“Division of labor is central to our way of life. Each person must perform as a tiny cog in a big machine. If, on the other hand, your primary goal is wholeness, egalitarianism, autonomy, and an intact world, then there's quite a lot wrong with it.”

—  John Zerzan

Running on Emptiness: The Pathology of Civilization (2002)

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John Zerzan 23
American anarchist and primitivist philosopher and author 1943

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“A good idea turns every cog in your mind, making you scared of bed in case the whole machine grinds to a halt.”

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“As the world changed, we reverted to social divisions that we'd thought were obsolete. The egalitarian pretenses of the high-octane decades had dissolved and nobody even debated it anymore, including the women of our town. A plain majority of the townspeople were laborers now, whatever in life they had been before. Nobody in town called them peasants, but in a effect that's what they'd become. That's just the way things were.”

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“What are our primary goals? Our greatest goals?”

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As quoted in Venceremos! The Speeches and Writings of Ernesto Che Guevara (1968) by John Gerassi, p. 98
Context: What are our primary goals? Our greatest goals? The great lines we must follow? From the political point of view, the first thing we want is to be masters of our own destiny, a country free from foreign interference, a country that seeks out its own system of development.

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“Each person must live their life as a model for others.”

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