Top 80 Barry López Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “My function as a writer is to provide an atmosphere in which people can think wisely about what we’re doing on this planet.”

— Barry López

52. “It is, I think, the rarest of leisure, hard work mixed with hard pleasure, to refine one’s time of deep thought or light regard into the utterly self-absorbed and equally and abundantly outward-seeking shape of the personal essay – a story comprised of found fact, of analyzed emotion, of fictive memory.”

— Barry López

53. “My faith is in my colleagues. And when I meet other writers, journalists, who’ve been doing this for a long time, trying to make us aware of what it is that we’re living in, I put my faith in those people.”

— Barry López

54. “The failure to speak in defense of marginalized or persecuted groups is a constant in recent human history. It.”

— Barry López

55. “The writer works on the inside and the critic works on the outside. I don’t know what it looks like on the outside, sometimes. It’s not that I’m not interested-it’s not where I live. I live inside the story.”

— Barry López

56. “For me, the ability to listen carefully to another person’s perspective, rather than summarily deciding what that person means, is in keeping with the behavior one expects of an elder. And the ability to understand what someone else is thinking is the foundation of stable social order.”

— Barry López

57. “If the real human environment in developed countries today is third-growth monocultured “forests,” tar-sand petroleum, cow-burnt grasslands, and smog-like clouds of microplastics floating in oceans where fish once thrived, then human cultures need to distinguish between sentimentality about loss and the imperative to survive. They need to establish a more relevant politics than the competitive politics of nation-states. And to found economies built not on profit but on conservation.”

— Barry López

58. “The frozen ocean itself still turns in its winter sleep like a dragon.”

— Barry López

59. “It would be to hear resonating within oneself the shouting of the Mothers of the Disappeared in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires in the 1970s, and to turn instead to other things.”

— Barry López

60. “Is it still possible to face the gathering darkness and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?”

— Barry López

61. “They have a quality of nuannaarpoq, of taking extravagant pleasure in being alive; and they delight in finding it in other people.”

— Barry López

62. “We can no longer afford to carry on in a prolonged era of polite reflection and ineffective resistance... We must invent overnight another kind of civilization... It is a good idea to love each other, and to love the Earth.”

— Barry López

63. “The wolf was the one animal that, again, did two things at once year after year: remained distinct and exemplary as an individual, yet served the tribe. There are no stories among Indians of lone wolves.”

— Barry López

64. “Of the sciences today, quantum physics alone seems to have found its way back to an equitable relationship with metaphors, those fundamental tools of the imagination. The other sciences are occasionally so bound by rational analysis, or so wary of metaphor, that they recognize and denounce anthropomorphism as a kind of intellectual cancer, instead of employing it as a tool of comparative inquiry, which is perhaps the only way the mind works, that parallelism we finally call narrative.”

— Barry López

65. “I had a theology professor once,” I said to John, “who told us that religion was not about being certain but about living with uncertainty. It was about being comfortable with doubt, and maintaining the continuity of one’s reverence for a profound mystery.”

— Barry López

66. “One can choose to step into the treacherous void between oneself and the confounding world, and there to be staggered by the breadth, the intricacy, the possibilities of that world, accepting its requirement for death but working still to lessen the degree of cruelty and to increase the reach of justice in every quarter.”

— Barry López

67. “To act here is to face one’s own complicity, to choose to take life in order that one’s own kin might continue to live. When I lie down to sleep far from home, I place this small work of art close by on a folded scarf.”

— Barry López

68. “The alarming situation here for humanity is that H. sapiens, though it has asserted itself as the dominant species on Earth, is at the same time the potential victim of its domination over virtually all Earth’s ecosystems. If H. sapiens were to become extinct, the event would simply be regarded as evolution continuing to unfold, a biological future for life but not one that any longer included humanity.”

— Barry López

69. “Our question is no longer how to exploit the natural world for human comfort and gain, but how we can cooperate with one another to ensure we will someday have a fitting, not a dominating, place in it.”

— Barry López

70. “And yet if we persist in believing that we alone, living in whatever culture we’re from, are right, and that we therefore have no need to listen to anyone else’s stories, stories that we often can’t quite understand and so are unwilling to discuss, we endanger ourselves.”

— Barry López

71. “And ceremony also functions as an antidote to loneliness.”

— Barry López

72. “In those minutes of gazing at the boiling cistern of waves and watching the albatrosses addressing the storm with great seriousness, I could fix only on what I admired most often in other human beings, their enduring grace and poise.”

— Barry López

73. “The truth, one tends to think, is that all of us, drunk or sober, sedated or not, aggrieved or manic, live consciously or unconsciously within this maelstrom, which no one really wants to risk shutting down.”

— Barry López

74. “Only the misled can insist that heaven awaits the righteous while they watch the fires on Earth consume the only heaven we have ever known.”

— Barry López

75. “At some critical point, accommodation and cooperation replace violence and exploitation, or humanity’s fate is delivered into the hands of barbarians.”

— Barry López

76. “We must invent overnight, figuratively speaking, another kind of civilization, one more cognizant of limits, less greedy, more compassionate, less bigoted, more inclusive, less exploitive.”

— Barry López

77. “In other words, that humans were not set apart by having “a soul.”

— Barry López

78. “It didn’t occur to me that taking life so seriously might cause a loss of perspective. How else, I would ask, could you take it?”

— Barry López

79. “To regard the Milagros there as evidence of superstition, or to describe these out-of-the-way chapels as backwards, seems to me to dismiss what it means to be human, which is to live in fear in a world in which one’s destiny is never entirely of one’s choosing.”

— Barry López

80. “A clearcut is not the outward sign of a healthy economy but of an indifference to life.”

— Barry López

81. “To this list I would add one more thing. Elders are more often listeners than speakers. And when they speak, they can talk for a long while without using the word I.”

— Barry López

82. “There is something about the way birds can calm you, how the graceful way they define the sky can draw irritation right out of you.”

— Barry López

83. “The horrors – ethnic cleansing, industrial rapine, political corruption, racist lynching, extrajudicial execution – once identified and then denounced, always return, wearing different clothes but with the same obsessive face of indifference. We denounce those who order it, we condemn the people who carry out the policies, calling them inhumane. But the behavior is fully human. We are the darkness, as we are, too, the light.”

— Barry López

84. “Exposure to an unusually spectacular place in conducive circumstance, the thinking goes, can release one from the prison of one’s own ego and initiate a renewed awareness of the wondrous, salutary, and informing nature of the Other, the thing outside of the self.”

— Barry López

85. “As the decades passed for me, I began to think that the path many of us now share, a path of self-realization and self-aggrandizement, might eventually leave us stranded, having arrived at the end of exploitation, but with most of us standing there empty-handed. And what is it that we have found through the injustice of exploitation that these Magdalenians at Altamira did not already possess?”

— Barry López

86. “Without intending to, they separated themselves from the galaxy of African wildlife and emerged as something else, not yet the founders of civilization but no longer truly wild. These were the first creatures to shimmer with intentionality.”

— Barry López

87. “To eliminate diversity would be like eliminating carbon and expecting life to go on.”

— Barry López