Barry Lopez Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. For centuries American and Europeans have arrived in foreign lands as though sent by a superior god. Even avowed atheists bent on making business deals now arrive regularly in foreign lands with this attitude. It's an outward sign of their success as a "superior" culture. It kills people.

2. However it might be viewed, the throttled Earth--the scalped, the mined, the industrially farmed, the drilled, polluted, and suctioned land, endlessly manipulated for further development and profit -- is now our home. We know the wounds. We have come to accept them. And we ask, many of us, What will the next step be?

3. Humans and Chimpanzees share 98% of their genes.

4. In Antarctica there was no end to the wonder.

5. it is dangerous to believe the past is behind us, that a remedy for barbarism has been found.

6. Perhaps I'm in a minority, feeling that the instability of my own country is partly the result of its support of an adolescent's ideal -- that people should be free to do whatever they want -- and its obsession with personal gratiication, whatever the cost. Lives without restraint are eventually ruinous, to those individuals and to the social and physical world around them.

7. The tendency of some to exaggerate our own importance as a species in the great theater of life on Earth is a sign of hubris. A more biologically informed or enlightened, and certainly secular, point of view is that man is better off viewing himself as a flawed rather than a potentially omnipotent creature, an animal with no more of a guaranteed future than any other animal. This perspective, some argue, that we are not the be-all and end-all, might eventurally lead to better politics and to the development of a more equitable social and economic systems worldwide.

8. We go on professing confidently what we know, armed with a secular faith in all that is reasonable, even though we sense that mystery is the real condition in which we live, not certainty.