Jacque Fresco quotes

I didn't want to teach my kid how to read, so I used to read to him at night and close the book at the most interesting part.  He said, “What happened then, daddy?”  I said, “If you learn to read, you can find out.  I'm too tired to read.  I'll read to you tomorrow.”  So, he had a need to want to learn how to read.  Don't teach children how to read.  Don't teach them mathematics.  Give them a reason to want it.  In school, they're working ass-backwards.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Children #Book #Tired

We don't know how to live together on Earth, how the hell are we going to live together on Mars?
-- Jacque Fresco

#Together #Mars #Earth

No one is born with greed, prejudice, bigotry, patriotism and hatred; these are all learned behavior patterns.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Hatred #Greed #Prejudice

You don't need to get rid of religion; you have to outgrow the need for it.  In other words, instead of hoping for the good life, you make the good life.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Good Life #Needs

Crime is based upon need, making money.  People sell drugs to make money.  But if everybody is cared for, they don't sell drugs and if there's no money you can't sell drugs even if you wanted to.  There'd be no such thing as gambling, prostitution, or selling out, or paying off a senator or a governor.  There are no senators, there are no governors so you can't pay them off.  If you take away the basis or the condition that generate abhorrent behavior, you don't have abhorrent behavior.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Gambling #People #Drug

Everything that you've learned: 'Make a lot of money, have a nice house'. But they never teach you at school how to relate, how to communicate with others, how to share values with others. ...They teach you how to make a living. You become an optometrist, he becomes a physicist, she becomes a structural engineer, he's an architect.  In the future, none of that. Everybody is trained to be a generalist, so they understand different cultures, different values, how we get to be the way we are. So no-one can ever use you for war or killing anybody or hurting anybody
-- Jacque Fresco

#Hurt #War #Nice

Democracy is a con game. It’s a word invented to placate people to make them accept a given institution. All institutions sing, ‘We are free.’ The minute you hear ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, watch out… because in a truly free nation, no one has to tell you you’re free.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Games #People #Democracy

We're running into a lot of new problems today because of what we emphasize in this culture. The word 'success' to the average person means earning a lot of money and having a home, two cars, children in college. Success to me is entirely different to what success is to the average person.  Success is being a successful human being in terms of pursuing what you believe in. If you believe in making paintings, writing poetry, writing music. If this is what you really want, you're successful to yourself. But to be successful to your culture means to sell yourself short of what you really want
-- Jacque Fresco

#Running #Children #Believe

Capitalism, Socialism, Fascism, Communism, the Free-Market .... What good are these approaches for? These attempts are made by men who are cerebral insufficient. I'm trying to give you back your brain, which they took away from you in schools and in your upbringing. I'm trying to show you how the world works. So if you want a better world, you have to get up off your ***** and make it better
-- Jacque Fresco

#School #Men #Giving

We live in a world where our social system is old, our language is old, the way we acquire goods and services is outdated, our cities are detrimental to our health, chaotic and a tremendous waste of resource, and most of all our politics and values no longer serve us.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Cities #World #Way

We are not taught to be thinkers, but reflectors of our culture. Let's teach our children to be thinkers.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Children #Culture #Taught

Today we have access to highly advanced technologies. But our social and economic system has not kept up with our technological capabilities that could easily create a world of abundance, free of servitude and debt.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Technology #Today #Debt

The Venus Project is a translation of all religions: The end of war, the end of poverty, the brotherhood of humanity.  If that isn't spiritual, like I've said before, I don't know what is.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Spiritual #War #Humanity

When you live in a false society, that bases its wealth upon money, then that society itself will collapse eventually. Not because I say so, because it's not based on physical reference.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Wealth #Collapse #Bases

Earth is abundant with plentiful resources. Our practice of rationing resources through monetary control is no longer relevant and is counter-productive to our survival.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Practice #Survival #Earth

To be human is to care for your fellow human beings and protecting the environment.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Care #Environment #Care For You

We have the technology to build a global paradise on earth, and at the same time, we have the power to end life as we know it.  I am a futurist.  I cannot predict the actual future - only what it can be if we manage the earth and its resources intelligently.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Technology #Earth #Paradise

Working with drug addicts, alcoholics, and so-called juvenile delinquents in New York City convinced me that instead of working with individuals, more effective methods would deal with the societal conditions that create dysfunctional behaviors in the first place.
-- Jacque Fresco

#New York #Cities #Drug

It’s your own expectations that hurt you. Not the world you live in. Whatever happens in the world is real. What you think should happen is unreal. So people are hurt by their expectations. You know , you’re not disappointed by the world, you are disappointed by your own projections.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Hurt #Real #Thinking

We talk about civilization as though it's a static state. There are no civilized people yet, it's a process that's constantly going on... As long as you have war, police, prisons, crime, you are in the early stages of civilization.
-- Jacque Fresco

#War #Civilization #Long

War, poverty, corruption, hunger, misery, human suffering will not change in a monetary system. That is, there will be very little significant change. It’s going to take the redesign of our culture and values.
-- Jacque Fresco

#War #Suffering #Culture

The Venus Project is neither Utopian nor Orwellian, nor does it reflect the dreams of impractical idealists. Instead, it presents attainable goals requiring only the intelligent application of what we already know. The only limitations are those which we impose upon ourselves.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Dream #Intelligent #Goal

The more intelligent our children, the better our lives and the richer our culture will be.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Children #Intelligent #Culture

Love is a fluxuating thing, not a fixed thing.  That's why we don't understand what's happening.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Love Is #Fixed

The only hope for developing a new civilization is to accept responsibility for improving our lives through knowledge, understanding, and a deeper comprehension of humanity’s relationship to natural processes of evolution. Our future is determined by effort we put forth to achieve this transition.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Responsibility #Civilization #Effort

At the beginning of World War II the U.S. had a mere 600 or so first-class fighting aircraft. We rapidly overcame this short supply by turning out more than 90,000 planes a year. The question at the start of World War II was: Do we have enough funds to produce the required implements of war? The answer was No, we did not have enough money, nor did we have enough gold; but we did have more than enough resources. It was the available resources that enabled the US to achieve the high production and efficiency required to win the war. Unfortunately this is only considered in times of war.
-- Jacque Fresco

#War #Fighting #Winning

In our search for more, we have blinded ourselves to our personal responsibility for challenging these absurdities. A resource-based society considers us all equal shareholders of Earth. We are responsible both for the planet and for our relationship with each other.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Responsibility #Challenges #Earth

Every system tries to get people to conform to support that system. That goes for communism, socialism, free enterprise, or any other civilization. If they don't demand loyalty, they can't keep their civilization together. So what they do is they teach things that would support an established system. We do not advocate an established system. TVP talks of an emergent system into state of change. So that we always prepare people for the next changes coming ahead. So that people will not cling to the past.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Loyalty #Past #Civilization

The entire money structure and materialistic society is a false society...
-- Jacque Fresco

#Materialistic #Structure

Human behavior is subject to the same laws as any other natural phenomenon. Our customs, behaviors, and values are byproducts of our culture. No one is born with greed, prejudice, bigotry, patriotism and hatred; these are all learned behavior patterns. If the environment is unaltered, similar behavior will reoccur.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Law #Hatred #Greed

If you think we can’t change the world, It just means you're not one of those that will
-- Jacque Fresco

#Mean #Thinking #World

People say that the monetary system produces incentive.  This may be true in limited areas, but it also produces greed, embezzlement, corruption, pollution, jealousy, anger, crime, war, poverty, tremendous scarcity, and unnecessary human suffering.  You have to look at the entire picture.
-- Jacque Fresco

#War #People #Greed

Self-centeredness will bring on the destruction of our world. National pride separates people. All people need the same thing. When you really get down to it, you'll find that all people need good food, clean water, clean air, and a decent environment, meaning education as to how to relate to one another and to avoid conflict, how to accept the differences where different people draw different conclusions.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Pride #Our World #Air

Whatever happens in the world is real, what one thinks should have happened is projection. We suffer more from our fictitious illusion and expectations of reality.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Real #Thinking #Expectations

Anthropology studies different cultures; mainly primitive, but it doesn't think its own culture is primitive, unfortunately.  There is no field that you can study today that isn't trapped in the culture in some way.  It's hard to escape your culture.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Thinking #Different #Culture

All things change.  The automobiles change every year.  [Your] television set gets lighter and smaller and higher definition.  All things in the scientific world change.  But politicians do not change.  They carry old values and they don't even know it.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Years #Television #World

I have no notions of a perfect society, I don’t know what that means. I know we can do much better than what we’ve got, I’m no utopian, I’m not a humanist that would like to see everybody living in warmth and harmony: I know that if we don’t live that way, we’ll kill each other and destroy the Earth.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Mean #Perfect #Earth

If orange trees grew all over the country, you couldn't sell oranges.  Do you understand that?  So, all our decision making is based upon scarcity or the availability of resources.  If we have a shortage of any kind of resource, we put all the labs to work on making substitute materials.  People always worry about 'What if we run out of a certain material?', but we have enough technology today to make thousands of different substitutes.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Running #Country #Technology

If you had a free society you couldn't get people to go to war, if you had an intelligent type of upbringing in ones children. They would say; There must be many other ways of solving problems other then killing people.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Children #War #Intelligent

Politics was good a hundred years ago. Today, politicians have no ability to solve any problems because they are not students of behavior. They are not students of agriculture, oceanography - they know nothing about the factors that operate the world.
-- Jacque Fresco

#Years #Agriculture #World