Ishmael Quotes

"Say, didn't we make for the garden a certain tree whose fruit is the knowledge of good and evil?"

"But it's not going to be this easy for the Takers. It's going to be hard as hell for them to give it up, because what they're doing is right, and they have to go on doing it even if it means destroying the world and mankind with it...It would mean spitting out the fruit of that tree and giving the rule of the world back to the gods."

"When Adam accepted the fruit of that tree, he succumbed to the temptation to live without limit...Whenever a Taker couple talk about how wonderful it would be to have a big family...why stop at four kids or six? we can have fifteen if we like. All we have to do is plow under another few hundred acres of rain forest--and who cares if a dozen other species disappear as a result?"

"Man was innocent until he discovered the difference between good and evil. When he was no longer innocent of that knowledge, he became a fallen creature."

"People can't just give up a story. That's what the kids tried to do in the sixties and seventies. They tried to stop living like Takers, but there was no other way for them to live. They failed because you can't just stop being in a story, you have to have another story to be in."
"And what do you suppose this story is about?"
"Well, you should at least know that it's about the meaning of the world, about divine intentions in the world, and about the destiny of man."

"They need a vision of the world and of themselves that inspires them."
"Yes. Definitely. Stopping pollution is not inspiring. Sorting your trash is not inspiring. Cutting down on fluorocarbons is not inspiring. But this...thinking of ourselves in a new way, thinking of the world in a new way...This..." I let it go. What the hell, he knew what I was trying to say.

"What I've been at pains to give you is a new paradigm of human history. The Leaver life is not an antiquated thing that is 'back there' somewhere. Your task is not to reach back but to reach forward."
"But to what?"
"You're an inventive people, aren't you? You pride yourselves on that, don't you?"
"Yes."
"Then invent."

"White or black, male or female, what the people of this culture want is to have as much wealth and power in the Taker prison as they can get. They don't give a damn that it's a prison and they don't give a damn that it's destroying the world."

"In my experience, you never really know how you're going to handle a problem until you actually have it."


Link of the day: The Eight Extraordinary Meridians