William Irwin Thompson Quotes

23 Sourced Quotes

The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.

William Irwin Thompson
One way to find food for thought is to use the fork in the road, the bifurcation that marks the place of emergence in which a new line of development begins to branch off.

William Irwin Thompson
In the domain of cops and robbers, an interdiction serves to structure a black market and a shadow economy.

William Irwin Thompson
The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.

William Irwin Thompson
Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose.

William Irwin Thompson
For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture.

William Irwin Thompson
In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise.

William Irwin Thompson
With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries.

William Irwin Thompson
Idealistic reformers are dangerous because their idealism has no roots in love, but is simply a hysterical and unbalanced rage for order amidst their own chaos.

William Irwin Thompson
We are the climactic generation of human cultural evolution, and in the microcosm of our lives the macrocosm of the evolution of the human race is playing itself out.

William Irwin Thompson
Ideologies do not map the complete living processes of a World.

William Irwin Thompson
Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe.

William Irwin Thompson
Not all intelligence can be artificial now, so if we make a mistake, the consequences are no longer simply located within an institution or a national culture.

William Irwin Thompson
That shoreline where the island of knowing meets the unfathomable sea of our own being is the landscape of myth.

William Irwin Thompson
When we come to an edge we come to a frontier that tells us that we are now about to become more than we have been before.

William Irwin Thompson
The future is beyond knowing, but the present is beyond belief.

William Irwin Thompson
If you do not create your destiny,
you will have your fate inflicted upon you.

William Irwin Thompson
Like a shadow that does not permit us to jump over it, but moves with us to maintain its proper distance, pollution is nature's answer to culture. When we have learned to recycle pollution into potent information, we will have passed over completely into the new cultural ecology.

William Irwin Thompson
If humans died in a healthy culture, they would not lock out the earth in metal coffins and carve their names on stone monuments, but would instead place the naked body in the earth and plant a tree above the silent heart.

William Irwin Thompson
In the shift from direct democracy to representational democracy, the printed book became an embodiment of thought for the physically absent author; and so the popular art form of the popular book and the pamphlet re-presented ideas and contributed to the public space of political philosophies of the Enlightenment. Television, however, now brings forth this new kind of public space, and it calls into being this new world, not of the educated citizenry in a republic, but of the electropeasantry in the state of Entertainment. Recall how people stopped singing in pubs when they brought in the TV set, and you will appreciate the new passivity in which people stop voting for their representatives as TV takes over the electoral campaigns.

William Irwin Thompson
If a person is open to a new world view, it can often mean that he is not firmly rooted in the reality of the old world view; as a lunatic or alienated artist, his own neurotic traits can become magnified as they tremble with the new energy pouring in from the universal source.

William Irwin Thompson
The conscious process is reflected in the imagination; the unconscious process is expressed as karma, the generation of actions divorced from thinking and alienated from feeling.

William Irwin Thompson
But the time has come; the revelation has already occurred, and the guardian seers have seen the lightning strike the darkness we call reality. And now we sleep in the brief interval between the lightning and the thunder.

William Irwin Thompson