Source: The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), Chapter 2
“He tried to read an elementary economics text; it bored him past endurance, it was like listening to somebody interminably recounting a long and stupid dream. He could not force himself to understand how banks functioned and so forth, because all the operations of capitalism were as meaningless to him as the rites of a primitive religion, as barbaric, as elaborate, and as unnecessary. In a human sacrifice to deity there might be at least a mistaken and terrible beauty; in the rites of the moneychangers, where greed, laziness, and envy were assumed to move all men’s acts, even the terrible became banal.”
Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 5 (pp. 130-131)
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Ursula K. Le Guin 292
American writer 1929–2018Related quotes
Source: Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said (1974), Chapter 5 (p. 54)
Pierre Joseph Proudhon
(1809–1865) French politician, mutualist philosopher, economist, and socialist
Source: What is Property? (1840), Ch. V
Baruch Spinoza
(1632–1677) Dutch philosopher
Original in German: Einen solchen Standpunkt fand Goethe früh in Spinoza, und er erkennet mit Freuden, wie sehr die Ansichten dieses großen Denkers den Bedürfnissen seiner Jugend gemäß gewesen. Er fand in ihm sich selber, und so konnte er sich auch an ihm auf das schönste befestigen.
Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens, 1831
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Peter Medawar
(1915–1987) scientist
Source: 1970s, Advice to a Young Scientist (1979), p. 25, footnote to previous quotation.
"A Defence of Baby-Worship"
The Defendant (1901)
Context: The essential rectitude of our view of children lies in the fact that we feel them and their ways to be supernatural while, for some mysterious reason, we do not feel ourselves or our own ways to be supernatural. The very smallness of children makes it possible to regard them as marvels; we seem to be dealing with a new race, only to be seen through a microscope. I doubt if anyone of any tenderness or imagination can see the hand of a child and not be a little frightened of it. It is awful to think of the essential human energy moving so tiny a thing; it is like imagining that human nature could live in the wing of a butterfly or the leaf of a tree. When we look upon lives so human and yet so small, we feel as if we ourselves were enlarged to an embarrassing bigness of stature. We feel the same kind of obligation to these creatures that a deity might feel if he had created something that he could not understand.
Narcissus and Goldmund (1930)
