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  "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-m-pirsig/zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance/the-church-of-reason",
  "json": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-m-pirsig/zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance/the-church-of-reason.json",
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  "slug": "the-church-of-reason",
  "text": "The Church of Reason, like all institutions of the System, is based not on individual strength but upon individual weakness. What's really demanded in the Church of Reason is not ability, but inability. Then you are considered teachable. A truly able person is always a threat. Phædrus sees that he has thrown away a chance to integrate himself into the organization by submitting to whatever Aristotelian thing he is supposed to submit to. But that kind of opportunity seems hardly worth the bowing and scraping and intellectual prostration necessary to maintain it. It is a low-quality form of life.",
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  "author": {
    "name": "Robert M. Pirsig",
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  "book": {
    "title": "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance",
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      "name": "education",
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    {
      "name": "conformity",
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  "added_at": "2026-09-25T22:40:34",
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      "slug": "uncle-toms-cabin",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-m-pirsig/zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance/uncle-toms-cabin",
      "text": "Uncle Tom's Cabin was no literary masterpiece but it was a culture-bearing book. It came at a time when the entire culture was about to reject slavery. People seized upon it as a portrayal of their own new values and it became an overwhelming success.\n\nThe success of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance seems the result of this culture-bearing phenomenon. The involuntary shock treatment described here is against the law today. It is a violation of human liberty. The culture has changed.",
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          "name": "slavery",
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        "url": "https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_M._Pirsig#Afterword_(1984)",
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      "slug": "trials-never-end",
      "url": "https://www.leafyquotes.com/robert-m-pirsig/zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance/trials-never-end",
      "text": "Trials never end, of course. Unhappiness and misfortune are bound to occur as long as people live, but there is a feeling now, that was not here before, and is not just on the surface of things, but penetrates all the way through: We've won it. It's going to get better now. You can sort of tell these things.",
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      "text": "Quality is better seen up at the timberline than here obscured by smoky windows and oceans of words, and he sees that what he is talking about can never really be accepted here because to see it one has to be free from social authority and this is an institution of social authority. Quality for sheep is what the shepherd says. And if you take a sheep and put it up at the timberline at night when the wind is roaring, that sheep will be panicked half to death and will call and call until the shepherd comes, or comes the wolf.",
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