Civilization Quote by Robert M. Pirsig

“Civilization, or "the system" or "society" or whatever you want to call it, is best served not by mules but by free men.”

Robert M. Pirsig

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“And from time to time you find your “county road” takes you onto a two-rutter and then a single rutter and then into a…

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“I started to roll over for more sleep but heard a rooster crowing and then became aware we are on vacation and there is…

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The Buddha, the Godhead, resides quite as comfortably in the circuits of a digital computer or the gears of a cycle transmission as he…

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Even though quality cannot be defined, you know what quality is.

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I suppose philosophy is historically not a woman's game, though that is changing.

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Up until my first book was published, I had all this potential, people would say, and I screwed up. After it, I could say:…

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There is a perennial classical question that asks which part of the motorcycle, which grain of sand in which pile, is the Buddha. Obviously…

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“Of the value traps, the most widespread and pernicious is value rigidity. This is an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment…

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“Historically mystics have claimed that for a true understanding of reality metaphysics is too “scientific”. Metaphysics is not reality. Metaphysics is names about reality.…

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“What’s emerging from the pattern of my own life is the for belief that the crisis is being caused by the inadequacy of existing forms of thought to cope with the situation. It can’t be solved by rational means because the rationality itself is the source of the problem. The only ones who’re solving it are solving it at a…

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To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as 'the system' is to speak correctly . . . They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands it be that way. There's…

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If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will…

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Explore all 351 Robert M. Pirsig quotes

More Civilization quotes

What sets worlds in motion is the interplay of differences, their attractions and repulsions. Life is plurality, death is uniformity. By suppressing differences and pecularities, by eliminating different civilizations and cultures, progress weakens life and favors death. The ideal of a single civilization for everyone, implicit in the cult of progress and technique, impoverishes and mutilates us. Every view of…

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Sentiment is the mightiest force in civilization; not sentimentality, but sentiment. Women will bring this into politics. Home, sweet home, is as powerful on…

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Violence is not necessary to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies from indifference toward the unique values which created it.

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We released 400,000 classified documents, the most extraordinary history of a war to ever have been released in our civilization. Those documents cover 109,000…

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Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been…

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Whenever we touch nature we get clean. People who have got dirty through too much civilization take a walk in the woods, or a…

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The invention of gunpowder and the constant improvement of firearms are enough in themselves to show that the advance of civilization has done nothing…

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Another success is the post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a certain religious sentimentin mankind; so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea over land and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look…

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“The mission is, not to replace old world mindlessness with new world mindlessness, but to put an end to all forms of brainless authoritarianism.”

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We are somehow the children of the planet, we are somehow its finest hour; we bind time, we bind the past, we anticipate the future - we are going hyper-spatial; we are claiming a whole new dimension for biology that it never claimed before. We are actually becoming a fourth-dimensional kind of creature. Our future is somehow with us, as…

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