initial inspiration

What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost. There is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.
Thoreau

When the best leader’s work is done the people say, “We did it ourselves.”
Lao-Tzu

Technology is destructive only in the hands of people who do not realize that they are one and the same process as the universe.
Alan Watts

I feel that my whole life is a contribution.
Pete Seeger

We live in a time, after all, when hard-nosed bosses compose awestruck disquisitions on the nature of “change,” punk rockers dispense leadership secrets, shallow profundities about authenticity sell luxury cars, tech billionaires build rock ‘n’ roll museums, management theorists ponder the nature of coolness, and a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead hails the dawn of New Economy capitalism from the heights of Davos. Conservatives may not understand why, but business culture had melded with counterculture for reasons having a great deal to do with business culture’s usual priority–profit.
Thomas Frank