William T Thompson Quotes & Sayings

But the time has come; the revelation has already occurred, and the guardian seers have seen the lightning strike the darkness we call reality. And now we sleep in the brief interval between the lightning and the thunder. — William Irwin Thompson

History is made up of "moral" judgments based on politics. We condemned Lenin's acceptance of money from the Germans in 1917 but were discreetly silent while our Colonel William B. Thompson in the same year contributed a million dollars to the anti-Bolsheviks in Russia. As allies of the Soviets in World War II we praised and cheered communist guerrilla tactics when the Russians used them against the Nazis during the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union; we denounce the same tactics when they are used by communist forces in different parts of the world against us. The opposition's means, used against us, are always immoral and our means are always ethical and rooted in the highest of human values. — Saul D. Alinsky

When we come to an edge we come to a frontier that tells us that we are now about to become more than we have been before. — William Irwin Thompson

There are some writers who sweep us along so strongly in their current of energy--Normal mailer, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, William F. Buckley, Jr., Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers--that we assume that when they go to work the words just flow. Nobody thinks of the effort they made every morning to turn on the switch. You also have to turn on the switch. Nobody is going to do it for you. — William Zinsser

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. — William Irwin Thompson

The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos. — William Irwin Thompson

There are authors I truly enjoy to read, like John Irving and Don Delillo and Vollman and Hubert Selby Jr. and Hunter S. Thompson. And then there are writers that, while I enjoy their work, I read as a challenge to myself, to sharpen my knives, like Goethe or Genet or Faulkner or Joyce or Salinger. And I have a terrible weakness for music biographies. They are the best books to take on the road. I don't even have to like the band to enjoy the book. Want a wonderful literary anecdote? And watch your toes, because I'm dropping names like bricks. My favorite book of all time is Among The Dead by Michael Tolkin. Wonderful, dark, funny book. — Sammy Winston

Fairy tales and myths are forms of cultural storage for the natural history of life. — William Irwin Thompson

We are the climactic generation of human cultural evolution, and in the microcosm of our lives the macrocosm of the evolution of the human race is playing itself out. — William Irwin Thompson

Like a shadow that does not permit us to jump over it, but moves with us to maintain its proper distance, pollution is nature's answer to culture. When we have learned to recycle pollution into potent information, we will have passed over completely into the new cultural ecology. — William Irwin Thompson

We are none of us infallible not even the youngest of us. — William Hepworth Thompson

The acid test is that all paranoids and fundamentalists lack a sense of humor, for humor is a chaos flux and flexibility, of ambiguity and multi-dimensionality, and that kind of erotic liveliness is precisely what the fundamentalist is trying to eliminate in holding rigidly to doctrine. — William Irwin Thompson

If you do not create your destiny, you will have your fate inflicted upon you. — William Irwin Thompson

It is my place to remind you of the rules," Stefan said, his voice even. "You, William Frost, have chosen three against three. Two fighters, with you as the captain of yours, and Marsilia as the captain of hers, with the other two participants on either side yet to be chosen. The fight is to the death of the captains."
"Excuse me," I said diffidently. "But both the captains are already dead."
Everyone looked at me. The vampires with cold, unfriendly gazes, and Honey as if I were crazy. That was okay - because I was utterly crazy. — Patricia Briggs

In a world in which men write thousands of books and one million scientific papers a year, the mythic bricoleur is the man who plays with all that information and hears a music inside the noise. — William Irwin Thompson

Life as Hunter Thompson's mother was no weenie roast. — William McKeen

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. — William Irwin Thompson

Some god or Weltgeist has been making a movie out of us for the past six thousand years, and now we have turned a corner on the movie set of reality and have discovered the boards propping up the two-dimensional monuments of human history. The movement of humanism has reached its limit, and now at that limit it is breaking apart into the opposites of mechanism and mysticism and moving along the circumference of a vast new sphere of posthuman thought. — William Irwin Thompson

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. — William Irwin Thompson

It is not enough to raise consciousness. One must lower the spirit into the earth to embody a change in things as basic as food, shelter, and livelihood. — William Irwin Thompson

The planets are not hunks of stuff out there but nodes of vibration that resonate in multiple dimensions that enfold themselves into one another in patterns of complex recursiveness in which Sun, Moon, and Saturn are also modalities of Earth. — William Irwin Thompson

If a person is open to a new world view, it can often mean that he is not firmly rooted in the reality of the old world view; as a lunatic or alienated artist, his own neurotic traits can become magnified as they tremble with the new energy pouring in from the universal source. — William Irwin Thompson

I don't think anyone now really understands the planetisation of mankind, really understands the new world order emerging through all this period of strain and pain and contradiction, so more than ever, we need to have an internal sense of navigation. — William Irwin Thompson

It should be possible to say that there really is such as thing as "genius" and that what it is, is precisely a surprising and unexpected movement away from collective patterns of behavior and received wisdom. — William Irwin Thompson

What is at the higher levels of meaning consciousness is like a hyperspace in which each point is equidistant from the other and where 'the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere'? The mythologies of the occult seem like baroque music: there is an overall similar quality of sound and movement, but, upon examination, each piece of music is unique; Vivaldi and Scarlatti are similar and different. — William Irwin Thompson

What time he can spare from the adornment of his person he devotes to the neglect of his duties. — William Hepworth Thompson

The actors are organizations, not individuals. Individuals do the actual fighting, but they fight on behalf of a larger collective political unit, under the direction and coordination of political and/or military leaders, to advance the goals of the collectivity, or at least of its leadership. An individual who acts on his own to kill a border guard, or who crosses a border to kill citizens of another political system, is not engaging in war. But if that individual is part of a political system's formal military organization, and that military organization engages in a sustained campaign of violence against the military organization of another state or another organized group, we would call it a war. — William R. Thompson

I regret that my coauthors and I omitted statistically significant information in our 2004 article published in the journal Pediatrics. The omitted data suggested that African American males who received the MMR vaccine before age 36 months were at increased risk for autism. Decisions were made regarding which findings to report after the data were collected, and I believe that the final study protocol was not followed. — William Thompson

Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose. — William Irwin Thompson

The future is beyond knowing, but the present is beyond belief. — William Irwin Thompson

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. — William Irwin Thompson

The real secret to freedom seems to lie in the ability to deal with ambiguity, the capacity to tolerate noise and yet hear within its wild randomizing abandon the possibilities of innovation and transformations. — William Thompson

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. — William Irwin Thompson

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. — William Irwin Thompson