gigantic machine hurtling through time and space to its final destruction: individuals in ...it are but tiny organisms with private lives that lead to private deaths: personal power, success and fame are the absolute measures of values, the things to live for. This outlook on life divides the universe into a host of individual little entities which cannot help being in constant conflict thereby hastening the approach of the hour of their final destruction.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Have We not made the earth as a cradle and the mountains as pegs?... And We created you in pairs, and We appointed your sleep for a rest; and We appointed night for a garment, and We appointed day for a livelihood. And We have built above you seven strong ones, and We appointed a blazing lamp and have sent down out of the rain-clouds water cascading that We may bring forth thereby grain and plants, and gardens luxuriant.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Apache have a legend that the coyote brought them fire and that the bear in his hibernations communes with the spirits of the ..."overworld" and later imparts the wisdom gained thereby to the medicine men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
If psychoanalysis emerged just before World War I to deal with the repressions of Puritanism, the hedonistic age has its counterpa...rt in sensitivity training, encounter groups, "joy therapy," and similar techniques that have two characteristics essentially derived from a hedonistic mood: they are conducted almost exclusively in groups; and they try to "unblock" the individual by physical contact, by groping, touching, fondling, manipulating. Where the earlier intention of psychoanalysis was to enable the patient to achieve self-insight and thereby redirect his life--an aim inseparable from a moral context--the newer therapies are entirely instrumental and psychologistic; their aim is to "free" the person from inhibitions and restraints so that he or she can more easily express his impulses and feelings.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We as a nation need to be reeducated about the necessary and sufficient conditions for making human beings human. We need to be re...educated not as parents--but as workers, neighbors, and friends; and as members of the organizations, committees, boards--and, especially, the informal networks that control our social institutions and thereby determine the conditions of life for our families and their children.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its... fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man's carnal truth is handled as something artificial.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Europe has lived on its contradictions, flourished on its differences, and, constantly transcending itself thereby, has created a ...civilization on which the whole world depends even when rejecting it. This is why I do not believe in a Europe unified under the weight of an ideology or of a technocracy that overlooked these differences.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away, fair seed-fields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal th...e man himself first ceases to be a jungle, and foul unwholesome desert thereby.... The man is now a man.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The problem is that we attempt to solve the simplest questions cleverly, thereby rendering them unusually complex. One should seek... the simple solution.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
A zoologist who observed gorillas in their native habitat was amazed by the uniformity of their life and their vast idleness. Hour...s and hours without doing anything. Was boredom unknown to them? This is indeed a question raised by a human, a busy ape. Far from fleeing monotony, animals crave it, and what they most dread is to see it end. For it ends, only to be replaced by fear, the cause of all activity. Inaction is divine; yet it is against inaction that man has rebelled. Man alone, in nature, is incapable of enduring monotony, man alone wants something to happen at all costs--something, anything.... Thereby he shows himself unworthy of his ancestor: the need for novelty is the characteristic of an alienated gorilla.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »