William Irwin Thompson Quotes

• 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

  Topics in Evolution, Life

  Tags in Human

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in World, Ideology, Science And Scientists, Scientific

• 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

  Topics in Failure

  Tags in Catastrophe

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Conscious, Imagination, Process, Generation

• 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

  Topics in Evolution

  Tags in Human

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Idealistic, Dangerous

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

  William Irwin Thompson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Ideologies

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

  William Irwin Thompson

  Topics in Fate

  Tags in Destiny

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

  William Irwin Thompson

  Topics in Economy

  Tags in Shadow

• 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

  Topics in Mistake

  Tags in Artificial, Intelligent

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Thoughts And Thinking, Find

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

  William Irwin Thompson

  Topics in Nature

  Tags in Science

• 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

  Topics in History, Work

  Tags in Culture

• Unconscious Polities emerge independent of conscious purpose.

  William Irwin Thompson

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Conscious, Purpose

• 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

  Topics in Uncategorized

  Tags in Civilization, Science

William Irwin Thompson (15)

Birth:	16th July, 1938
Nationality:	American
Profession:	Critic, Philosopher

Related Authors

• Richard Howard
• Charles Finch
• Andrew Sarris
• Samuel Coleridge
• Margaret Fuller
• Callimachus
• Lewis Mumford
• Ian Dunlop
• Leonard Alfred George Strong
• Jerry Saltz

Advertisement

Today's Anniversary - 22nd December

Births

• 1861 - Sara Jeannette Duncan
• 1915 - Barbara Billingsley
• 1938 - Lucien Bouchard
• 1948 - Steve Garvey
• 1960 - Luther Campbell

Deaths

• 1989 - Samuel Beckett
• 1899 - Dwight L. Moody
• 1940 - Nathanael West
• 1998 - Virginia Graham
• 1943 - Beatrix Potter