Ronald Wright Quotes & Sayings

Soon after man shows up in new lands, the big game starts to go missing. [ ... ] A bad smell of extinction follows Home sapiens around the world. (37) — Ronald Wright

The most compelling reason for reforming our system is that the system is in no one's interest. It is a suicide machine. — Ronald Wright

Like most problems with technology, pollution is a problem of scale. The biosphere might have been able to tolerate our dirty old friends coal and oil if we burned them gradually, but how long can it withstand a blaze of consumption so frenzied that the dark size of this planet glows like a fanned ember in the night of space. — Ronald Wright

If civilization is to survive, it must live on the interest, not the capital, of nature. — Ronald Wright

Societies that do not eat people are fascinated by those that do. — Ronald Wright

Our word "lord" comes from the Old English hlaford, or "loafward," he who guarded the bread supply - and was expected to share it. — Ronald Wright

Like all creatures, humans have made their way in the world by trial and error. Unlike other creatures we have a presence so colossal that error is a luxury we can no longer afford. The world has grown too small to forgive us any big mistakes. — Ronald Wright

Civilization is an experiment, a very recent way of life in the human career, and it has a habit of walking into what I am calling progress traps. A small village on good land beside a river is a good idea; but when the village grows into a city and paves over the good land, it becomes a bad idea. While prevention might have been easy, a cure may be impossible: a city isn't easily moved. This human inability to foresee
or to watch out for
long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed, and foolishness encouraged by the shape of the social pyramid. The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to prosper in darkening times long after the environment and general populace begin to suffer. (109) — Ronald Wright

Benjamin Disraeli had anticipated Erewhon's fears in his novel Coningsby: "The mystery of mysteries," he wrote, "is to view machines making machines, a spectacle that fills the mind with curious and even awful speculation. — Ronald Wright

America seemed a virgin land waiting for civilization. But Europe had made the wilderness it found; America was not a virgin, she was a widow. — Ronald Wright

Our main difference from chimps and gorillas is that over the last 3 million years or so, we have been shaped less and less by nature, and more and more by culture. We have become experimental creatures of our own making. This experiment has never been tried before. And we, its unwitting authors, have never controlled it. The experiment is now moving very quickly and on a colossal scale. Since the early 1900s, the world's population has multiplied by four and its economy - a rough measure of the human load on nature - by more than forty. We have reached a stage where we must bring the experiment under rational control, and guard against present and potential dangers. It's entirely up to us. If we fail - if we blow up or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us - nature will merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun for a while but in the end a bad idea. — Ronald Wright

In times of war or crisis, power is easily stolen from the many by the few on a promise of security. The more elusive the or imaginary the foe, the better for manufacturing consent. — Ronald Wright

Even today, some opt for the comforts of mystification, preferring to believe that the wonders of the ancient world were built by Atlanteans, gods, or space travelers, instead of by thousands toiling in the sun. Such thinking robs our forerunners of their due, and us of their experience. Because then one can believe whatever one likes about the past - without having to confront the bones, potsherds, and inscriptions which tell us that people all over the world, time and again, have made similar advances and mistakes. — Ronald Wright

Each time history repeats itself, the price goes up. — Ronald Wright

Capitalism lures us onward like the mechanical hare before the greyhounds,
insisting that the economy is infinite and sharing therefore irrelevant. Just enough greyhounds catch a
real hare now and then to keep the others running till they drop. In the past it was only the poor who
lost this game; now it is the planet. — Ronald Wright

Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. — Ronald Wright

People afraid of outsiders are easily manipulated. The warrior caste, supposedly society's protectors, often become protection racketeers. In times of war or crisis, power is easily stolen from the many by the few on a promise of security. The more elusive or imaginary the foe, the better for manufacturing consent. The Inquisition did a roaring trade against the Devil. — Ronald Wright

To use a computer analogy, we are running twenty-first-century software on hardware last upgraded 50,000 years ago or more. This may explain quite a lot of what we see in the news. — Ronald Wright

Our practical faith in progress has ramified and hardened into an ideology
a secular religion which, like the religions that progress has challenged, is blind to certain flaws in its credentials. Progress, therefore, has become 'myth' in the anthropological sense. By this I do not mean a belief that is flimsy or untrue. Successful myths are powerful and often partly true. [ ... ] The myth of progress has sometimes served us well
those of us seated at the best tables, anyway
and may continue to do so. [ ... ] Progress has an internal logic that can lead beyond reason to catastrophe. (4-5) — Ronald Wright

kin, not ancestors. Our main difference from — Ronald Wright