Top 18 Larry Harvey Quotes

Belief is thought at rest.

The art cars are the public transportation system. And that requires regulation because, lately, we’ve had art cars that don’t want people on board and that want private parties, and that’s in conflict with the communitarian feeling and the interactive aspect of society.

I’m actually a very shy person. You’d be surprised how many leaders are shy. They’re not all extroverts by nature.

Black Rock gives us all a chance to heal, to become ourselves.

We see culture as a self-organising thing.

I think it’s a little much to expect the organisation to solve the problem of racial parity. We do see a fast-increasing influx of Asians, black folks. I actually see black folks out here, unlike some of our liberal critics.

I’ve learned never to expect people to be better than they are, but to always have faith that they can be more.

We didn’t worry about getting a venue or asking permission. We started out guerrilla. We were illegal, going down to the beach to burn this thing.

I’ll believe in utopia when I meet my first perfect person, and this community is made up of 70,000 imperfect persons.

We’ve been civilized from the beginning. In the desert, it’s a baroque city like Paris or Rome.

My wife is from Jamaica. My ex-wife. My stepchildren – and then there’s my son. So, it’s a biracial family.

People out here build whole worlds out of nothing, through cooperating.

We don’t use the trademark to market anything. It’s our identity.

When I was in my late 30s, I lit a figure on fire on Baker Beach in San Francisco. It was me, a friend, and maybe eight people, tops. There wasn’t any premeditation to it at all. It was really just a product of San Franciscan bohemian milieu.

Burning Man is like a big family picnic. Would you sell things to one another at a family picnic? No, you’d share things.

It avoids a self-conscious relationship to the act. We live in the most self-conscious society in the history of mankind. There are good things in that, but there are also terrible things. The worst of it is, that we find it hard to give ourselves to the cultural process.

As a child, I craved sophistication and culture. My parents didn’t know what to make of me.

Well it seems to me, that all real communities grow out of a shared confrontation with survival. Communities are not produced by sentiment or mere goodwill. They grow out of a shared struggle. Our situation in the desert is an incubator for community.