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If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government.

Robert M. Pirsig

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Robert M. Pirsig
Age: 88 †
Born: 1928
Born: September 6
Died: 2017
Died: April 24
Autobiographer
Novelist
Philosopher
Writer
Minneapolis
Minnesota
Robert Maynard Pirsig
Left
Systematic
Thought
Destroys
Government
Repeat
Repeats
Produced
Patterns
Revolution
Intact
Succeed
Succeeding

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There is an evil tendency underlying all our technology - the tendency to do what is reasonable even when it isn't any good.
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When you've got a Chautauqua in your head, it's extremely hard not to inflict it on innocent people.
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Metaphysics is a restaurant where they give you a thirty thousand page menu, and no food.
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The number of hypotheses available to explain any given phenomenon is infinite.
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Programs of a political nature are important end products of social quality that can be effective only if the underlying structure of social values is right. The social values are right only if the individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there.
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Why, for example, should a group of simple, stable compounds of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen struggle for billions of years to organize themselves into a professor of chemistry? What's the motive?
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Institutions such as schools, churches, governments and political organizations of every sort all tended to direct thought for ends other than truth, for the perpetuation of their own functions, and for the control of individuals in the service of these functions.
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Now, to take that which has caused us to create the world, and include it within the world we have created, is clearly impossible. This is why Quality cannot be defined. If we do define it, we are defining something less than Quality itself.
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We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.
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Religious mysticism is intellectual garbage. It’s a vestige of the old superstitious Dark Ages when nobody knew anything...It is one of those delusions that isn’t called insane only because there are so many people involved.
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The buddah can reside in the gears of a motorcycle as easily as in a flower on a mountaintop. To believe otherwise is to demean the buddah which is to demean one's self.
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I think now the trace of egotism may have been the beginning of all his troubles
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If you become restless, speed up. If you become winded, slow down. You climb the mountain in an equilibrium between restlessness and exhaustion.
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From an endless beach of reality, we take a grain of sand and call it the world.
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An evolutionary morality argues that The North was right in pursuing that war because a nation is a higher form of evolution than a human body and the principle of human equality is an even higher form than a nation
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Stuckness shouldn't be avoided. It's the physic predecessor of all real understanding.
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If you stare at a wall from four in the morning till nine at night and you do that for a week, you are getting pretty close to nothingness.
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It's better not to see than to see wrongly.
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A thing that has no value does not exist.
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The logic of science was infallible, and if the scientists were sometimes mistaken, this was assumed to be only from their mistaking its rules.
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