Jacque Fresco Quotes

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.

Anthropology studies different cultures; mainly primitive, but it doesn't think its own culture is primitive, unfortunately. There is no field that you can study today that isn't trapped in the culture in some way. It's hard to escape your culture.

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.

We don't want to hurt anybody, kill anybody, build any prisons, or build police. We want to make it unnecessary for people to steal - so they'll have access to medical care, health care, decent housing, all people, all over the world. As long as you don't share your resources, you are going to have trouble

We can work out anything if we put our mind to it, study it, do hard work instead of finding simple answers

Don't get mad at me cause I call something a 'nothing thing'. I mean it's nothing in terms of the majority of people ... I'm not that concerned with my son. I'm more concerned with all people. I look at all people as brothers and sisters. I have no priority for members of the family.

Wiser, never wise. Smarter, never smart.

We have more than enough resources in the world. The only thing we don't have is brains in Washington.

The Venus Project presents a bold, new direction for humanity that entails nothing less than the total redesign of our culture.

When you live in a false society, that bases its wealth upon money, then that society itself will collapse eventually. Not because I say so, because it's not based on physical reference.

The fact that cultures are failing all over the world means that they don't know how to operate a society to make it work. Politicians have no real knowledge of technology; therefore, they are not capable of increasing food production, designing transportations systems that are safe ... They have no knowledge in that area. Therefore it's senseless to talk to them about anything of significance.

In a society where every man works for himself, individual incentive, working for one's self. If people worked for one's self, there wouldn't be the electric light, there wouldn't be engines and powered vehicles, there wouldn't be electrification and reservoirs and water purification. These are processes that help all people. And processes that help single people is a very primitive value system carried into this century, which is really not necessary.

The only limitations on the future of the humankind are those we impose upon ourselves

Only when science and technology are used with human concern in a world in which all of the earth's resources are held as the common heritage of all of the earth's people can we truly say that there is intelligent life on Earth.

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

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.

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.

I didn't want to teach my kid how to read, so I used to read to him at night and close the book at the most interesting part. He said, "What happened then, daddy?" I said, "If you learn to read, you can find out. I'm too tired to read. I'll read to you tomorrow." So, he had a need to want to learn how to read. Don't teach children how to read. Don't teach them mathematics. Give them a reason to want it. In school, they're working ass-backwards.

Instruction in academia did not emphasize what I thought of as essential points. I was interested in the broad range of interrelated connections within the physical sciences, but formal studies isolated each branch of science. I feel that I have advantages greater than Da Vinci's such as access to more information, materials, and methods.

The original intent of laws was to get the masses of people to accept the limitations superimposed upon them as being the result of their own misbehavior.

We live in a world where our social system is old, our language is old, the way we acquire goods and services is outdated, our cities are detrimental to our health, chaotic and a tremendous waste of resource, and most of all our politics and values no longer serve us.

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.

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.

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.

Working with drug addicts, alcoholics, and so-called juvenile delinquents in New York City convinced me that instead of working with individuals, more effective methods would deal with the societal conditions that create dysfunctional behaviors in the first place.

You know that you can't go out there and change the world tomorrow morning. It just takes time, and the realization of that does not produce frustration. What produces frustration, is when you expect the world to join with your cause it's so reasonable. It is not reasonable to unreasonable 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.

At the beginning of World War II the U.S. had a mere 600 or so first-class fighting aircraft. We rapidly overcame this short supply by turning out more than 90,000 planes a year. The question at the start of World War II was: Do we have enough funds to produce the required implements of war? The answer was No, we did not have enough money, nor did we have enough gold; but we did have more than enough resources. It was the available resources that enabled the US to achieve the high production and efficiency required to win the war. Unfortunately this is only considered in times of war.

I don't believe in Gods and devils. I think it's man-made stories to try and help people understand where all this came from. They said 'Where did the world come from if there's no God', 'Where did life come from'. Just say 'I don't know'. Don't say some guy made a man and a woman. You have no business doing that, you know what I mean? And then He got mad and flooded the whole world; told Noah to build an arc. These are terrible stories.

There are no good or bad people, humans are shaped by culture.

I don't believe in the Great Man theory of science or history. There are no great men, just men standing on the shoulders of other men and what they have done.

There are no negro problems, or Polish problems, or Jewish problems, or Greek problems, or women's problems, there are HUMAN PROBLEMS.

And you can't find "love" because in order to find "love" you have to be capable of dishing it out. In order to be capable of giving "love", your own life has to be in harmony with everything else, and that's not attainable ...

I have no notions of a perfect society, I don't know what that means. I know we can do much better than what we've got, I'm no utopian, I'm not a humanist that would like to see everybody living in warmth and harmony: I know that if we don't live that way, we'll kill each other and destroy the Earth.

If orange trees grew all over the country, you couldn't sell oranges. Do you understand that? So, all our decision making is based upon scarcity or the availability of resources. If we have a shortage of any kind of resource, we put all the labs to work on making substitute materials. People always worry about 'What if we run out of a certain material?', but we have enough technology today to make thousands of different substitutes.

Laws do not stop crime; they merely make noise about crime. They say 'Don't take anything that doesn't belong to you'. Well, that doesn't do anything.

The teachings or the information in the Venus project is not what Jacque Fresco dictates. It's first doing a survey of the carrying capacity of a given environment and maintaining a population in accordance of the Earth's resources, not Fresco's opinion.

In my work, I am not attempting to predict the future. I am only pointing out what is possible with the intelligent application and humane use of science and technology. This does not call for scientists to manage society. What I suggest is applying the methods of science to the social system for the benefit of human kind and the environment.

When they say all men are created equal, that bothers me. I told you some are thin, some are heavy, some have better eyesight than others. I don't know what that means. I think they're trying to talk about equal opportunity and I know that doesn't exist. If you don't have the money to go to college, the word 'equal opportunities' mean nothing

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.

Self-centeredness will bring on the destruction of our world. National pride separates people. All people need the same thing. When you really get down to it, you'll find that all people need good food, clean water, clean air, and a decent environment, meaning education as to how to relate to one another and to avoid conflict, how to accept the differences where different people draw different conclusions.

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.

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

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.

If you make people uniform, you can control them. If you teach people to read, and think, and question things, you lose control. So, the best idea is to separate people if you wish to maintain a monetary system. It's called divide and conquer. By dividing people, they're not a threat, you can control them.

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.

We are all victims of culture.

Merely complaining without proposing an alternative offers nothing.

You can't participate in agriculture or redesign of aircraft for making them safer if you know nothing about it. So, whenever a person says 'will I be participating in the new world?' Only in areas that you can participate it. Areas that you have competence in. I'm not talking about self confidence, I'm talking about the ability to solve problems. Electrical, chemical, technical. I don't know of any other kind of problem.

What kind of competition is there in your body? Suppose your brain said ' I'm the most important organ, and the liver said 'I am, and I want to go in a free enterprise-system.' You would rot away in a month, if every organ of your body, were out for itself.

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.

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'.

The uncreative mind can spot the wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot the wrong questions The question has never been: Do we have the money? The question has always been: Do we have the resources?

I was asked once, 'you're a smart man,why aren't you rich?' I replied, 'you're a rich man, why aren't you smart?

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.

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.

You can either have one guy lifting a billion pounds by himself, and it takes many years of planning and preparation - or you can have a billion people, each lifting one pound, and it takes a mere moment. This is the power of unity.

It is not that people are evil or greedy. The conditions that socially support the system force us to behave in socially offensive ways.

This is not a dictatorship, this is based upon scientific evidence to support a given project. If you want to put up a building, say half a mile high, the material has to be available. Using statistics is not a dictatorship. It's a method of getting the most from existing resources.

Capitalism, Socialism, Fascism, Communism, the Free-Market ... What good are these approaches for? These attempts are made by men who are cerebral insufficient. I'm trying to give you back your brain, which they took away from you in schools and in your upbringing. I'm trying to show you how the world works. So if you want a better world, you have to get up off your ass and make it better

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.

This shit's got to go.

Man, in the collective sense, is the hero of science. Man, in the collective sense, is the hero of Earth.

We have more than enough to take care of everybody on earth at this time. If we have a shortage of anything, it's very easy for science to make a substitute material. There's no shortage of anything except brains in Washington.

We accept, without sufficient consideration, a system that breeds inefficiencies and actually encourages the creation of shortages.

The government means industry, if you know what I mean.

It takes a different value system if you wish to change the world.

A Resource-Based Economy is in the application of the methods of science with human concern and environmental concern. If we used the scientific method throughout the world, the probability of war drops to zero. The probability of human suffering disappears. Deprivation, poverty, crime - all those things tend to disappear because there's no basis. I'm strictly concerned with the environment that people are raised in and if that environment is altered, so will behaviors be altered.

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.

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

LOVE is to stop making demands on people and give them room to grow.

What will drive people if they don't have money or reward? The reward is the end of war, the end of poverty, most crime, and the end of begging for medical care. Everyone will be cared for and educated. There will be no taxation, and no advantage group. No technical elitism, or any other kind of elitism. If that isn't incentive enough, then I don't know what is.

You really don't want a job. What you want is access to those things you'd like to have.

All things change. The automobiles change every year. [Your] television set gets lighter and smaller and higher definition. All things in the scientific world change. But politicians do not change. They carry old values and they don't even know it.

When somebody asks, 'Whats the answer to all of these questions?' that's absurd. There is no answer, there are answers, along the way.

In our search for more, we have blinded ourselves to our personal responsibility for challenging these absurdities. A resource-based society considers us all equal shareholders of Earth. We are responsible both for the planet and for our relationship with each other.

One may reasonably ask: Why do people cling to the values and practices of the past, when they so obviously no longer work? Long-standing thought patterns are hard to overcome because they often appear to serve the interests of the individual, and old ways of thinking are simpler and easier to handle. In a two-valued way of thinking, as in good and bad, right and wrong, love and hate, cause and effect, very little logical analysis is involved.

No one is born with greed, prejudice, bigotry, patriotism and hatred; these are all learned behavior patterns.

We must look at alternatives objectively, and not try to fit the future into our present social mould.

We could either develop paradise on Earth or oblivion; wipe ourselves out, only the future will tell. It's what you do to make the future.

There's no such thing as designing the perfect utopian city. Everything is subject to change. There are no final frontiers.

We have the technology to build a global paradise on earth, and at the same time, we have the power to end life as we know it. I am a futurist. I cannot predict the actual future - only what it can be if we manage the earth and its resources intelligently.

We are all an integral part of the chain of life.

We don't know how to live together on Earth, how the hell are we going to live together on Mars?

People say that the monetary system produces incentive. This may be true in limited areas, but it also produces greed, embezzlement, corruption, pollution, jealousy, anger, crime, war, poverty, tremendous scarcity, and unnecessary human suffering. You have to look at the entire picture.

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.

As we begin to plan for a new human society, we need to foster common values about clean air, water, and other elements of self-sustenance. These, along with a complete inventory of Earth's resources, will form the basis for a holistic approach to cybernated decision-making.

Our universities today are better equipped than ever, and the wars keep getting worse.

Truly free people do not need to be told they are free.

Unfortunately, we tend to support basic values and traditions that reflect the past, without questioning their appropriateness to the present or the future

If you want your children to relate to the culture you live in, if you want to train them outside of the general system, you have to tell your children that ordinary children tend to say things like 'I can run faster than you; I can draw better than you; I know things you don't know'. You have to tell them what normal children are like. Normal children are messed up and you have to tell them about that. But if you instruct your child in high correlation with the physical world, they won't be able to relate with normal children. Normal means mixed up as I use the word.

We can build rockets to explore outer space and enhance the quality of life on Earth, or we can use them to destroy other nations.

It's hard in a monetary system to trust people.

The only hope for developing a new civilization is to accept responsibility for improving our lives through knowledge, understanding, and a deeper comprehension of humanity's relationship to natural processes of evolution. Our future is determined by effort we put forth to achieve this transition.

Each system will depend on resources available, not from the bottom up or top down. In other words, if you put 500 passengers in an airplane that's designed to carry 100, it won't get off the ground. So all decisions are made based upon the physical equipment you're working with, or the environmental resources available. They're not made by Fresco or any other person. They're arrived at by studies and research.

Youre a rich man, why arent you smart?

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

So, "normal" is really what society dictates as normal and if we're born in that world, we would see that as normal. But if you think about it for a second, is it really?

When education and resources are available to all without a price tag, there will be no limit to the human potential.

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.