John Zerzan Quotes

Republicans don't want to shrink government. They want more and more military, more and more surveillance. They'd like to have the government banning gay marriage and so forth.

I do what I do and hope that it might connect with people who are thinking along the same lines.

The largely hidden key to the symbolic world is time; indeed it is at the origin of human symbolic activity. Time thus occasions the first alienation, the route away from aboriginal richness and wholeness.

If we once, and for so long, lived in balance with nature and each other, we should be able to do so again.

Mass society has displaced real community, where people function together and account for their own lives.

We live in an era with no real sense of community or connection to nature.

The pleasure of authenticity exists only against the grain of society.

"The people" aren't running anything. That's why technology has replaced politics as the source of ideology. The ideological claims are hollow and absurd, and nobody believes them anymore.

We can either passively continue on the road to utter domestication and destruction or turn in the direction of joyful upheaval, passionate and feral embrace of wildness and life that aims at dancing on the ruins of clocks, computers and that failure of imagination and will called work. Can we justify our lives by anything less than such a politics of rage and dreams?

Never before have people been so infantalized, made so dependant on the machine for everything; as the earth rapidly approaches its extinction due to technology, our souls are shrunk and flattened by its pervasive rule. Any sense of wholeness and freedom can only return by the undoing of the massive division of labour at the heart of technological progress. This is the liberatory project in all its depth.

I don't think it could be a coincidence that the more technological a society is, the less it connects people.

If you have a problem in mass society, you call the cops. The experts. You no longer have any operative connection with yourself or others, or with a functioning community.

Everyone can feel the nothingness, the void, just beneath the surface of everyday routines and securities.

We don't need more stupid ideas.

The more the society becomes a technological society, the less it has to hold itself together.

I think pushing the ideas is important. I wouldn't say it's more important than action. You can't really separate the two.

There's a hollowness to civilized life. It doesn't appeal to people, and some people react with extreme violence.

If we once and for so long lived in balance with nature and each other, we should be able to do so again. The catastrophe that's overtaking us has deep roots, but our previous state of natural anarchy reaches much further into our shared history .