Quotes by William Thompson

• We are none of us infallible not even the youngest of us.
• What time he can spare from the adornment of his person he devotes to the neglect of his duties.
• The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.
• 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.
• The teacher of history's work should be, ideally, not simply a description of past cultures, but a performance of the culture in which we live and are increasingly taking our being.
• The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• If you do not create your destiny, you will have your fate inflicted upon you.
• Ideologies do not map the complete living processes of a World.
• 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.
• A World is not an ideology nor a scientific institution, nor is it even a system of ideologies; rather, it is a structure of unconscious relations and symbiotic processes.
• Hominid and human evolution took place over millions and not billions of years, but with the emergence of language there was a further acceleration of time and the rate of change.
• 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.
• 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.
• In the domain of cops and robbers, an interdiction serves to structure a black market and a shadow economy.
• Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose.
• Life is like a camera; focus on what’s important, capture the good times, develop from the negative, and if things don’t work out, just take another shot!