“It is perfectly true that neither you nor I can hope to set up a program for activity which is at all likely to be feasible ten or twenty thousand years from now. But it is also true that unless we habitually feel our activity and decisions to be somehow involved in the long-range future, just as we know know them to be involved with the far, far distant past, we can no longer make decisions which will be very real in the twentieth century present.”
More from Walter Ong
“Written words are residue. Oral tradition has no such residue or deposit… Though words are…”
“The articulate remains always embedded in the inarticulate.”
“Science itself is always incomplete articulation.”
“What was earlier inviolably intimate or totally inaccessible is often now on total public…”