William Irwin Thompson Quotes

28 quotes in 441 categories

• Like a shadow that does not permit us to jump over it, but moves with us to maintain its proper distance, pollution is nature's answer…
• Science is the storytelling of our time.
• The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.
• That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth.
• In the domain of cops and robbers, an interdiction serves to structure a black market and a shadow economy.
• The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.
• When we come to an edge we come to a frontier that tells us that we are now about to become more than we have…
• But the time has come; the revelation has already occurred, and the guardian seers have seen the lightning strike the darkness we call reality. And…
• Hominid and human evolution took place over millions and not billions of years, but with the emergence of language there was a further acceleration of…
• If humans died in a healthy culture, they would not lock out the earth in metal coffins and carve their names on stone monuments, but…
• The future is beyond knowing, but the present is beyond belief.
• If a person is open to a new world view, it can often mean that he is not firmly rooted in the reality of the…
• For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now…
• 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…
• Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced…
• 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…
• Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose.
• A World is not an ideology nor a scientific institution, nor is it even a system of ideologies; rather, it is a structure of unconscious…
• Idealistic reformers are dangerous because their idealism has no roots in love, but is simply a hysterical and unbalanced rage for order amidst their own…
• Ideologies do not map the complete living processes of a World.

Browse William Irwin Thompson Quotes by Category