Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again to the people of your culture, you’ll never stop being conscious of it. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you’ll be tempted to say to the people around you, “how can you listen to this stuff and not recognize it for what it is?

Far and away the most futile admonition Christ ever offered was when he said, 'Have no care for tomorrow. Don't worry about whether you're going to have something to eat. Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, but God takes perfect care of them. Don't you think he'll do the same for you?' In our culture the overwhelming answer to that question is, 'Hell no!' Even the most dedicated monastics saw to their sowing and reaping and gathering into barns.

[T]he price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.

If the world was made for us, then it BELONGS to us and we can do what we damn well please with it.

The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison.

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.

If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual - "Ishmael