Quotes by William Irwin Thompson

About William Irwin Thompson:

William Irwin Thompson is known primarily as a social philosopher and cultural critic, but he has also been writing and publishing poetry throughout his career and received the Oslo International Poetry Festival Award in 1986. He describes his writing and speaking style as "mind-jazz on ancient texts". He is the founder of the Lindisfarne Association.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

One way to find food for thought is to use the fork in the road, the bifurcation that marks the place of emergence in which a new line of development begins to branch off.

William Irwin Thompson

Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe.

William Irwin Thompson

The teacher of history's work should be, ideally, not simply a description of past cultures, but a performance of the culture in which we live and are increasingly taking our being.

William Irwin Thompson

Hominid and human evolution took place over millions and not billions of years, but with the emergence of language there was a further acceleration of time and the rate of change.

William Irwin Thompson

With the emergence of civilization, the rate of change shifted from hundreds of thousands of years to millennia. With the emergence of science as a way of knowing the universe, the rate of change shifted to centuries.

William Irwin Thompson

Not all intelligence can be artificial now, so if we make a mistake, the consequences are no longer simply located within an institution or a national culture.

William Irwin Thompson

For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture.

William Irwin Thompson

The conscious process is reflected in the imagination; the unconscious process is expressed as karma, the generation of actions divorced from thinking and alienated from feeling.

William Irwin Thompson

The conscious purpose of science is control of Nature; its unconscious effect is disruption and chaos.

William Irwin Thompson

The more chaos there is, the more science holds on to abstract systems of control, and the more chaos is engendered.

William Irwin Thompson

Idealistic reformers are dangerous because their idealism has no roots in love, but is simply a hysterical and unbalanced rage for order amidst their own chaos.

William Irwin Thompson

If you do not create your destiny, you will have your fate inflicted upon you.

William Irwin Thompson

A World is not an ideology nor a scientific institution, nor is it even a system of ideologies; rather, it is a structure of unconscious relations and symbiotic processes.

William Irwin Thompson

Ideologies do not map the complete living processes of a World.

William Irwin Thompson

In the domain of cops and robbers, an interdiction serves to structure a black market and a shadow economy.

William Irwin Thompson

Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose.

William Irwin Thompson

Author Bio

  • NameWilliam Irwin Thompson
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • Born1938
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionHistorian; Novelist