Dee W Hock

Unwritten thoughts are illusive and evanescent. When reduced to writing they take on permanency, enabling us to discover error, improve content and refine expression.

We assume we cannot live well without technology when, indeed, we did so for millennia. What we do not know, is whether we can live well with it. What we do know, is that we cannot live well without nature, and that a great deal of technology is incompatible with it.

Why is it that those who know the least are the most eager to explain everything? Why is it that mind and mouth are so often strangers to one another?

Nature will ever have the best technology, and mankind the worst. Yet in our greed, ignorance, and hubris, we continually perpetuate the worst at the expense of the best. We must get into harmony with nature, not attempt to subdue it.

Every thing we think, experience or feel is infinitely richer and more complex than the language we have to express it. Life cannot be contained in words, no matter how beautiful they may be.

Devotion to truth, honesty and equity is a poor path to wealth and power. How much of that devotion to sacrifice is the problem for an ambitious, but principled person. Some sacrifice it all, which readily observable in today's society

The zeal with which we are led to believe that science and technology will save us from ecological, social, and political disaster, and the fervor with which so many believe it, would be laughable, were the consequences less grim.

For those who do not believe in the religion of money, or worship in the temples of commerce, and realize that the ultimate act of self interest is to do something for someone else without recompense, our present society is a cold, ugly, unfriendly, even dangerous place.

It is as foolish to expect ethics and morality from science as it is to expect feathers from a rock. Science is good at what it does, such as measurement, specialization and dissection, but ethics and morality are not among them.

The only beings more discontent and destructive of the organs and bodies on which they depend for their existence than cancer cells, are humans, who are savaging all other living things and the earth itself, on which they are dependent for their existence.

Under precise, absolute, scientific control, life will still do and it pleases. Life is uncertain and messy. Only death is neat and controlled.

In the gratification of every desire, and pleasure lies the birth of even greater desires and pleasures. So round and round we go like greyhounds chasing mechanical rabbits, always trying to outrun all the others and grasp the prize, only to end up in our kennels.

Modern society is so obsessed with the nature of the economy that it is blind to the economy of nature. Nature is not obsessed with anything, nor is it blind to our transgressions against it in mindless pursuit of profit.

First came pirates and freebooters. Then came commercial corporations. The fact that the former were outside the law, and the latter have been sanctioned by nation states, radically altered the form, but did little to change the function.

All medical science notwithstanding, the race between microbes and man has barely started. My money is on the microbes.

We often seem bound between things too huge, and too small to be grasped; between things too obvious, and too obscure to be noticed; between things too good, and too evil to comprehend; between our individual magnitude, and our insignificance.

The health of the planet is at risk, and so is the health of all people. What an incredible opportunity for those who profess to lead. It is incomprehensible they choose to ignore the opportunity, and lavish time, energy and ingenuity in pursuit of profit, but so they have.

Study opponents and enemies with great care. The surest way to gain advantage over them, or convert them to allies, is to know, and understand their abilities and qualities better than they do.

Four common attributes of management of mechanistic, hierarchical organizations are aversion to advice, intolerance of criticism, disregard of morality, and worship of money.

Specialization, particularly in science, leads one to lose themselves in the intricacies of ever finer rationalization, narrowing perspective until ethics are difficult to discern, morality arduous to practice, and consequences of little concern.