Robert M. Pirsig Quotes

If you don't watch it people will force you one way or the other, into doing what they think you should do, or into just being mule-stubborn and doing the opposite out of spite.

You know what happened the last time a group of people said, 'Screw it, we don't care what you think'? They got hung as witches.

The truth is . . . you think what people want you to think.

People will always put you in a box that they think you fit in, and it's up to you to not fall into it.

Formerly no one was allowed to think freely; now it is permitted, but no one is capable of it any more. Now people want to think only what they are supposed to think, and this they consider freedom.

I think that once you've produced a conformist, a totally conformist society, a society in which there were no critics, that would in fact be an exact equivalent of the totalitarian societies against which we are supposed to be fighting in a cold war.

If you can't, or won't, think of Seymour, then you go right ahead and call in some ignorant psychoanalyst. You just do that. You just call in some analyst who's experienced in adjusting people to the joys of television, and Life magazine every Wednesday, and European travel, and the H-bomb, and Presidential elections, and the front page of the Times, and God knows what else that's gloriously normal.

If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to be given them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishment, but have no sense of shame.

I think things happen between people for a reason.

I just try to be myself and not conform to something I'm not and just continue doing what I do. I just try not to think about the fact that I'm an inspiration for people.

Stuffing people into boxes is for those who have issues about their own box.

The problem isn't who is in charge. It's what is in charge. The problem is that people are encouraged to function as machines. Or, actually, as mechanisms. Human emotion and sympathy are unprofessional. They are inappropriate to the exercise of reason. Everything which makes people good - makes them human - is ruled out. The system doesn't care about people, but we treat it as if it were one of us, as if it were the sum of our goods and not the product of our least admirable compromises.

[They] agreed that it was neither possible nor necessary to educate people who never questioned anything.

If people aren't educated, they can't question. If they can't question, they can't change anything, which is great for the status quo and all the people who can question them at their own level.

Humanists recognize that it is only when people feel free to think for themselves, using reason as their guide, that they are best capable of developing values that succeed in satisfying human needs and serving human interests.

On their sofas of spice and feathers, the concubines also slept fretfully. In those days the Earth was still flat, and people dreamed often of falling over edges.

If you say to people that they, as a matter of fact, can't protect their conversations, in particular their political conversations, I think you take a long step toward making a transition from a free society to a totalitarian society.

I think we live in an industrial dimensional reality where we're programmed to believe what we're told. We're programmed to believe them. We're programmed to believe what that ruling class wants us to believe.

Relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.

Unchecked, the new tolerance will sooner or later put many people in chains.

I am fearful when I see people substituting fear for reason.

The film [the white Ribbon] does try to use German Fascism as an example, but not specifically Fascism... the results of German Fascism. It shows how people are prepared or indoctrinated for an ideology... people who are already in a state of repression who have been humiliated by society and who clasp at a straw that's offered to them. And how that's then developed into a form of indoctrination.

Why do you necessarily have to be wrong just because a few million people think you are?

The left are afraid of independent thinkers. They are afraid of people who are able to reason and think on their own.

Sometimes they [people] throw off their freedom so quickly, you'd think it was burning them.