Literary Critics

"A fully integrated culture would be like the dinosaurs, which had to perish because they were no longer able to adapt themselves to changes in the external environment."

"Capitalism might be defined, if we wish to be scientific, as a form of economic organization motivated by the pursuit of profit within a price structure."

"The range of human potentialities is also the range of human needs because of man's vital drive that impels him to seek to realize his potentialities. this drive is even more mysterious than the potentialities it seeks to realize."

"Each individual in a society is a nexus where innumerable relationships of this character intersect."

"When we approach history, we are dealing with a conglomeration of irrational continua. Those who deal with history by nonrational processes are the ones who make history, the actors in it."

"It is not easy to tear any event out of the context of the universe in which it occurred without detaching from it some factor that influenced it."

"Even today few scientists and perhaps even fewer nonscientists realize that science is a method and nothing else."

"No culture has ever exceeded Western civilization in power and extent. Our society now covers more than half of the globe, extending in space from Poland to the east of Australia i n the west. In the course of this expansion, most of it during the last five centuries, the power of Western civilization has been so great that it has destroyed, almost without thinking of it, hundreds of other societies, including five or six other civilizations."

"The very idea that there is some kind of conflict between science and religion is completely mistaken. Science is a method for investigating experience... Religion is the fundamental, necessary internalization of our system of more permanent values."

"When profits are pursued by geographic interchange of goods, so that commerce for profit becomes the central mechanism of the system, we usually call it "commercial capitalism." In such a system goods are conveyed from ares where they are more common (and therefore cheaper) to areas where they are less common (and therefore less cheap). This process leads to regional specialization and to division of labor, both in agricultural production and in handicrafts."

"Closely related to the erroneous idea that science is a body of knowledge is the equally erroneous idea that scientific theories are true."

"Western ideology believed that the world was good because it was made by God in six days and that at the end of each day He looked at His work and said that it was good."

"Another thing that they have tried to get us to believe in the last 150 years... is that the nation as the repository of sovereignty can be both a state and a community. ...Why did the English, the French, the Castilians, the Hohenzollerns, and others become the repository of sovereignty as nations... They did so because... weapons made it possible to compel obedience over areas which were approximately the size of these national groups... nationalism is an episode in history, and it fit a certain power structure and a certain configuration in human life in our civilization. Now... They all want autonomy. ...The nation or the state, as we now have it as the structure of power, cannot be a community."

"The fundamental, all-pervasive cause of world instability is the destruction of communities by the commercialization of all human relationships and the resulting neuroses and psychoses. The technological acceleration of transportation, communication and weapons systems is now creating power areas wider than existing political structures."

"...another cause of today’s instability is that we now have a society in America, Europe and much of the world which is totally dominated by the two elements of sovereignty that are not included in the state structure: control of credit and banking, and the corporation. These are free of political controls and social responsibility and have largely monopolized power in Western Civilization and in American society. They are ruthlessly going forward to eliminate land, labor, entrepreneurial-managerial skills, and everything else the economists once told us were the chief elements of production. The only element of production they are concerned with is the one they can control: capital."

"The final result will be that the American people will ultimately prefer communities. They will cop out or opt out of the system. Today everything is a bureaucratic structure, and brainwashed people who are not personalities are trained to fit into this bureaucratic structure and say it is a great life--although I would assume that many on their death beds must feel otherwise. The process of copping out will take a long time, but notice: we are already copping out of military service on a wholesale basis; we are already copping out of voting on a large scale basis. ...People are also copping out by refusing to pay any attention to newspapers or to what’s going on in the world, and by increasing emphasis on the growth of localism, what is happening in their own neighborhoods."

"When Rome fell, the Christian answer was, "Create our own communities.""

"In fact, violence as a symbol of our growing irrationality has had an increasing role in activity for its own sake, when no possible justification could be made that the activity was seeking to resolve a problem."

"To know is not too demanding: it merely requires memory and time. But to understand is quite a different matter: it requires intellectual ability and training, a self conscious awareness of what one is doing, experience in techniques of analysis and synthesis, and above all, perspective."

"The link between a society, whether it be made up of communities or individuals, and a state is this: Power rests on the ability to satisfy human needs."

"For years I have told my students that I been trying to train executives rather than clerks. The distinction between the two is parallel to the distinction previously made between understanding and knowledge. It is a mighty low executive who cannot hire several people with command of more knowledge than he has himself."

"When these extremists argued for "either-or," the Western tradition answered "both!""

"...the levels of culture, the aspects of society: military, political, economic, social, emotional, religious, and intellectual. Those are your basic human needs. ...they are arranged in evolutionary sequence."

"One of the chief reasons for the widespread fear of the Huns rested on their ability to travel very long distances in relatively short periods. This ability may well have been based on their use of horseshoes."

"The West believes that man and the universe are both complex and that the apparently discordant parts of each can be put into a reasonably workable arrangement with a little good will, patience, and experimentation."

"The fundamentalist position on biblical interpretation, with its emphasis on the explicit, complete, final, and authoritarian nature of Scripture, is a very late, minority view quite out of step with the Western tradition."

"The problem of meaning today is the problem of how the diverse and superficially self-contradictory experiences of men can be put into a consistent picture that will provide contemporary man with a convincing basis from which to live and to act."

"Men have social needs. They have a need for other people; they have a need to love and be loved."

"...a state is not the same thing as a society, although the Greeks and Romans thought it was. A state is an organization of power on a territorial basis."

"We have now done what the Romans did when they started to commit suicide. We have shifted from an army of citizens to an army of mercenaries..."

"The economic and technological achievements of industrialization in this period were fundamentally mistaken. ...based upon plundering the natural capital of the globe that was created over millions of years: the plundering of the soils and their fertility; the plundering of human communities whether they were our own or someone else's."

"The appearance of stability from 1840 to about 1900 was superficial, temporary and destructive in the long run... because communities and societies must rest upon cooperation and not upon competition. Anyone who says that society can be run on the basis of everyone's trying to maximize his own greed is talking total nonsense. And to teach it in schools, and to go on television and call it the American way of life still doesn't make it true. Competition and envy cannot become the basis of any society or any community."

"After years of work in both areas of study, I concluded that the social sciences were different, in many important ways, from the natural sciences, but that the same scientific methods were applicable in both areas, and, indeed, that no very useful work could be done in either area except by scientific methods."

"No scientist ever believes that he has the final answer or the ultimate truth on anything."

"I came into history from a primary concern with mathematics and science. This has been a tremendous help to me as a person and as a historian, although it must be admitted it has served to make my historical interpretations less conventional than may be acceptable of many of my colleagues in the field."

"This book is not a history. Rather it is an attempt to establish analytical tools that will assist the understanding of history"

"Haiku in particular allows poets to depict the insignificant things that other poetic forms cannot, given the natural tendency of a haiku poet’s observations to encompass every inch of the world. Taken to the extreme, the haiku poet cannot dismiss even excrement."

"In his later, bedridden years his observations were limited almost entirely to his sickroom and the small garden that adjoined it, yet he continued until the very end to draw artistic inspiration from the few flowers, plants, and other objects that were within his field of vision. Or he wrote about the foods he enjoyed, particularly such fruits as persimmons, since eating was one of the few physical pleasures that his ailment had not deprived him of."

"柿くへば 鐘が鳴るなり 法隆寺 kaki kueba kane ga naru nari Hōryūji"

"Tell them I was a persimmon eater who liked haiku"

"... the sparrow’s chirp, the crow’s caw, the willow’s green, the cherry blossom’s pink, are the truth of the Zen master and the essence of Basho's style."

"In this jumbled world of ten thousand things, there are things that are beautiful, things that are ugly, and things that combine beauty and ugliness. However, if we attend to beauty, we can find almost nothing that completely lacks it. The ugly face of the puffer fish bears a slight trace of beauty within its ugliness. Sea cucumbers possess an unintelligible form, but even in this unintelligible form, we catch a glimpse of beauty. People despise the creepy appearance of hairy caterpillars and snakes, yet an honest look may reveal something appealing about them. But of all these subjects, the most extreme example must be shit. Among countless books on aesthetics, probably not a single one expounds on its beauty. There are voluminous Western and Chinese poems, but in our experience, we have never run into a poem about shit. Probably such a poem does not exist even in books of which we are not aware. If this is the case, then we might regard shit as entirely unsuitable for poetry; but, curiously, there are many poems about shit in haiku."

"Until now I had mistaken the "Enlightenment” of Zen: I was wrong to think it meant being able to die serenely under any conditions. It means being able to live serenely under any conditions."

"Take your materials from what is around you—if you see a dandelion, write about it; if it’s misty, write about the mist. The materials for poetry are all about you in profusion."

"Despise me not And not be queasy To praise somewhat Verse is not easy"

"Grief restrains grief as dams torrential rain And time grows fertile with extended pain"

"An old dissembler who lived out his lie Lies here as if he did not fear to die."

"What demon is our god? What name subsumes That act external to our sleeping selves? Not pleasure — it is much too broad and narrow —, Not sex, not for the moment love, but pride, And not in prowess, but pride undefined, Autonomous in its unthought demands, A bit of vanity, but mostly pride."

"Poetry is what looks like poetry, what sounds like poetry. It is metrical composition."

"With an a natural affinity for the epigram genre, I am, so to speak, a short breathed man and have an almost unthoughtout preference for brief definitive statements."