Running on Emptiness Quotes

“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.”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“a minute freed from the order of time has recreated in us ... the individual freed from the order of time,”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“when justice is against the law, only outlaws can effect justice.”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“As Proust put it, the only paradises are those we have lost.”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“No time is entirely present,”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“history is the negation of nature.”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“To symbolize is to express time consciousness, for the symbol embodies the structure of time”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“Human behavior is symbolic behavior; symbolic behavior is human behavior. The symbol is the universe of humanity.”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“Just as Freud predicted that the fullness of civilization would mean universal neurotic unhappiness, anti-civilization currents are growing in response to the psychic immiseration that envelops us. Thus symbolic life, essence of civilization, now comes under fire.”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“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.”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“Philosophy, in its very diachrony, is the consciousness of the breakup of consciousness.”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“If machines can be human, humans can be machines.”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“In fact, in an overwhelmingly commodified existence, consumption becomes the number one form of entertainment.”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“Art is also a quasi-utopian promise of happiness, always broken.”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“How can you help resenting the absurdity of time, its march into the future, and all the nonsense about evolution and progress? Why go forward, why live in time.”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization

“Six thousand feet above men and time ...”
― John Zerzan, Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization