William Irwin Thompson Quotes


"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
(Related: Change, Science, Civilization, Universe, Years)

"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."
- William Irwin Thompson
(Related: Work, History, Performance, Being, Culture, Past)

"The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos."
- William Irwin Thompson
(Related: Science, Nature, Control, Purpose, Chaos, Effect, Unconscious)

"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
(Related: Imagination, Actions, Feeling, Karma, Thinking, Unconscious)

"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."
- William Irwin Thompson
(Related: Food, Thought, Development, Road)

"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."
- William Irwin Thompson
(Related: Intelligence, Mistake, Consequences, Culture, Now)

"If you do not create your destiny, you will have your fate inflicted upon you."
- William Irwin Thompson
(Related: Destiny, Fate, Will)

"Ideologies do not map the complete living processes of a World."
- William Irwin Thompson
(Related: Living, 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."
- William Irwin Thompson
(Related: Love, Chaos, Idealism, Order)

"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."
- William Irwin Thompson
(Related: Ideology, Unconscious, World)

"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
(Related: Change, Time, Evolution, Language, Years)

"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
(Related: Life, Time, Culture, Evolution, First, Mind, Now)

"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
(Related: Imagination, Failure, Catastrophes)

"In the domain of cops and robbers, an interdiction serves to structure a black market and a shadow economy."
- William Irwin Thompson
(Related: Economy, Shadow)

"Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose."
- William Irwin Thompson
(Related: Purpose, Unconscious)