24 quotes
Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.
Dark Age Ahead (2004)
To science, not even the bark of a tree or a drop of pond water is dull or a handful of dirt banal. They all arouse awe and wonder.
Dark Age Ahead (2004)
Redundancy is expensive but indispensable.
Dark Age Ahead (2004)
Virtually all ideologues, of any variety, are fearful and insecure, which is why they are drawn to ideologies that promise prefabricated answers for all circumstances.
Dark Age Ahead (2004)
Subsidiarity is the principle that government works best — most responsibly and responsively — when it is closest to the people it serves and the needs it addresses.
Dark Age Ahead (2004)
This is both a gloomy and a hopeful book.
Dark Age Ahead (2004)
Beneficent spirals, operating by benign feedback, mean that everything needful is not required at once: each individual improvement is beneficial for the whole
Dark Age Ahead (2004)
A region is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961)
One wonders at the docility of the students who evidently must be satisfied enough with the credentials to be uncaring about the lack of education.
Dark Age Ahead (2004)
In wretched outcomes, the devil is in the details.
Dark Age Ahead (2004)
I would spend a nickel on the subway and go arbitrarily to some other stop and look around there.
Privately run jails are a mark of American "reinvented government" that has been picked up by neoconservatives in Canada.
Dark Age Ahead (2004)
Credentialing, not education, has become the primary business of North American universities.
Dark Age Ahead (2004)
Advanced cultures are usually sophisticated enough, or have been sophisticated enough at some point in their pasts, to realize that foxes shouldn't be relied on to guard henhouses.
Dark Age Ahead (2004)
I was brought up to believe that there is no virtue in conforming meekly to the dominant opinion of the moment.
Political questionnaire response (1952)
I had put a nickel in and just invested something.
I have learned yet again (this has been going on all my life) what folly it is to take any thing for granted without examining it skeptically.
Dark Age Ahead (2004)
But in North America we live in a graveyard of lost aboriginal cultures, many of which were decisively finished off by mass amnesia in which even the memory of what was lost was also lost.
Dark Age Ahead (2004)
I did have an inkling that I was going to be a writer. That was my intention.
While politicians, clergy, creators of advertisements, and other worthies assert stoutly that the family is the foundation of society, the nuclear family, as an institution, is currently in grave trouble.
Dark Age Ahead (2004)