On a Beam of Light

The Wisdom (or Craziness) of prot
(from his television appearance of Sept. 20, 1995)

Don’t blame the politicians for your problems. They are merely a reflection of yourselves.

Many humans feel sorry for the dolphins who are trapped in tuna nets. Who weeps for the tuna?

Your recorded “history” and your “literature” and “art” are merely those of your own species; they ignore all the other beings who share your planet. For a long time we thought that Homo sapiens was the only species living on EARTH.

Religions are difficult for a K-PAXian to understand. Either all of them are right or none of them is.

Human society will always have a drug problem unless life without drugs becomes a more attractive prospect for those concerned.

Hunting is no sport, it is cold-blooded murder. If you can outwrestle a bear or chase down a rabbit, then you can consider yourself a true sportsman.

Killing someone because he killed someone else is an oxymoron.

The root of all evil isn’t the lust for money, but money itself. Try to think of a problem that doesn’t involve money in some way.

Schools are not for teaching anything. They exist solely to pass on society’s beliefs and values to its children.

The purpose of governments is to make your WORLD safe for commerce.

Humans love to fool themselves with euphemisms in order to pretend they aren’t eating other animals—“beef” for cow, “pork” for pig, etc. This never fails to elicit gales of laughter from our beings.

All wars are holy wars.

Some humans are concerned with the destruction of their environment and the concomitant extinction of other species. If these well-meaning people were more concerned with the individual beings involved, there would be no need to worry about loss of species.

There will come a time when the human beings of EARTH will be devastated by diseases that will make aids look like a runny nose.

This above all: To thine own WORLD be true.

“There’s a lot of concern these days about the environment, for example.”
“The environment? You mean your environment.”
“Well, yes.”
“And to make your environment more tolerable for you, you recycle beer cans, plant trees—is that what you mean?”
“It’s a start, isn’t it?”
“Recycling is like putting a Band-Aid on a tumor, doc. And where are you going to plant a tree when there’s no place left to plant it?”
“Is that what you meant when you said in your report that we are yet children?”
<...>
“Let me put it this way: When you stop making killing seem admirable, when motherhood becomes less important than survival—not just your survival, but that of all the other creatures on your PLANET—you’ll be on your way to adulthood.”
“Lions kill! So do eagles and bears and—”
“They have no choice. You do.”

“<...> First, what does ‘K-PAX’ mean?”
<...>“ ‘K’ is the highest class of PLANET, the last step in the evolutionary process, the point of perfect peace and stability. ‘PAX’ means ‘a place of purple plains and mountains.’ “
“Because of your red and blue suns.”
He relaxed again. “Bingo!”
“So ‘B-TIK,’ what we call Earth, is the second lowest type?”
“Kee-reck. You don’t want to know about the ‘A’ category.”
“Why not?”
“Those are WORLDS already destroyed by their own inhabitants. Before that they were ‘B’s.”
“I see. And ‘TIK’ means—?”
“Beautiful blue water dotted with white clouds.”
“Ah, I get it.”