Kirkpatrick Sale Quotes

Huts they made then, and fire, and skins for clothing, And a woman yielded to one man in wedlock... ... Common, to see the offspring they had made; The human race began to mellow then. Because of fire their shivering forms no longer Could bear the cold beneath the covering sky.

I would hazard a guess that we have found fossilized human remains of at least a thousand different specimens in South and East Africa, more or less complete at that. I think this is where the prelude to human history was primarily played out.

And it was only when we invented the spear and began roaming the planet that technologies got complex and central to human survival.

If a technology is elegant, biodegradable, made from renewable materials and employs a minimum of muscular, water or wind energy, is responsive, beautiful in its way, and challenging to the user in that it develops the user's senses and strength - it may comport with nature.

It was 100,000 years before we figured out what to do with fire. Imagine cavemen, sitting in front of a fire, eating raw meat for 100 thousand years.

I think fire is so critical in the wild. You can cook with it, you can make tools, you can deter a predator, you can dry your clothes and you get that element of morale that matters so much when you're stuck in the middle of nowhere.

Respecting beings, places, and life ways would be a basis for a worthy systemic analysis. And such an analysis would be inherently conservative, assuming that technology - from the fire stick to the silicon chip - is apt to do more harm to the Whole than good.

Human beings were human beings anatomically for several hundred thousand years, wandering around, hunting and gathering. And then suddenly, at the same time they started painting in caves they started multiplying.

I love technology. Matches, to light a fire is really high tech. The wheel is REALLY one of the great inventions of all time. Other than that I am an ignoramus about technology. I once looked for the 'ON' button on the computer and came to find out it was on the back. Then I thought, anyone who would put the 'on' switch on the back, where you can't find it, doesn't do any good for my psyche. The one time I did get the computer on, I couldn't turn the damn thing off!

Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.

The aim of industrialization has always been to replace people with machines or other technology, to make the cost of production as low as possible, to sell the product as high as possible, and to move the wealth into fewer and fewer hands.

When human beings lose their connection to nature, to heaven and earth, then they do not know how to nurture their environmect or how to rule their world - which is saying the same thing. Human beings destroy their ecology at the same time that they destroy one another. From that perspective, healing our society goes hand in hand with healing our personal, elemental connection with the phenomenal world.

I'm one of those people that if you're told that if you put your hand in the fire, you'll burn your hand, I won't listen.

When you are in accord with nature, nature will yield its bounty. This is something that is coming up in our own consciousness now...recognizi ng that by violating the environment in which we are living, we are really cutting off the energy and source of our own living. And it’s this sense of accord, so that living properly in relation to what has to be done in this world one fosters the vitality of the environment.

A sustainable human community is designed in such a manner that its ways of life, technologies, and social institutions honor, support, and cooperate with nature's inherent ability to sustain life.

People always think of technology as something having silicon in it. But a pencil is technology. Any language is technology. Technology is a tool we use to accomplish a particular task and when one talks about appropriate technology in developing countries, appropriate may mean anything from fire to solar electricity.

Astonishingly, at some point, a sputtering torch was thrust into her hands. Alma did not see who gave it to her. She had never before been entrusted with fire. The torch spit sparks and sent chunks of flaming tar spinning into the air behind her as she bolted across the cosmos-the only body in the heavens who was not held to a strict elliptical path. Nobody stopped her. She was a comet. She did not know that she was not flying.

The future will belong to the nature-smart...Th e more high-tech we become, the more nature we need.

People in the future look back on primitive machinery or technology or painting, and in some ways, it always seems amazingly intricate and finely wrought.

The fact that we have not yet found the slightest evidence for life - much less intelligence - beyond this Earth does not surprise or disappoint me in the least. Our technology must still be laughably primitive, we may be like jungle savages listening for the throbbing of tom-toms while the ether around them carries more words per second than they could utter in a lifetime.

Once fire was discovered, the instinct for improvement made men bring food to it. First to dry it, then to put it on the coals to cook.

If you put your hand into a fire, does anyone have to tell you to move it? Do you have to decide? No: When your hand starts to burn, it moves. You don’t have to direct it; the hand moves itself. In the same way, once you understand, through inquiry, that an untrue thought causes suffering, you move away from it.

As for you, Private, if you mention a word of this to anyone, I'll feed you to the cat thing here. Understand?" "Yum," said Mogget. "Yes, sir!" mumbled the telephone operator, his hands shaking as he tried to smother the burning wreckage of his switchboard with a fire blanket.

I believe that man is the product of natural evolution that is born from the conflict of being a prisoner and separated from nature, and from the need to find unity and harmony with it.

How about Pithecanthropus Erectus? Was it really he who ate the apple? Or was it Homo Pekiniensis?