William Irwin Thompson Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

- 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

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

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

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

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

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

- William Irwin Thompson

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

- 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

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

- William Irwin Thompson