Jacque Fresco Quotes

Our customs, behaviors, and values are byproducts of our culture.

If you make a movie of the present day culture, in the future it'll be a horror film.

The Venus Project is neither Utopian nor Orwellian, nor does it reflect the dreams of impractical idealists. Instead, it presents attainable goals requiring only the intelligent application of what we already know. The only limitations are those which we impose upon ourselves.

What will drive people if they don't have money or reward? The reward is the end of war, the end of poverty, most crime, and the end of begging for medical care. Everyone will be cared for and educated. There will be no taxation, and no advantage group. No technical elitism, or any other kind of elitism. If that isn't incentive enough, then I don't know what is.

I don't get upset if people think I'm crazy. If you go to a mental hospital and someone calls you a name, would you get upset? Of course not. Well, that's the way I think about the world. They don't know any better.

If technology does not liberate all people for the pursuit of higher aspirations in human achievement, then all its technical potential will be meaningless.

It takes a different value system if you wish to change the world.

If you had a free society you couldn't get people to go to war, if you had an intelligent type of upbringing in ones children. They would say; There must be many other ways of solving problems other then killing people.

I didn't want to teach my kid how to read, so I used to read to him at night and close the book at the most interesting part. He said, “What happened then, daddy?” I said, “If you learn to read, you can find out. I'm too tired to read. I'll read to you tomorrow.” So, he had a need to want to learn how to read. Don't teach children how to read. Don't teach them mathematics. Give them a reason to want it. In school, they're working ass-backwards.

I was asked once,'your a smart man,why arnt you rich?I replied 'your a rich man,why arnt you smart?

Let's teach our children to be thinkers.

We could either develop paradise on Earth or oblivion; wipe ourselves out, only the future will tell. It's what you do to make the future.

Much of a behavior acceptable today would be socially offensive in a saner or more logical arrangement.

When somebody asks, 'Whats the answer to all of these questions?' that's absurd. There is no answer, there are answers, along the way.

Anthropology studies different cultures; mainly primitive, but it doesn't think its own culture is primitive, unfortunately. There is no field that you can study today that isn't trapped in the culture in some way. It's hard to escape your culture.

Earth is abundant with plentiful resources. Our practice of rationing resources through monetary control is no longer relevant and is counter-productive to our survival.

Crime is based upon need, making money. People sell drugs to make money. But if everybody is cared for, they don't sell drugs and if there's no money you can't sell drugs even if you wanted to. There'd be no such thing as gambling, prostitution, or selling out, or paying off a senator or a governor. There are no senators, there are no governors so you can't pay them off. If you take away the basis or the condition that generate abhorrent behavior, you don't have abhorrent behavior.

Learning to be flexible in values takes a very long time...Of course I felt a little uncomfortable during questioning the concept of God, but then reading about the history and evolution of Gods. There were many different Gods: the God of war, the God of peace, the God of love, which was more like the people that invented them. They behaved, they got angry, they made sacrifices, they created floods when they didn't like the way things are going. This didn't come through as superior intelligence.

To be human is to care for your fellow human beings and protecting the environment.

If you're shipwrecked on an island with 10 million dollars and your wife has gold and diamonds, but there's no water, no arable land, no fish, you have nothing. Money is a 'nothing' thing.

It is not that people are evil or greedy. The conditions that socially support the system force us to behave in socially offensive ways.

There is no way you can think outside of your culture.

We talk about civilization as though it's a static state. There are no civilized people yet, it's a process that's constantly going on... As long as you have war, police, prisons, crime, you are in the early stages of civilization.

I have no notions of a perfect society, I don’t know what that means. I know we can do much better than what we’ve got, I’m no utopian, I’m not a humanist that would like to see everybody living in warmth and harmony: I know that if we don’t live that way, we’ll kill each other and destroy the Earth.

We can work out anything if we put our mind to it, study it, do hard work instead of finding simple answers

We are all victims of culture.

The teachings or the information in the Venus project is not what Jacque Fresco dictates. It’s first doing a survey of the carrying capacity of a given environment and maintaining a population in accordance of the Earth's resources, not Fresco's opinion.

Everything that you've learned: 'Make a lot of money, have a nice house'. But they never teach you at school how to relate, how to communicate with others, how to share values with others. ...They teach you how to make a living. You become an optometrist, he becomes a physicist, she becomes a structural engineer, he's an architect. In the future, none of that. Everybody is trained to be a generalist, so they understand different cultures, different values, how we get to be the way we are. So no-one can ever use you for war or killing anybody or hurting anybody

If nations join together now, before the big collapse and share their resources, they can maintain a level of sustainability. Sustain the people that is, and not banks and businesses.

Our problems are technical, not political

Instead of a pentagon, you have a lot of people that are trained in bridging the difference between nations. The pentagon would serve as an intermediate organization to bridge the difference between cultures.

Living through the 1929 Great Depression helped shape my social conscience. During this time, I realized the earth was still the same place, manufacturing plants were still intact, and resources were still there, but people didn’t have money to buy the products. I felt the rules of the game we play by were outmoded and damaging. This began a life-long quest resulting in the conclusions and designs presented in The Venus Project.

The intelligent use of science and technology are the tools with which to achieve a new direction.

We must look at alternatives objectively, and not try to fit the future into our present social mould.

You really don't want a job. What you want is access to those things you'd like to have.

The majority of the people of the world today are unsane, not insane, unsane meaning having been exposed to methods of evaluation that have long rendered obsolete.

Architects are mostly self-centered and their buildings express their ego. [They are] not social buildings to make it more comfortable for people - to make life better for people. The cities have to be designed so people can get together and talk with one another.

Social change cannot come above the intellect, it comes about by people suffering. And the more people are related to that, the more they lose respect for an existing government. They will seek another direction. If there are too many people who seek a new direction, then the existing government calls upon the army and police to manage society – that is called fascism.

Armies are created to protect an established system, not people. In the future, an educated humanity will not stand for war.

There are no negro problems, or Polish problems, or Jewish problems, or Greek problems, or women's problems, there are HUMAN PROBLEMS”.

Politics is an obsolete way of doing things. Although it was good a hundred years ago, it has no place in today's high tech society.

We must learn to outgrow our egos in exchange for constructive dialogue rather than debate. In addition, we must be capable of stating problems and proposing solutions clearly and succinctly, without distortion of meaning or misunderstanding, even when these solutions are radically opposed to accepted norms.

There's no such thing as designing the perfect utopian city. Everything is subject to change. There are no final frontiers.

The original intent of laws was to get the masses of people to accept the limitations superimposed upon them as being the result of their own misbehavior.

In a monetary system, most of us live near our work with a house, car, and lifestyle we can afford (or, all too often, cannot afford), rather than the one we prefer. We are only as free as our purchasing power permits. Even many wealthy people today select a residence mainly to impress others with their status. Lacking a true sense of self worth, many live to impress others.

You can never design the best city, but you can design the best city you know how to design at this time.

You cannot approach people who think differently with reason and logic if they don't know what that means. First, you have to appeal to their values to start with. If you attack them, you lose them.

Money is only important in a society when certain resources for survival must be rationed and the people accept money as an exchange medium for the scarce resources. Money is a social convention, an agreement if you will. It is neither a natural resource nor does it represent one. It is not necessary for survival unless we have been conditioned to accept it as such.