Paul L Wachtel quotes

Having more and newer things each year has become not just something we want but something we need. The idea of more, of ever increasing wealth, has become the center of our identity and our security, and we are caught up by it as the addict by his drugs.
-- Paul L Wachtel

#Inspiring #Years #Ideas

Our present stress on growth and productivity is, I believe, intimately related to the decline in rootedness. Faced with loneliness and vulnerability that come with deprivation of a securely encompassing community, we have sought to quell the vulnerability through our possessions.
-- Paul L Wachtel

#Loneliness #Stress #Believe

We are faced with having to learn again about interdependency and the need for rootedness after several centuries of having systematically-and proudly-dismantled our roots, ties, and traditions. We had grown so tall we thought we could afford to cut the roots that held us down, only to discover that the tallest trees need the most elaborate roots of all.
-- Paul L Wachtel

#Pride #Cutting #Roots

Very few people would choose to have even the most fabled assortment of goods if it meant getting cancer within the year. But the choice involves not the certainty of cancer very soon but an increased probability of cancer at some time in the future. The cancers are no less real; millions will die painfully and prematurely because of what we do to our environment. But the choice is not an easily visualizable one, and our capacity of denial comes strongly into play - as it tends to whenever we must weigh future costs against immediate benefits.
-- Paul L Wachtel

#Real #Cancer #Years

It is a sad commentary of our times when our young must seek advice and counsel from 'Dear Abby' instead of going to Mom and Dad.

I care not much for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.

That some achieve great success, is proof to all that others can achieve it as well.

No woman is really an insider in the institutions fathered by masculine consciousness. When we allow ourselves to believe we are, we lose touch with parts of ourselves defined as unacceptable by that consciousness; with the vital toughness and visionary strength of the angry grandmothers, the fierce market women of the Ibo's Women's War, the marriage-resisting women silk workers of pre-Revolutionary China, the millions of widows, midwives, and the women healers tortured and burned as witches for three centuries in Europe.

You either get the point of Africa or you don't. What draws me back year after year is that it's like seeing the world with the lid off.

It came about as follows: over the years when I was involved in dianetics, I wrote the beginnings of many stories. I would get an idea, and then write the beginning, and then never touch it again.

The World Health Organization ... estimated that 1.6 million years of healthy living are lost every year in Europe because of noise pollution.

A false idea is not only one which is absolutely subjective but one which is absolutely objective.

I tried the paleo diet, which is the caveman diet - lots of meat. And I tried the calorie restriction diet: The idea is that if you eat very, very little - if you're on the verge of starvation, you will live a very long time, whether or not you want to, of course.

Once I went to bed in Orlando and I woke up in Atlanta. I have no idea how that happened.