"We are like flies crawling across the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel: we cannot see what angels and gods lie underneath the threshold of our perceptions. We do not live in reality; we live in our paradigms, our habituated perceptions, our illusions; the illusions we share through culture we call reality, but the true historical reality of our condition is invisible to us. How can you fix up history if you cannot see it? And what if history cannot be fixed from inside history? What if the attempt to fix human history is an effort to seek out the dark with a searchlight?"

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Added on April 10, 2026
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Original Language: English

Sources

Thompson (1976) Evil and World Order, p. 81.

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/William_Irwin_Thompson