Quotes

I endorse the teaching of everything, because everything is what children want to know. What children very deeply want to know of history is how things got to be this way - but no one in your culture would think of teaching them that.

Mother Culture's deception here is that schools exist to serve the needs of people. In fact they exist to serve the needs of your economy. The schools turn out graduates who can't live without jobs but who have no job skills, and this suits your economic needs perfectly. What you're seeing at work in your schools isn't a system defect, it's a system requirement, and they meet that requirement with close to one hundread percent efficiency.

Since they don't have any survival value, they're forced to enter the Taker economy. Even if they'd rather opt out of that economy, they can't.

In actual fact, people seldom remember things they have no use for.

If fourteen-year-olds had to support themselves, they wouldn't be spending their money on Nike shoes, arcade games, and CDs.

The prison is your culture, which you sustain generation after generation. You yourself are learning from your parents how to be a prisoner. Your parents learned from their parents how to be a prisoner. Their parents learned from their parents how to be a prisoner. And so on, back to the beginning in the Fertile Cresent ten thousand years ago.

For ten thousand years you've been making and multiplying laws that you fully expect to be broken. Do you personally know a single person who isn't a lawbreaker?

A system that works for tens of thousands of years is going to be a system that works for people who are always capable of being troublesome, disruptive, selfish, greedy, cruel and violent.

It's important to be predictable to a certain extent, but it's also important not to be predictable.

I'm trying to get you used to the fact that things that look strange to you are not in fact stranger than things that look ordinary.

The community of life that we see here at any given time isn't just a random collection. It's a collection of successes. It's the remainder that is left over when the failures have disappeared.

Thinkers aren't limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they're limited by what puzzles them, because there's no way to become curious about something that doesn't puzzle you. If a thing falls outside the range of people's curiosity, then they simply cannot make inquiries about it. It constitutes a blind spot - a spot of blindness that you can't even know is there until someone draws your attention to it.