when the world comes down

“Most people are mirrors, reflecting the mood and emotions of the times; few are windows, bringing light to bear on the dark corners where troubles fester.”

“Millions of people watch the same TV programmes and read the same newspapers. As a result their own conversations are standardised. Communications have become a commodity to be consumed, ‘sounds’ to be bought on plastic tapes. All modern communications media have two things in common: you have to pay for them, and there is no way of participating, you listen or watch, nothing else is required of you.”

“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more “successful people”. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of every kind. it needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and human, and these qualities have little to do with success as our culture has defined it.”

“By today’s standards, King George III was a very mild tyrant indeed. He taxed his American colonists at a rate of only pennies per annum. His actual impact on their personal lives was trivial. He had arbitrary power over them in law and in principle, but in fact it was seldom exercised. If you compare his rule with that of today’s U.S. Government, you have to wonder why we celebrate our independence.”

“The notion that a radical is one who hates his country is naïve and usually idiotic. He is, more likely, one who likes his country more than the rest of us, and is thus more disturbed than the rest of us when he sees it debauched.”

“America is sliding deeper and deeper into a politically correct, scholastically indoctrinated, regulated, credentialed, homogenized and degenerate hole. If nothing alters this course, America will become a land of subhuman semi-illiterates, utterly dependent on government, profoundly alienated from one another and entertained to the point of stupefaction.”

“Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become
global garbage cans.”

“Imagine a society that subjects people to conditions that make them terribly unhappy then gives them the drugs to take away their unhappiness. Science fiction is already happening to some extent in our own society. Instead of removing the conditions that make people depressed modern society gives them antidepressant drugs. In effect antidepressants are a means of modifying an individual’s internal state in such a way as to enable him to tolerate social conditions that he would otherwise find intolerable.”