For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.

No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet.

Writing is really very easy. Tap a vein and bleed onto the page. Everything else is just technical.

For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.

Civilization can never be sustainable.

I get asked quite often if I'm an anarchist. If they want to put a label on me, that's fine. What is most important to me is to live in a world that is not being murdered.

I think a lot of us are increasingly recognizing that the dominant culture is killing the planet.

I want you to begin keeping a calendar of who you see and when: the first day each year you see buttercups, the first day frogs start singing, the last day you see robins in the fall, the first day for grasshoppers. In short, I want you to pay attention.

If the world is presented as resources to be exploited, then, more than likely, you're going to exploit the world.

If you see yourself as entitled to a resource, and if you're not willing or incapable of seeing this other as a being with whom you can and should be in relation with, then you're going to take the resource.

In all of my books, I've emphasized that the fundamental difference between civilized and indigenous ways of being is that, for even the most open-minded of the civilized, listening to the natural world is a metaphor.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that any way of living that's based on the use of non-renewable resources won't last.

Maud Gonne was - excuse me, Maud Gonne was central to the Gaelic literature revival. She wrote plays, and she sang.

My audience consists mainly of people who already recognize how bad this culture is, and I want to push them to become more radical. It doesn't really matter to me if they are Left or Right.

My great-grandmother grew up in a sod house in Nebraska. When she was a tiny girl - in other words, only four human generations ago - there were still enough wild bison on the Plains that she was afraid lightning storms would spook them and they would trample her home.

Part of the problem is that we have become so dependent upon this system that is killing and exploiting us, it has become almost impossible for us to imagine living outside of it, and it's very difficult physically for us to live outside of it.

People say 'what do you mean' when you talk about 'bringing down civilization.' What I really mean is depriving the rich of the ability to steal from the poor and depriving the powerful of the ability to destroy the planet. That's what I really mean.

The stories we are told shape the way we see the world, which shapes the way we experience the world.

If we celebrate life with all its contradictions embrace experience and ultimately live with it a chance exists for a spiritual life filled not only with pain and untidiness but also with joy community and creativity.

Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption or enlightenment for organised political resistance

We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.

Truth lies within a little and certain compass, but error is immense.

To free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves - there lies the great, singular power of self-respect.

Act well your part, there all the honour lies.

The real peril of war lies not in military defeat. It lies in war itself, whether we win or lose.

All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.

Seeking to forget makes exile all the longer; the secret of redemption lies in remembrance.

Because of the lack of education on AIDS, discrimination, fear, panic, and lies surrounded me.

Wisdom lies neither in fixity nor in change, but in the dialectic between the two.

The English are polite by telling lies. The Americans are polite by telling the truth.

The great danger for family life, in the midst of any society whose idols are pleasure, comfort and independence, lies in the fact that people close their hearts and become selfish.

Americans detest all lies except lies spoken in public or printed lies.

The task of the educator lies in seeing that the child does not confound good with immobility and evil with activity.

The worlds I paint leave a lot to engage the imagination by hinting at what lies beyond the four edges of the painting. I think getting beyond the four edges of an opportunity or challenge is one of the basic skills you need in business.

The road to perseverance lies by doubt.

The power of a book lies in its power to turn a solitary act into a shared vision. As long as we have books, we are not alone.

I firmly believe that any man's finest hour, the greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear, is that moment when he has worked his heart out in a good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle - victorious.

Heaven lies about us in our infancy and the world begins lying about us pretty soon afterward.

The secret of a person's nature lies in their religion and what they really believes about the world and their place in it.

While I recognize the necessity for a basis of observed reality... true art lies in a reality that is felt.

For me the greatest beauty always lies in the greatest clarity.

Remember, beneath every cynic there lies a romantic, and probably an injured one.

The strength of criticism lies in the weakness of the thing criticized.

Satire lies about literary men while they live and eulogy lies about them when they die.

The way of a man's heart will be foreshadowed by what goodness lies in him - coming from above, and from around; but a way foreshadowed is not a way made.

The elite media has been caught in so many lies because of false statements that its whole reputation has eroded, their circulation is down, and their profits are down.

The golden age has not passed; it lies in the future.

What lies behind you and what lies in front of you, pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.

You can't take a character anywhere they don't expect the character to go. But within those confines is where creativity lies.