Kirkpatrick Sale Quotes

• That is certainly the point: when the human species was born, on the African savanna, life was pretty good; we could live in harmony with the rest of nature, and that's what I've been calling Eden. The only technologies that humans devised for some 2 million years were fire and the hand ax. That's all. Eden didn't need anything more

  Kirkpatrick Sale

  Technology, Fire, Hands

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

  11 Copy quote

• So the technology that does the least alteration of nature, the least harm to other species and systems, and provides the greatest intimacy of human with nature, is the best. We could make a scale with that in mind, and judge any technology by its place on that scale: speech and eyeglasses, say, would rank low; nuclear bombs and coal plants, high.

  Kirkpatrick Sale

  Technology, Eyeglasses, Judging

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

  9 Copy quote

• Governments, existing primarily to protect and enhance capitalism, maintain their power through the use of technologies that control the populace - by bread or circuses, by war or schooling, by armies and police, all of which are enabled and empowered by technology. That is what we might call the stick part of capitalism, while the riches-for-the-few is the carrot.

  Kirkpatrick Sale

  War, Army, Technology

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

  4 Copy quote

• My analysis, especially of the computer revolution, always comes back to capitalism. It's that economic system that has led to Western civilization's willingness to enslave ourselves to machines - because some people benefit enormously from it, while the costs are borne by other people and the planet.

  Kirkpatrick Sale

  Civilization, People, Analysis

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

  6 Copy quote

• It's from love and knowledge of nature that any sensible understanding must come. Technology is essentially antagonistic to nature - that in fact is why it's created, to do something to or with nature that wasn't there before, that wasn't natural.

  Kirkpatrick Sale

  Technology, Understanding, Facts

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

  8 Copy quote

• Everyone is shy - it is the inborn modesty that makes us able to live in harmony with other creatures and our fellows. Achievement comes not by denying shyness but, occasionally, by setting it aside and letting pride and perspiration come first.

  Kirkpatrick Sale

  Inspirational, Motivational, Pride

  14 Copy quote

• I want to leave my country without leaving my home.

  Kirkpatrick Sale

  Country, Home, Leaving

  4 Copy quote

• The virtue of small government is that the mistakes are small as well...If you want to leave a nation you think is corrupt, inefficient, militaristic, oppressive, repressive, but you don't want to move to Canada or France, what do you do? Well, the way is through secession, where you could stay home and be where you want to be.

  Kirkpatrick Sale

  Mistake, Moving, Home

  11 Copy quote

• When I speak of knowledge of nature, I do not mean industrial science, which argues that nature is inert and can be understood only to enable humans to manipulate it. I mean that sense of nature that Aldo Leopold had in mind when he said, "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community, wrong when it tends otherwise.

  Kirkpatrick Sale

  Integrity, Mean, Community

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

  4 Copy quote

• I'm convinced that the catastrophes of the next two decades will be so vast as to bring about a world where life, if it survives, will be far simpler - and the technologies, too. Then we will have come full circle to something like life on the savanna.

  Kirkpatrick Sale

  Technology, Circles, Two

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

  4 Copy quote

• Economic and social misery increases in direct proportion to the size and power of the central government of a nation or state.

  Kirkpatrick Sale

  Government, Size, Misery

  Kirkpatrick Sale (2017). “Human Scale Revisited: A New Look at the Classic Case for a Decentralist Future”, p.64, Chelsea Green Publishing

  7 Copy quote

• That is the onslaught. It has been going on a long time, I argue, but in the 20th century humans have certainly perfected it, extending domination to every single corner of the earth and our Homo sapiens population to more than 6 billion - until no place is untouched by despoliation.

  Kirkpatrick Sale

  Long, Population, Earth

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

  4 Copy quote

• And it was only when we invented the spear and began roaming the planet that technologies got complex and central to human survival.

  Kirkpatrick Sale

  Technology, Survival, Roaming

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

  7 Copy quote

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