Think Change, Change Thought

     A fundamental way in which the ancient science differs from our own is that it was not intended to represent progress, but was regarded more as a compensation. In all traditional histories, such as those of the Chinese and Ancient Greeks already referred to, the remote ancestors were thought of as wiser and more knowledgeable than the present generation because they were able to live more simply, without the elaborate institutions of civilization. Science was seen as the compensation for the lost classic style of the Ancients. Thus its purpose was not to progress but to delay and make up for regression. The old perception is that cultures do not develop gradually through unaided human efforts, but are created at their highest at the start of one of those mysterious cycles of earth-renewal, influx of cosmic energy whatever, which result in the appearance of godlike individuals or culture heroes who establish the new order of the age. From that time entropy takes over and a people's culture begins its long decline. Religion and science are developed with the object of arresting that decline by keeping society in touch with its cultural origins through the perpetuation of customs and rituals. When these become empty forms, when the knowledge and perception behind them are lost, the society is in its period of decadence, and its end comes either by gradual dissolution or catastrophe.
— John Mitchell, from "The Ideal World-View, in The Schumacher Lectures, Satish Kumar (ed.), p. 112.

     Now it is time to sharpen the points already made and, perhaps, in conclusion, to take the matter a little further. The world today is dominated by ideas and forces which are inimical to its survival. The great modern institutions of power, as is the tendency of all human institutions, have gained independent momentum beyond rational human control, and, since any institution is more stupid and stubborn than any of the individuals who comprise it, they cannot go against their own programmes by abolishing themselves or reforming their own destructive characters. It seems that we are in the power of forces which we or our ancestors first set in motion but which have become blind and inhuman, destined to react with each other in swings of ever greater violence until they destroy forever the precarious balance between the interests of civilization and those of nature. In terms of our present mode of reasoning it seems that nothing can avert, or even long delay, the cataclysmic demise of ourselves and our native planet.
— John Mitchell, in Ibid., pp. 117-118.

     The human brain, being so excellent at pattern-making and pattern-using, has rather few methods for escaping from old patterns to reach new ones. We always suppose that more information will cause us to see things differently. This does not often happen, for two reasons. First of all we only look for the  information that the old patterns tell us to look for. Second, we tend to see the new information through the old pattern. That leaves us with accident, mistake, humour and lateral thinking as our tools for changing patterns. The history of science shows how effective accident and mistake have been in stting off new ideas (for example, the invention of the triode valve or Pasteur's development of inoculation). Thinkers have not yet learned to take humour seriously. That leaves lateral thinking as the deliberate methodology for changing patterns.
— Edward de Bono, from "Lateral Thinking," in The Schumacher Lectures, Satish Kumar (ed.), pp. 156-157.

      I took a photograph of my wife, Jill Krementz, for the jacket of a book by her. She set the camera and told me where to stand and how to click it. When the book came out, with my name under the picture, a gallery owner offered me a one-person show of my photographs. It wouldn't have been just a one-person show. It would have been a one-photograph show. Such is celebrity. Eat your heart out.
— Kurt Vonnegut, Fates Worse Than Death, pp. 40-41.