Men are born human. What they must learn is to be an animal. If they learn otherwise it may kill them, and kill life on the planet.

The desert sky is encircling, majestic, terrible.

To the desert go profits and hermits, through deserts go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality.

Careless of waste, wallowing in refuse, exterminating the enemies . . . despising age, denying human natural history, fabricating pseudotraditions, swamped in the repeated personal crises of the aging preadolescent; all are familiar images of American society. They are signs of private nightmares of incoherence and disorder in broken climaxes where technologies in pursuit of mastery create ever-worsening problems - private nightmares expanded to a social level.

Men are born human. What they must learn is to be an animal. If they learn otherwise it may kill them, and kill life on the planet.

The human cardiovascular system evolved as part of the physiology of [prehistoric] hunters, who ran for their lives.

All around us, aspects of the modern world - diet, exercise, medicine, art, work, family, philosophy, economics, ecology, psychology - have begun a long circle back toward their former coherence. Whether they can arrive before the natural world is damaged beyond repair and madness destroys humanity, we cannot tell.