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"A slave mentality which had been built into him by years of carrot-and-whip grading, a mule mentality which said, 'If you don't whip me, I won't work. He didn't get whipped. He didn't work."
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"If a moneyed man had a "corny mind, a flatterer would immediately start chasing him like a hungry hen!"
"A government which is not liked by the artists is certainly a bad government, because artist sees very well what is behind the masks!"
"An honest government is the childish dream of the gullible men!"
"Our spiritual history is the history of God-ventriloquists! The truth is that the voice of God is the voice of cunning Man, the ventriloquist's voice!"
"Most of the time it is a good job and a good honour to fight against people's values, because most of the time people's values are irrational and absurd!"
"A country where women are not free has no chance ever to be something good and respectable!"
"Governments stand because people sit; if people stand, governments will sit!"
"In reality the concept of 'other nation' is wrong because there is only one nation: The Human Nation!"
"It is better to go near the truth and be imprisoned than to stay with the wrong and roam about freely, master Galilei. In fact, getting attached to falsity is terrible slavery, and real freedom is only next to the right."
Explore more quotes by Robert M. Pirsig
"It was the ghost of rationality itself ... This is the ghost of normal everyday assumptions which declares that the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose. That is what the ghost says."
"Pretty mountains, pretty river, bumpy but pleasant tar road... old buildings, old people on a front porch... strange how old, obsolete buildings and plants and mills, the technology of fifty and a hundred years ago, always seem to look so much better than the new stuff."
"When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things. I just want to get at it slowly, but carefully and thoroughly, with the same attitude I remember was present just before I found that sheared pin. It was that attitude that found it, nothing else."
"We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with the emphasis on 'good' rather than on 'time'...."
"The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around."
"We're living in topsy-turvy times, and I think that what causes the topsy-turvy feeling is inadequacy of old forms of thought to deal with new experiences. I've heard it said that the only real learning results from hang-ups, where instead of expanding the branches of what you already know, you have to stop and drift laterally for a while until you come across something that allows you to expand the roots of what you already know. Everyone's familiar with that. I think the same thing occurs with whole civilizations when expansion's needed at the roots."
"The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely between them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him."
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