"[A]ny species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion."
"This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world's divinely appointed ruler: 'I will not LET them starve. I will not LET the drought come. I will not LET the river flood."
"You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world."
"[N]ow we have a clearer idea what this story is all about: The world was made for man, and man was made to rule it."
"The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it. Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans and the elements. According to your mythology, this is what he was BORN to do."
"The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. … The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'."