Christopher McDougall Quotes

Civilization impairs physical fitness.

Technology is the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it.

Killing time is the chief end of our society.

Mankind has invested more than four million years of evolution in the attempt to avoid physical exertion. Now a group of backward-thinking atavists mounted on foot-powered pairs of Hula-Hoops would have us pumping our legs, gritting our teeth, and searing our lungs as though we were being chased across the Pleistocene savanna by saber-toothed tigers. Think of the hopes, the dreams, the effort, the brilliance, the pure force of will that, over the eons, has gone into the creation of the Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Bicycle riders would have us throw all this on the ash heap of history.

Because of the rush of human knowledge, because of the digital revolution, I have a voice, and I do not need to scream.

Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did not occur as a result of the hunter-gatherers' elsewhere adopting farming; hunter-gatherers tend to be conservative.... Instead, farming spread mainly through farmers' outbreeding hunters, developing more potent technology, and then killing the hunters or driving them off of all lands suitable for agriculture.

The egoic madness, or dysfunction, becomes enormously amplified by the science and technology we all have developed.

The shock of twentieth-century technology numbed our brains and we are just beginning to notice the spiritual and social debris that our technology has strewn about us.

What's really heavy on my heart is fighting physical inactivity.

Our technology forces us to live mythically

We live in the time of the colossal upright oblong.

All the modern devices we have enable us to investigate things and have enabled us to do better.

By his very success in inventing labor-saving devices, modern man has manufactured an abyss of boredom that only the privileged classes in earlier civilizations have ever fathomed.

Modern science and technology can relieve men of the necessity for specialized, imbecile labor. They may, in principle, provide the basis for a rational social order based on free association and democratic control, if we have the will to create it.

Every twenty minutes on the Appalachian Trail, Katz and I walked farther than the average American walks in a week. For 93 percent of all trips outside the home, for whatever distance or whatever purpose, Americans now get in a car. On average the total walking of an American these days - that's walking of all types: from car to office, from office to car, around the supermarket and shopping malls - adds up to 1.4 miles a week, barely 350 yards a day.

People go to the movies instead of moving.

The only possible form of exercise is to talk, not to walk.

The perils of overwork are slight compared with the dangers of inactivity.

More and more Americans feel threatened by runaway technology, by large-scale organization, by overcrowding. More and more Americans are appalled by the ravages of industrial progress, by the defacement of nature, by man-made ugliness. If our society continues at its present rate to become less livable as it becomes more affluent, we promise all to end up in sumptuous misery.

How to become a really modern society when today we are so - as a human being, we feel so powerful. We have high technology and a superb way of controlling our life. And at the same time, in many ways we are so primitive. We are not on - even just a step away from the most brutal and primitive crudity. To be very crude on those issues, which is always challenges and we always have to look at the situation like a mirror, to draw some understanding.

We are in the twentieth or the twenty-first century, but all the thinking, if you speak to one of those people keen on technology - you see that all their thinking is two centuries old. In cinema, you can show this.

India is committed to strong armed forces, well-equipped with modern arms & technology!

Some people never get their feet on the ground, They're either sitting in a chair or theyre laying down.

If you're not active - and I'm not active - and you don't watch what you eat, you can get big as a horse.

The irony is palpable - technical access has never been greater, cultural access never weaker.