Very few people can communicate with one another. The only language that's not subject to interpretation is mathematics, chemistry, basic science, engineering principles, and applied agriculture. But other than that, many systems today are subject to interpretation.
If you remain conventional and don't change, you'll get along. You'll get along in the limited forms of insanity that exist out there. You'll never be able to keep a marriage together, you'll never be able to keep anything together, because the whole goddamn thing isn't together.
There is no such thing as beauty. If your culture says, 'This is a beautiful girl,' that's within the framework of your culture. If you're brought up in an island where people have pointed heads, that would be 'beautiful' in your terms. All these mythological structures is what gets us into trouble; the artificiality of our values that get us into trouble.
Notions of Good and Evil depend entirely on social context. It is not that people are good or bad, they are raised in an aberrant or twisted environment.
Lack of education turns soldiers into killing machines.
Earth is abundant with plentiful resources. Our practice of rationing resources through monetary control is no longer relevant and is counter-productive to our survival.
You really don't want a job. What you want is access to those things you'd like to have.
Perhaps the most significant thing a person can know about himself is to understand his own system of values. Almost every thing we do is a reflection of our own personal value system. What do we mean by values? Our values are what we want out of life. No one is born with a set of values. Except for our basic physiological needs such as air, water, and food, most of our values are acquired after birth.
If nations join together now, before the big collapse and share their resources, they can maintain a level of sustainability. Sustain the people that is, and not banks and businesses.
In the future, in a saner system, we would design products not to wear out and break down; to last as long as possible, so that the responsibility of the service sector would not be overloaded.
Social change cannot come above the intellect, it comes about by people suffering. And the more people are related to that, the more they lose respect for an existing government. They will seek another direction. If there are too many people who seek a new direction, then the existing government calls upon the army and police to manage society – that is called fascism.
Politics was good a hundred years ago. Today, politicians have no ability to solve any problems because they are not students of behavior. They are not students of agriculture, oceanography - they know nothing about the factors that operate the world.
You have to tell your children about the world they live in, about the discrepancies, about the things that don't work… So you have to bring it up with a scientific orientation so they learn to ask questions, and learn how to say the most difficult thing in the world: 'I don't know'.
If we really wish to put an end to our ongoing international and social problems we must eventually declare Earth and all of its resources as the common heritage of all the world's people.
Whatever happens in the world is real, what one thinks should have happened is projection. We suffer more from our fictitious illusion and expectations of reality.
If we are genuinely concerned about the environment and the fellow human beings, and want to end territorial disputes, war, crime, poverty, hunger, and the other problems that confront us today, the intelligent use of science and technology are the tools with which to achieve a new direction – one that will serve all people, and not just a select few.
Science and education, when devoid of a social conscience or environmental and human concern, are meaningless.
The Venus Project is a translation of all religions: The end of war, the end of poverty, the brotherhood of humanity. If that isn't spiritual, like I've said before, I don't know what is.
Wiser, never wise. Smarter, never smart.
Living through the 1929 Great Depression helped shape my social conscience. During this time, I realized the earth was still the same place, manufacturing plants were still intact, and resources were still there, but people didn’t have money to buy the products. I felt the rules of the game we play by were outmoded and damaging. This began a life-long quest resulting in the conclusions and designs presented in The Venus Project.
I am afraid to live in the society we live in today. Our society cannot be maintained by this type of incompetency.
Learning to be flexible in values takes a very long time...Of course I felt a little uncomfortable during questioning the concept of God, but then reading about the history and evolution of Gods. There were many different Gods: the God of war, the God of peace, the God of love, which was more like the people that invented them. They behaved, they got angry, they made sacrifices, they created floods when they didn't like the way things are going. This didn't come through as superior intelligence.
We must learn to outgrow our egos in exchange for constructive dialogue rather than debate. In addition, we must be capable of stating problems and proposing solutions clearly and succinctly, without distortion of meaning or misunderstanding, even when these solutions are radically opposed to accepted norms.
Every action and decision we take – or don’t – ripples into the future. For the first time we have the capability, the technology, and the knowledge to direct these ripples.
Let's teach our children to be thinkers.
