[A]ny species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion.

Our schools are much like our prisons: they disappoint us because they only do what they're designed to do, and it annoys us that they don't do something else!

You've been in love with someone for a decade - someone who barely knows you're alive. You've done everything, tried everything to make this person see that you're a valuable, estimable person, and that your love is worth something. Then one day you open the paper and glance at the Personals column, and there you see that your loved one has placed an ad... seeking someone worthwhile to love and be loved by.

We've poured our poisons into the world as though it were a bottomless pit.. and we go on gobbling them up. It's hard to imagine how the world could survive another century of this abuse, but nobody's really doing anything about it. It's a problem our children will have to solve, or their children.

There is a difference between the inmates of your criminal prisons and the inmates of your cultural prison: The former understand that the distribution of wealth and power inside the prison had nothing to do with justice.

Man's destiny was to conquer and rule the world, and this is what he's done.. almost. He hasn't quite made it, and it looks as though this may be his undoing. The problem is that man's conquest of the world has itself devastated the world. And in spite of all the mastery we've attained, we don't have enough mastery to stop devastating the world.. or to repair the devastation we've already wrought.

But why? Why do you need prophets to tell you how you ought to live? Why do you need anyone to tell you how you ought to live