Quotes – Page 2

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.

People seldom look very hard for things they don't want to find.

Are there really people in the world who don't think they're miserable, destructive, greedy lot?

Simple things are almost always the hardest to explain.

No story is devoid of meaning, if you know how to look for it. This is as true of nusery rhymes and daydreams as it is of novels and epic poems.

Adults get real cranky if you quiz them about the scams they're running on you.