John Zerzan Quotes

Never before have people been so infantalized, made so dependant on the machine for everything; as the earth rapidly approaches its extinction due to technology, our souls are shrunk and flattened by its pervasive rule. Any sense of wholeness and freedom can only return by the undoing of the massive division of labour at the heart of technological progress. This is the liberatory project in all its depth.

Everyone can feel the nothingness, the void, just beneath the surface of everyday routines and securities.

We can either passively continue on the road to utter domestication and destruction or turn in the direction of joyful upheaval, passionate and feral embrace of wildness and life that aims at dancing on the ruins of clocks, computers and that failure of imagination and will called work. Can we justify our lives by anything less than such a politics of rage and dreams?

If we once and for so long lived in balance with nature and each other, we should be able to do so again. The catastrophe that's overtaking us has deep roots, but our previous state of natural anarchy reaches much further into our shared history .

We are lost, but other animals point to the right road. They are the right road.

I don't think it could be a coincidence that the more technological a society is, the less it connects people.

The liberty that remains to us is essentially the freedom to choose among brands A, B, and C.

We live in an era with no real sense of community or connection to nature.

"The people" aren't running anything. That's why technology has replaced politics as the source of ideology. The ideological claims are hollow and absurd, and nobody believes them anymore.

Culture has lead us to betray our own aboriginal spirit and wholeness, into an ever-worsening realm of synthetic, isolating, impoverishing estrangement. Which is not to say that there are no more everyday pleasures, without which we would loose our humanness. But as our plight deepens, we glimpse how much must be erased for our redemption.

There's a hollowness to civilized life. It doesn't appeal to people, and some people react with extreme violence.

The more the society becomes a technological society, the less it has to hold itself together.

Mass society has displaced real community, where people function together and account for their own lives.

The largely hidden key to the symbolic world is time; indeed it is at the origin of human symbolic activity. Time thus occasions the first alienation, the route away from aboriginal richness and wholeness.

If you have a problem in mass society, you call the cops. The experts. You no longer have any operative connection with yourself or others, or with a functioning community.

Republicans don't want to shrink government. They want more and more military, more and more surveillance. They'd like to have the government banning gay marriage and so forth.

It is our fall from a simplicity and fullness of life directly experienced, from the sensuous moment of knowing, which leaves a gap that the symbolic can never bridge.

The pleasure of authenticity exists only against the grain of society.

A great deal of anthropological/ethnological literature describes indigenous peoples who live in oneness with the natural world and one another. Survival itself necessitates a borderlessness between inner and outer worlds. At times we still feel a return to that unified state. T.S. Eliot’s designation of our return is ‘through the unknown remembered gate.'

We have the freedom to choose between brand A, brand B, and brand C. That´s about it for freedom.

We don't need more stupid ideas.

If we once, and for so long, lived in balance with nature and each other, we should be able to do so again.

I do what I do and hope that it might connect with people who are thinking along the same lines.

I think pushing the ideas is important. I wouldn't say it's more important than action. You can't really separate the two.