Alternative Values Quotes

I was a little different. I still say I'm a little different, because success to me is not having the most money, or having the biggest car or the biggest house.

It is better to be able neither to read nor write than to be able to do nothing else.

For a variety of reasons, I have always felt myself an outsider. I don't know how to classify myself in economics. I am a loner. I do not like groupthink, which, if anything, has become more important in economics. In addition, a lot of the values I hold are not the mainstream values in the profession.

The way you win this war is to adopt a value system different from your enemy.

I'm interested in the lives of Americans for whom the ways this culture has tried to define itself - that is, self-esteem defined by material wealth - they have nothing to do with that.

It's because the idea of what's cool is different. When you talk to a girl who goes to regular school, what's cool is whether or not you've been to jail, or if you have a car. If you talk to a girl who goes to art school, what's cool to her is if you do art projects on the weekend with your dad, if you can build something - out-of-the-norm stuff.

What hope is there for individual reality or authenticity when the forces of violence and orthodoxy, the earthly powers of guns and bombs and manipulated public opinion make it impossible for us to be authentic and fulfilled human beings? The only hope is in the creation of alternative values, alternative realities. The only hope is in daring to redream one's place in the world - a beautiful act of imagination, and a sustained act of self becoming. Which is to say that in some way or another we breach and confound the accepted frontiers of things.

My family, my parents are hippies.

The moon people do not eat by swallowing food but by smelling it. Their money is poetry - actual poems, written out on pieces of paper whose value is determined by the worth of the poem itself.

My real fantasy if I was to drop out would be to live in a mobile home and be a hippie and drive around festivals and have millions of children - children with dreadlocks and nose rings - and play the flute.

I grew up counterculture. I'm essentially a hippie, and I'm essentially a folkie.

I think there's something important in going against the grain and perhaps finding value in things that aren't necessarily institutionally recognized.

Philosophy, art, politics, religion and bohemia have never sought to do away entirely with the status hierarchy; they have attemptee, rather, to institute new kinds of hierarchies based on sets of values unrecognised by, and critical of, those of the majority.. They have provided us with persuasive and consoling reminders that there is more than one way of succeeding in life.

I'm interested in the fact that comics are people who are oddly courageous in their desire and their commitment to sacrificing any sense of normalcy in their lives, any sense of security, and most of them are oddly unique individuals. Let's have a broader conversation with people that have spent their last however-many-years thinking about their lives. I mean, they're philosophers. They're poets. They're people who are on the outside looking in at the world through a different set of values.

With material wealth and in a culture where many of us defines our self-worth by what we have and what we own and what we achieve, it's very hard to comprehend that there are enclaves all over our big country in which people are very purposefully choosing to maintain different values.

I liked movers and shakers more than celebrities. I wasn't that interested in celebrities. I grew up without a TV.

In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive.