Home > Work > Horizon

Horizon QUOTES

Horizon QUOTES

1 " One emerging view of Homo sapiens among evolutionary biologists is that he has built a trap for himself by clinging to certain orthodoxies in a time of environmental emergency. A belief in cultural progress, for example, or in the propriety of a social animal’s quest for individual material wealth is what has led people into the trap, or so goes the thinking. To cause the trap to implode, to disintegrate, humanity has to learn to navigate using a reckoning fundamentally different from the one it’s long placed its faith in. A promising first step to take in dealing with this trap might be to bring together wisdom keepers from traditions around the world whose philosophies for survival developed around the same uncertainty of a future that Darwin suggested lies embedded in everything biological. Such wisdom keepers would be people who are able to function well in the upheaval of any century. Their faith does not lie solely with pursuing technological innovation as an approach to solving humanity’s most pressing problems. Their solutions lie with a profound change in what humans most value. "

― Barry Lopez , Horizon

2 " To go in search of what once was is to postpone the difficulty of living with what is. "

― Barry Lopez , Horizon

3 " What perished with their cultures were their unique ideas of what it meant to be courteous, reverent, courageous, and just. What disappeared with them were their thoughts about what could be expected to be going on in the places into which we cannot see. As our own cultures continue to unfold around the riptides of aggressive commerce and heedless development, it seems these thoughts might have been good things to have made note of. "

― Barry Lopez , Horizon

4 " Evolution, if it is nothing else, is endless modification, change without reason or end. Notions of preserving racial purity in the twenty-first century, or of maintaining biologically static environments, in which all new arrivals are classified as “invasive” or “foreign” and are to be expunged, or are not permitted entry to start with, are untenable. The obvious ethical issues aside, these arguments deny the flow of time. Landscapes are figuratively, not actually, timeless. And ours is an age of unprecedented cultural exchange, of emigration and immigration. Reactionary resentment around issues of race and culture has no future but warfare. "

― Barry Lopez , Horizon

5 " The young man visiting the archeological site on Skraeling Island is the same fellow who at the end of the book encounters a stranger on the road to Port Famine, but also not. "

― Barry Lopez , Horizon

6 " Its only boundary was the horizon, the sill of the sky, separating what the eye could see from what the mind might imagine. "

― Barry Lopez , Horizon

7 " Our question is no longer how to exploit the natural world for human comfort and gain, but how we can cooperate with one another to ensure we will someday have a fitting, not a dominating, place in it. "

― Barry Lopez , Horizon

8 " We, all of us, look back over our lives, trying to make sense of what happened, to see what enduring threads might be there. "

― Barry Lopez , Horizon

9 " Traveling encourages the revision of received wisdoms and the shedding of prejudices. It turns the mind toward a consideration of context and releases it from the dictatorship of absolute truths about humanity. "

― Barry Lopez , Horizon

10 " If the real human environment in developed countries today is third-growth monocultured “forests,” tar-sand petroleum, cow-burnt grasslands, and smog-like clouds of microplastics floating in oceans where fish once thrived, then human cultures need to distinguish between sentimentality about loss and the imperative to survive. They need to establish a more relevant politics than the competitive politics of nation-states. And to found economies built not on profit but on conservation. "

― Barry Lopez , Horizon

11 " For me, the ability to listen carefully to another person’s perspective, rather than summarily deciding what that person means, is in keeping with the behavior one expects of an elder. And the ability to understand what someone else is thinking is the foundation of stable social order. "

― Barry Lopez , Horizon

12 " the primary organizing principle for human achievement is stability, not progress, meaning that balance, symmetry, and regularity are more to be valued than change, growth, deviation, and ambition. "

― Barry Lopez , Horizon

13 " What will prove to be the metaphorical gridwork of latitudes and longitudes, the dependable charts for human navigation that will let us heal the rift between knowing something and feeling something, a chasm the Enlightenment created for us when it privileged the ability to know over the ability to feel? What will be the grid of metaphorical rhumb lines and meridians in a new portolano, one that will not permit the integrity and profundity of the local to slip away in order to serve a vision of the grand? "

― Barry Lopez , Horizon

14 " The failure to speak in defense of marginalized or persecuted groups is a constant in recent human history. It "

― Barry Lopez , Horizon

15 " how are we to tone down the voices of nationalism, or of those in support of profiteering, or religious fanaticism, racial superiority, or cultural exceptionalism? If economic viability trumps human health in systems of governance, and if personal rights trump community obligations at almost every turn, what sort of future can we expect never to see? "

― Barry Lopez , Horizon

16 " The Pacific is twice the size of the Atlantic, a comparison perhaps too incomprehensible to convey meaning. If in a cartoon, Mount Everest were placed on the floor of the Mariana Trench south of Guam, its peak would fall 6,800 feet short of the surface of the Pacific. "

― Barry Lopez , Horizon

17 " Apparently it’s regrettable but finally all right to let thousands starve in order to ensure that a few have the yachts they require. Apparently it’s all right for thousands to die of lung cancer and for tobacco companies to withhold the evidence that would incriminate them, as long as the companies can show a profit. Apparently it’s all right for China to dam a tributary of the Brahmaputra River and endanger the flow of freshwater to Bangladesh if this will help develop a wealthy middle class in China. "

― Barry Lopez , Horizon

18 " Art’s underlying strength is that it does not intend to be literal. It presents a metaphor and leaves the viewer or listener to interpret. It is giving in to art, not trying to divine its meaning, that brings the viewer or listener the deepest measures of satisfaction. "

― Barry Lopez , Horizon

19 " you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans… "

― Barry Lopez , Horizon

20 " what most of us are looking for is the opportunity to express, without embarrassment or judgment or retaliation, our capacity to love. "

― Barry Lopez , Horizon