"I think a lot of us are increasingly recognizing that the dominant culture is killing the planet,"

"Civilization is not and can never be sustainable."

"I think it's very important for us to start to build a culture of resistance, because what we're doing isn't working, clearly."

"There is always money to kill people. There is never enough money for life affirming ends."

"If any thing can be predicated as universally true of uncultivated man, it is that he will not labour beyond what is absolutely necessary to maintain his existence."

"A language Older Than Words"

"Civilization can never be sustainable."

"A friend asked, "If increased awareness means less happiness, why bother?" No answer."

"A wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope doesn't kill you, nor did it make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems - you ceased hoping your problems somehow get solved, through the magical assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the Earth itself - and you just began doing what's necessary to solve your problems yourself."

"You can rarely prove something to someone who does not want to see it proven, and even more to the point, you can almost never prove something to someone who has financial or ideological reasons to not see it proven."

"But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here’s the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless."

"In sum, one of the primary things I learned was how to kill time. I learned also to wish away my life. I learned to give myself away."

"If your community is founded on an injustice, that injustice cannot be questioned."

"Many Indians have told me that the most basic difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that Westerners view the world as dead, and not as filled with speaking, thinking, feeling subjects as worthy and valuable as themselves."

"I waited for him to come out. He didn't. I considered going in after him, but knew the fact that I had readied myself to kill him did not mean that he had readied himself to die."

"I no longer see Descartes' statement as arbitrary. It is representative of our culture's narcissism. This narcissism leads to a disturbing disrespect for direct experience and a negation of the body."

"I had broken the most basic commandment of our culture: Thou shalt pretend there is nothing wrong."

"Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless."

"There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists..."

"Violence, and evil, doesn't always come dressed in black, and it doesn't always look like Charles Manson. Nor does it always come to us as obvious and arrogant[...]. Often it comes to us with the simple plea to be reasonable."

"The only real job of a teacher, especially a writing teacher, is to help students find themselves."

"It's okay to be happy, it's okay to live your life exactly the way you want it... It's okay to find what makes you happy and then to fight for it. To dedicate your life to discovering who you are."

"The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment."

"I really love doing what I do, being an actor. It's the greatest. You can do it until you die."