1900s, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (1900), National Duties
“And suddenly the circle came together for me. We were as a civilization making one big mistake, a mistake that was understandable because we had been raised to make it. We had been culturally indoctrinated to believe it to be not a mistake at all, but rather a normal and healthy habit. But this mistake was killing us as individuals just as it was destroying our land and our forests and our rivers. We were eating dead animals, and it wasn't working. If those animals had set out to take their revenge on us, they couldn't have done a better job.”
Source: Mad Cowboy (1998), Ch. 4: From the Farm to the Capital, pp. 80-81
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Howard F. Lyman 10
American activist 1938Related quotes
Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1962/aug/02/britain-and-the-common-market in the House of Lords on the British application to join the Common Market (2 August 1962).
Later life
“we’re allowed to make a lot of mistakes in our lives, except the mistake that destroy us”
Source: Veronika Decides to Die
“We had the freedom to make mistakes. That's something very important.”
Interview with Heinrich Rohrer at the Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, 9 April, 2008. The interviewer is Adam Smith, Editor-in-Chief of Nobelprize.org.
Context: We had the freedom to make mistakes. That's something very important. Unfortunately, this freedom for scientists gets more and more lost. … Otherwise, you do the common things. You don't dare to do something beyond what everybody else thinks.
“The biggest mistake we could ever make in our lives is to think we work for anybody but ourselves.”
Akio Morita, cited in: Nick Lyons (1976) The Sony vision. p. 101.