The Story Of B Quotes
"When one does not see what one does not see, one does not even see that one is blind." - Paul Veyne
"Though I'm supposedly only writing for myself, I feel impelled to explain who I am and what I'm doing here."
"My superiors were as nice about it as they could be."
"The blunt truth is that you don't have to be a very good priest to make the grade at the parish level."
"The priest is only a mediator of grace, not a source of grace."
"Europe is just a rehearsal. Whatever else the United States has lost in the last three or four decades, it's still the world's style setter."
"Programs are sticks set in the riverbed to impede the flow."
"Vision is the flowing river. Programs are sticks set in the riverbed to impede the flow."
"Really smart wolves know that the most suspicious-looking wolf in the pack is the one disguised as a sheep."
"Never trust a Christian. Not once has ever Christian given me reason to change."
"Your loyalty is always subject to change, always subject to revision according to some undisclosed standard."
"This week you're my friend, but next week they say I'm a witch and God wants witches to be burned, so you burn me."
"Every study of calories spent versus calories gained confirms that the more your food comes from agriculture, the harder you have to work for it."
"The only people who can afford to wait for crops to grow are people who already have food."
"Our message to those we must reassure is: 'Don't worry, nothing's happened. The world is just what it was.'"
"You can't just say, 'All I mean by truth is this one piece of the puzzle. If it isn't this one piece, I don't want to hear about it.'"
"These days are still those days. Do you understand what these words mean?"
"If it's thinkable to posit the existence of a Christ, then why shouldn't it be thinkable to posit his antithesis?"
"I've had many pupils, but they've always learned simply by hanging around."
"We believed (and still believe) that we have the one right way for people to live."
"Man was meant to live as a totalitarian agriculturalist and a city builder the way bees were meant to live as honey collectors and hive builders."
"We understand what they had in mind because they were doing what we would do in their place."
"But when we look back beyond our agricultural revolution into the human past, we no longer understand what people had in mind."
"This is of course another result of the Great Forgetting. We've forgotten what people had in mind before our revolution."
"Every piece of hand-woven cloth has an element of magic in it, which is the special magic of its weaver."
"Terrifically excited, these paleoanthropologists brought their discovery to the attention of their department head."
"Our ancestors accomplished something similar in the first three million years of human life: They learned how to live like humans."
"The fundamental Taker delusion is that humanity itself was designed--and therefore destined--to become us."
"Takers make their living by behaving as though the world belongs to them."
"What appears to be kind and is meant to be kind can be the reverse of kind."
"The Law of Life in a single word is: abundance."
"I know where I want to end up, I just don't know how to get there."
"Our relationship is inherently adversarial... it's simply what is."
"The closer you come to understanding it, the less unhappy you'll feel."
"What's important to us is not how many they are but where they are."
"A god is that strange force that makes every place a place."
"The human breakthrough wasn't associated with any tool-making breakthrough."
"The hunter who's not only hungry but avid to know the future is certainly going to have an edge."
"The world is a sacred place and a sacred process."
"The world will not be saved by old minds with new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by new minds--with no programs."
"Totalitarian agriculture is what has kept us 'on the boil' here for ten thousand years."
"Man was born MILLIONS of years ago, and he was no more a scourge than hawks or lions or squids."
"We don't have to change HUMANKIND in order to survive. We only have to change a single culture."
"It's during this period that we see the first states formed for the purpose of armed defense and aggression."
"For the first time in human history, the important people are the people with armies."
"The ability to reproduce is clearly a prerequisite for biological success, and we can be sure that every species comes into existence with that ability as an essential heritage from its parent species."
"The Great Forgetting was woven into the fabric of our intellectual life from its very beginning."
"You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not wage war on your competitors."
"It's not MAN who is the scourge of the world, it's a single culture. One culture out of hundreds of thousands of cultures. OUR culture."
"The fire burned on under the cauldron of our culture, and the next doubling of our population took only sixteen hundred years."
"The water is getting hotter--always getting hotter."
"Unlike signs of war, other signs of distress aren't cast in bronze or chiseled in stone."
"What we mean by crime doesn't exist among tribal peoples."
"In other words, crimes engage the machinery of the state, while other unpleasant behaviors don't."
"For the first time in history, people were dealing with crime."
"As soon as people started to write, they started writing laws."
"From this point on, crime would have an identity of its own as 'a problem' in our culture."
"For the first time in history, people were beginning to suspect that something fundamentally wrong was going on here."
"For the first time in history, people began listening to religious teachers who promised them salvation."
"Salvation is the most wonderful thing you can achieve in your life--and you not only don't have to share it, it isn't even possible to share it."
"Forget the boiling, forget the pain. Nothing matters but you and your salvation."
"It was quite a vision--but of course the fire burned on under the cauldron of our culture."
"Your salvation is what matters. Nothing else--not even my salvation (except of course, to me)."
"The famous mythologist Joseph Campbell lamented the fact that nowadays the people of our culture have no mythology."
"The earth was created specifically to be used in this way."
"We've lost our ability to believe that the world was made for Man and that Man was made to conquer and rule it."
"We are just one culture--one culture out of hundreds of thousands."
"The founders of our culture didn't live in an empty world, they were a tribal people surrounded by many other tribal peoples."
"These were old, old, old, old, old, old hands at culture, which means that not a single one of them was a stranger to the concept of law."
"The names of the tribes inhabiting the relevant area at this time will never be known to us."
"Each tribe is defined by the solidity and density of its own laws and customs."
"The solid border around each tribe makes it clear that the cultural boundaries between tribes are impenetrable."
"Their invention was a new style of agriculture--the totalitarian style."
"The Tak had the remarkable and unprecedented idea that everyone should live the way they lived."
"By adopting a common culture, the Tak, Dak, and Fak have necessarily lost some of the solidity that once defined them."
"The laws and customs of individual tribes continue to fade into irrelevance."
"The foundation thinkers of our culture imagined that our culture was born in a world empty of law."
"The Tak revolution began to engulf its neighbors."
"The world of the detribalized is as easy for one of the Ak to live among the Hak as it is for a Belgian to live in France."
"The Great Forgetting blinds us to the fact that we are a biological species in a community of biological species."
"Tribal laws are never invented laws, they're always received laws."
"The tribal life is precious because it tested out."
"It doesn't matter if people liked it. It didn't matter if people suffered the torments of hell."
"The age of the Great Forgetting has ended, and all its lies and delusions have been dispelled."
"We're straying from the path of salvation because we remember that we once belonged to the world."
"The final hour is at hand! You've heard that the Antichrist is coming."
"We're straying from the path of salvation for love of the world."