When We Are Human Quotes

“Civilization’s advance has always meant more work, and its increasing control dynamic is centrally achieved by reducing work skills. There may be increased political rights and freedoms, but deskilling renders the individual more subservient. Even the semblance of autonomy or self-sufficiency is taken away.”
― John Zerzan, When We Are Human: Notes from the Age of Pandemics

“We are still in the Enlightenment era, and its “light” is spreading everywhere. The fully enlightened world, the fully civilized world, is indeed disaster. The prospect of modernity without end faces each and all of us.”
― John Zerzan, When We Are Human: Notes from the Age of Pandemics

“Five years before Jemison’s 1758 capture, Benjamin Franklin wrote these reflections: When white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived a while among them, tho ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of life…and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.”
― John Zerzan, When We Are Human: Notes from the Age of Pandemics

“Various ways to employ fire, but none to domesticate it. Be like fire.”
― John Zerzan, When We Are Human: Notes from the Age of Pandemics

“Our species is unique, mainly in a negative sense, having brought ruin and estrangement to every corner of the world.”
― John Zerzan, When We Are Human: Notes from the Age of Pandemics

“is an element of all-living nature that rises in rebellion against nature. He will pay for his defiance with his life.”
― John Zerzan, When We Are Human: Notes from the Age of Pandemics

“For more than 99 percent of our two to three million years as Homo species, we lived as mobile hunter-gatherers/foragers. How could this be other than foundational?”
― John Zerzan, When We Are Human: Notes from the Age of Pandemics