Philip Slater

"[E]very morning all 200 million of us get out of bed and put a lot of energy into creating and re-creating the social calamities that oppress, infuriate and exhaust us."

"It is easy to produce examples of the many ways in which Americans attempt to minimize, circumvent, or deny the interdependence upon which all human societies are based. We seek a private house, a private means of transportation, a private garden, a private laundry, self-service stores, and do-it-yourself skills of every kind. An enormous technology seems to have set itself the task of making it unnecessary for one human being ever to ask anything of another in the course of going about his daily business."

"Our economy is based on spending billions to persuade people that happiness is buying things, and then insisting that the only way to have a viable economy is to make things for people to buy so they'll have jobs and get enough money to buy things."

"The troubles we're experiencing didn't arise because someone made the wrong economic prediction, or used the wrong economic indicator or the wrong theory of corporate investment. They arose because we've been using our energies mindlessly for decades; we've put our labor and resources into activities that have brought us nothing back."

"The idea that everybody wants money is propaganda circulated by wealth addicts to make themselves feel better about their addiction."

"Instead of using money to serve ourselves, we use ourselves to serve money."

"[If] the purposes for which money were designed were fulfilled completely, there would be no reason for humans to exist as decision-making beings."

"As a society, we encourage selfishness. We expect people to be interested primarily in their private or family welfare, with little concern for community needs. The care of the sick, old, disturbed, or poor, for example—a task that most societies take for granted—is carried out grudgingly, carelessly, or not at all."

"[If] you brainwash people into forgetting that they're part of each other, you can manipulate them...that's how individualism leads to fascism - divide and conquer."

"Conflict will never be eliminated from human affairs. Conflict is simply the active expression of difference, and an essential part of human development. Without conflict change would be impossible. Our goal as a species at this point in our development is to mold a world in which conflict can be contained within a larger embracing understanding—the realization that we share certain goals and aspirations in common, no matter how much we scream at each other about procedures."

"Americans need to wake up to the fact that right-wing Republicans don't believe in democracy and never have. They have always admired military dictatorships and seem to be working hard to set up the equivalent here in the United States. Their goal is to create an authoritarian government, with control of the media and the judiciary; to weaken all restraints on executive power and eliminate democratic freedoms; to undermine the public education system through fiscal starvation and rote learning, so that the poor will learn only enough to follow orders; and to create the kind of economic inequality so many Third World countries enjoy--by filling the pockets of a tiny group of extremely rich individuals and impoverishing the rest, thereby providing a mass of cheap labor."