“The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.”

“Chi disegna non deve perdersi d'animo, lasciarsi scoraggiare da un momento di stanchezza o di confusione. Deve insistere, perché la cosa giusta viene solo dopo il momento di disperazione. Invece a volte, appena lo scoraggiamento arriva, si smette, si abbandona il terreno. È un errore.”

“Boredom is an instrument of social control. Power is the power to impose boredom, to command stasis, to combine this stasis with anguish. The real tedium, deep tedium, is seasoned with terror and with death.”

“Boredom is the conviction that you can't change ... the shriek of unused capacities.”

“Does man not face life with a greater assurance is he believes that a benevolent providence foresees the future? And yet he must at the same time be confident that his will is free, otherwise moral support is meaningless altogether. Doctrines in themselves are not important to me, but their consequences are. For example, I urge upon men that they regard themselves as embodiments of the divine essence. If I convince them, their days are endowed with a sense of abiding significance and unturning glory. Then not all the misfortunes and degradations to which they may be subjected can take from them their feelings of oneness with angels and stars. And as for our people, persecuted and dispersed, they live under the shadow of death, cherishing a dream that is recurrently shattered by the caprice of tyrants and then dreamed again half in despair. What can enable such a people to persist except a conviction of a special relationship to God?”

“It is wrong to draw a sharp line in one's imagination between the "nature" present on the Rocky Mountain front and that available in the suburbanite's own front yard. The natural world found on even the most perfect and stylized of lawns is no less real than that at the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Different, yes, but to draw too sharp a distinction between the sparsely settled world of Alaska and the dense suburbs of Levittown is a prescription for the plundering of natural resources. It is easy to see how the yard, conceived as less natural and thus less important than the spotted owl, is easily ignored. The point is underscored by research showing that, surprisingly, people who evince concern for the environment are more likely to use chemicals on their yards than those who are less ecologically aware. ”

“Even in the wake of Rachel Carson's best-selling Silent Spring, Americans in 1963 spent nearly as much money fighting crabgrass with chemical weed controls as they contributed to the American Cancer Society. ”