William Irwin Thompson Quotes

Although, this is often used with negative connotations, I see ideology as an inherent part of culture.

Ideology has shaped the very sofa on which I sit.

I'm more into human nature than politics. But they're intertwined. Obviously, I live in civilization, so politics are part of my life.

One side of me is very busy paying attention to the details of life, the humanity of people, catching the street voices, the middle-class, upper-middle-class secret lives of Turks. The other side is interested in history and class and gender, trying to get all of society in a very realistic way.

It is our common experience as human beings that the results of social forces seem to admit only of 'probabilistic' predictions.

You can only judge anything that happened in the times, in the times that that happened.

Life, it is true, can be grasped in all its confused futility merely by opening one's eyes and sitting passively, a spectator on the stands of history - but to understand the social processes and conflicts, the interplay between individual and group, even the physicality of human experience, we have need of small-scale models.

Ideology has very little to do with 'consciousness' - it is profoundly unconscious.

No matter what you experience in life, it incorporates political tendencies, and in so many ways.

My art will reflect not necessarily conscious politics but the unanalysed politics of my life.

Political, social and economic realities are shaped by a historical process.

It is society which, fashioning us in its image, fills us with religious, political, and moral beliefs that control our actions.

I think character is very much a product of where you live, who you are, what is happening in that time of your life, and I'm interested in those pressures, those forces. A political context, a social context, really determines if not who people are then how they treat one another and what they say, how they speak.

Ideologies are ways of organizing large swaths of life and experience under a set of shared but unexamined assumptions. This quality makes an ideology particularly hard to see, at least while it's exerting its hold on your culture. A reigning ideology is a little like the weather: all pervasive and virtually inescapable.

I tend to write society as I see and understand it.

My books are not 'political.' I don't make political demands. They actually describe life. But when we look at human life, politics creeps in everywhere.

Many of the things that shape the way the world looks are, quite frankly, invisible.

What are all political and social institutions, but always a religion, which in realizing itself, becomes incarnate in the world?

Normal is all relative.

History is that form which his imagination seeks comprehension of the living existence of the world in relation to his own life, which he thereby invests with a deeper reality.

And people get all fouled up because they want the world to have meaning as if it were words... As if you had a meaning, as if you were a mere word, as if you were something that could be looked up in a dictionary. You are meaning.

I believe that nothing can be more abstract, more unreal, than what we actually see. We know that all we can see of the objective world, as human beings, never really exists as we see and understand it. Matter exists, of course, but has no intrinsic meaning of its own, such as the meanings that we attach to it. We can know only that a cup is a cup, that a tree is a tree.

Poetry is an awareness of the world, a particular way of relating to reality.

To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.

Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.