8 Quotes by Kirkpatrick Sale

The concerns and methods vary, but there is to it all, at bottom, a message that is unmistakably Luddistic: beware the technological juggernaut, reckon the terrible costs, understand the worlds being lost in the world being gained, reflect on the price of the machine and its systems on your life, pay attention to the natural world and its increasing destruction, resist the seductive catastrophe of industrialism.

I want to leave my country without leaving my home.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.