Jacque Fresco Quotes - Page 6

You cannot advocate decency and ethics, you must design the conditions that eliminate the problems. In scarcity, people will tend to steal. If you make things available, people tend not to steal.

People will continue to search for answers to universal and perplexing problems. But to find meaningful answers, one must first know what questions to ask.

I was asked once,'your a smart man,why arnt you rich?I replied 'your a rich man,why arnt you smart?

You don't see the plug connected to the environment, so it looks like we're free, wandering around. Take the oxygen away, we all die immediately. Take plant life away, we die. And without the sun, all the plants die. So we are connected.

The Venus Project is not about new cities or new architecture. It's about a way of thinking

Our customs, behaviors, and values are byproducts of our culture.

When you think, you think in terms of your culture.

If there's a group like Amish people, that want to live their own lifestyle – they don't want to live in our city – they want to live out in the country, with their own projects. We’ll put up the buildings for them, design the buildings for them, design the food production systems for them – if they want us to. But we don’t control them.

Once you accept the fact that people have 'individual choices' and they're 'free' to make those choices. Free to make choices means without being influenced and I can't understand that at all. All of us are influenced in all our choices by the culture we live in, by our parents, and by the values that dominate. So, we're influenced. So there can't be free choices.

I asked myself, 'How are you going to change all these people, they have different values, different customs, different language, different interpretations?' So that’s the time I joined the Ku Klux Klan in Miami. The reason I joined is to see if I could change them. So I dissolved that organization in a month-and-a-half, alone. [Applause] Then I joined the White Citizen Council. The WCC hates foreigners – all foreigners. So I joined that organization; I dissolved it in one month.

Much of a behavior acceptable today would be socially offensive in a saner or more logical arrangement.

I'd declare all the world's resources as a common heritage of all the world's people and get them to join and become one nation who takes care of the environment, the earth, the atmosphere. I'd abolish all separate nations because they are all corrupt.

As long as you have war, police, prisons, crime, you are in the early stages of civilization.

It's hard to be decent in a money world. We want to shut down all repetitious jobs, automate it, free people.

You can't be conscious unless you have variable receptors... When people say the way I see the world is the way it is - that's ridiculous. We can only see it depending on the quality of our receptors and background.

You can teach people specific reasoning, such as how to fly a kite or build a wheel. General reasoning cannot be imparted upon people, particularly if they like things the way they are - meaning, if their reactions are very simple. The reason most people behave badly or poorly is because they only understand simple things.

The Venus Project is a concept that could happen today but it is not up to me, it depends on what others do to help bring it about.

Whatever I decide will not work. It's what people want that will work. So no one decided whether you become a vegetarian or anything else. What determines that is the availability of food. If we run out of vegetation due to floods or natural disasters, people will consume meat and if we run out of meat they will consume vegetables. I have no control over that. That would be up to people.

The social designs that are proposed in [The Venus Project] merely provide the opportunity for individuals to develop their fullest potential in whatever endeavor they choose without the fear of loss of individuality or submission to uniformity.

Don't forget - you're dealing with aberrated people. They're not responsible for their answers. They're victims of culture. That means they have been influenced by their culture.

It's wrong to criticize government without offering a possible alternative.

Most people don't put things together. Geologists study the surface of the earth and geological phenomena. Meteorogists study the weather. That isn't science. Science is the study of all things that affect human beings. They have to be together! A meteorologist has difficulty talking with a sociologist, because they don't understand each other. You can't teach sciences in 'bits'; you have to bring it all together. Science is a way of thinking - a way at arriving at conclusions without your own opinion in it.

War represents the supreme failure of nations to resolve their differences. From a strictly pragmatic standpoint, it is the most inefficient waste of lives and resources ever conceived.

Love is a fluxuating thing, not a fixed thing. That's why we don't understand what's happening.

If your values are not related to the Earth or realistic, you'll believe in things that aren't so, which will hurt you in the long run, and as a species, too.