John Zerzan Quotes

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.

People are not more connected, despite the billions in ads from the IT companies. Why call it community? It's just technology. The machines are connected, not the people.

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

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

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

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 .

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

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.

"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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.