Top 100 Daniel Quinn Quotes
#1. I can't shake the crazy feeling that there is some small thing that we're being lied to about.
Daniel Quinn
#2. Has it ever occurred to you to wonder if the history we teach our children is a lie?
Daniel Quinn
#3. In hierarchal organizations, the boss is a supreme being. In tribal organizations, the boss is just another worker.
Daniel Quinn
#4. When one does not see what one does not see, one does not even see that one is blind. - Paul Veyne
Daniel Quinn
#5. They put their shoulders to the wheel during the day, stupefy themselves with drugs or television at night, and try not to think too searchingly about the world they're leaving their children to cope with.
Daniel Quinn
#6. Thinkers aren't limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they're limited by what puzzles them, because there's no way to become curious about something that doesn't puzzle you.
Daniel Quinn
#7. Karl Marx recognized that workers without a choice are workers in chains. But his idea of breaking chains was for us to depose the pharaohs and then build the pyramids for ourselves, as if building pyramids is something we just can't stop doing, we love it so much.
Daniel Quinn
#8. If you alone found out what the lie was, then you're probably right - it would make no great difference. But if you ALL found out what the lie was, it might conceivably make a very great difference indeed.
Daniel Quinn
#9. The world doesn't belong to us, we belong to it. Always have, always will. We belong to the world. We belong to the community of life on this planet
it doesn't belong to us. We got confused about that, now it's time to set the record straight
Daniel Quinn
#10.
Yes,I'm afraid you're right. Trial and error isn't a bad way to learn how to build an aircraft,but it can be a disastrous way to learn how to build a civilization.
Daniel Quinn
#11. Imagine that the gods have a care for everything that lives in the community of life on earth.
Daniel Quinn
#12. Our schools are much like our prisons: they disappoint us because they only do what they're designed to do, and it annoys us that they don't do something else!
Daniel Quinn
#13. From infancy onward, children are the most fantastic learners in the world.
Daniel Quinn
#14. When you send off a short story, it sits on the editor's desk in the same pile with stories by the most famous and honored names in present-day writing-and it's not going to be accepted unless it's as good as theirs. (And it'll probably have to be better.)
Daniel Quinn
#15. Animists are not so much people with a religion as people with a fundamentally religious way of looking at things.
Daniel Quinn
#16. The greatest discovery any alien anthropologist could make about our culture is our overriding response to failure: If it didn't work last year, do it AGAIN this year (and if possible do it MORE)
Daniel Quinn
#17. Arts and disciplines of that kind are fundamentally selfish; they're all designed to benefit the pupil - not the world - "Ishmael
Daniel Quinn
#18. I think what you're groping for is that people need more than to feel scolded, more than to be made to feel stupid and guilty. They need more than a vision of doom. They need a vision of the world and of themselves that inspires them.
Daniel Quinn
#20. I have amazing news for you. Man is not alone on this planet. He is part of a community, upon which he depends absolutely.
Daniel Quinn
#21. I mean that in the absence of food, baboons will organize themselves to find a meal, but in the absence of leopards they will never organize themselves to find a leopard.
Daniel Quinn
#22. The first time I read the ad, I choked and cursed and spat and threw the paper to the floor.
Daniel Quinn
#23. The civilized want people to make their living individually, and they want them to live separately, behind locked doors - one family to a house, each house fully stocked with refrigerators, television sets, washing machines, and so on.
Daniel Quinn
#25. The sign stopped me
or rather, this text stopped me. Words are my profession; I seized these and demanded that they explain themselves, that they cease to be ambiguous.
Daniel Quinn
#26. Because the tribe is its members, the tribe is what its members want it to be - nothing more and nothing less.
Daniel Quinn
#27. The journey itself is going to change you, so you don't have to worry about memorizing the route we took to accomplish that change.
Daniel Quinn
#28. Many of the biggest and most far-reaching investments we make in our lives are investments that have little or nothing to do with money.
Daniel Quinn
#29. No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' ... That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species.
Daniel Quinn
#30. For someone bent on achievement, education is a thing you get past and forget about as quickly as possible.
Daniel Quinn
#31. The world is not in any sense in danger from itself. The world is in fact not in any danger at all. It is we who are in danger.
Daniel Quinn
#32. We need schools to force kids to learn things they have no use for.
Daniel Quinn
#33. If the world was made for us, then it BELONGS to us and we can do what we damn well please with it.
Daniel Quinn
#34. But we're not humanity, we're just one culture - one culture out of hundreds of thousands that have lived their vision on this planet and sung their song. If it were humanity that needed changing, then we'd be out of luck. But it isn't humanity that needs changing, it's just ... us.
Daniel Quinn
#35. The tribal life doesn't turn people into saints; it enables ordinary people to make a living together with a minimum of stress year after year, generation after generation.
Daniel Quinn
#36. There is enormous pressure on you to take a place in the story your culture is enacting in the world - any place at all.
Daniel Quinn
#37. [A]ny species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion.
Daniel Quinn
#38. A system based on exchanging products inevitably channels wealth to a few, and no governmental change will ever be able to correct that. It isn't a defect of the system, it's intrinsic to the
Daniel Quinn
#39. You wouldn't know from experience that small children are the most powerful learning engines in the known universe.
Daniel Quinn
#40. All too often the people of our culture think they're really doing something if they're out there fighting bad things and getting laws passed. Just look at what we've accomplished by outlawing drugs and waging a trillion-dollar War on Drugs! (Nothing!)
Daniel Quinn
#41. Don't try to drive the homeless into places we find suitable. Help them survive in places they find suitable.
Daniel Quinn
#42. We're not destroying the world because we're clumsy. We're destroying the world
because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.
Daniel Quinn
#45. How easy it is first to leap to a false conclusion about someone and then to view everything he does in light of that conclusion.
Daniel Quinn
#46. The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison.
Daniel Quinn
#48. Lies are like sleeping pills. You should only use them when you absolutely have to. They spoil everything if you make a habit of them.
Daniel Quinn
#49. It applies to all species without distinction.
Daniel Quinn
#50. With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?
Daniel Quinn
#51. The world must live. We are only one species among billions. The gods don't love us any more than they love spiders or bears or whales or water lilies.
Daniel Quinn
#52. You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. ... You are captives - and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it? - your captivity and the captivity of the world.
Daniel Quinn
#53. With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?
Daniel Quinn
#54. But why? Why do you need prophets to tell you how you ought to live? Why do you need anyone to tell you how you ought to live
Daniel Quinn
#55. People will listen when they're ready to listen and not before. Don't waste time with people who want to argue. They'll keep you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to something new.
Daniel Quinn
#56. Simple things are almost always the hardest to explain, Julie. Showing someone how to tie a shoelace is easy. Explaining it is almost impossible.
Daniel Quinn
#57. I'm not an anthropology buff, but I've read enough of it to know that the Zuni don't think that their way is the way for everyone, and that the Navajo don't think their way is the way for everyone. Each of them has a way that works well for them.
Daniel Quinn
#58. And every time the Takers stamp out a Leaver culture, a wisdom ultimately tested since the birth of mankind disappears from the world beyond recall.
Daniel Quinn
#59. The relevant measures are not ease and difficulty. The relevant measures are readiness and unreadiness. If the time isn't right for a new idea, no power on earth can make it catch on, but if the time is right, it will sweep the world like wildfire.
Daniel Quinn
#60. The obvious can sometimes be illuminating when perceived in an unhabitual way.
Daniel Quinn
#61. The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it. Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans and the elements. According to your mythology, this is what he was BORN to do.
Daniel Quinn
#62. But when it's read another way, the explanation makes perfectly good sense: Man can never have the wisdom the gods use to rule the world, and if he tries to preempt that wisdom, the result won't be enlightenment, it will be death.
Daniel Quinn
#63. You never actually know how you're going to handle a problem until you actually have it.
Daniel Quinn
#64. But charisma only wins people's attention. Once you have their attention, you have to have something to tell them.
Daniel Quinn
#65. You shouldn't have to settle for rabbits if what you want is deer
Daniel Quinn
#66. No, the founders of our culture didn't just fall into a lifestyle of total dependence on agriculture, they had to whip themselves into it, and the whip they used was this meme: Growing all your own food is the best way to live. Nothing less could imaginably have done this amazing trick.
Daniel Quinn
#67. We've poured our poisons into the world as though it were a bottomless pit.. and we go on gobbling them up. It's hard to imagine how the world could survive another century of this abuse, but nobody's really doing anything about it. It's a problem our children will have to solve, or their children.
Daniel Quinn
#68. The community of life that we see here at any given time isn't just a random collection. It's a collection of successes. It's the remainder that is left over when the failures have disappeared.
Daniel Quinn
#69. What is crucial to your survival as a race is not the redistribution of power and wealth within the prison but rather the destruction of the prison itself.
Daniel Quinn
#70. Blessed are those who do whatever they can wherever they are, for no one is devoid of resources or opportunities.
Daniel Quinn
#71. [N]ow we have a clearer idea what this story is all about: The world was made for man, and man was made to rule it.
Daniel Quinn
#72. I pray about teeth-doesn't everyone? I don't have time to floss. You know. Hang in there, I tell them; I'll get around to it before it's too late.
Daniel Quinn
#73. Donald Trump can do a lot of things I can't, but he can no more get out of the prison than I can
Daniel Quinn
#74. It's the idea that people living close to nature tend to be noble. It's seeing all those sunsets that does it. You can't watch a sunset and then go off and set fire to your neighbor's tepee. Living close to nature is wonderful for your mental health.
Daniel Quinn
#75. There is a difference between the inmates of your criminal prisons and the inmates of your cultural prison: The former understand that the distribution of wealth and power inside the prison had nothing to do with justice.
Daniel Quinn
#76. As the Takers see it, the gods gave man the same choice they gave Achilles: a brief life of glory, or a long, uneventful life in obscurity. And the Takers chose a brief life of glory.
Daniel Quinn
#77. I hope it will not be too long before the technologies that support our population explosion begin to be perceived as no less hazardous to the future of life on this planet than the endless production of radioactive wastes.
Daniel Quinn
#78. There are times when having too much to say can be as dumbfounding as having too little.
Daniel Quinn
#80. You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
Daniel Quinn
#81. A tribe is nothing more than a coalition of people working together as equals to make a living.
Daniel Quinn
#82. In fact, of course, there is no secret knowledge; no one knows anything that can't be found on a shelf in the public library.
Daniel Quinn
#83. Children don't need learning. They need access to what they want to learn outside the home.
Daniel Quinn
#84. WHAT you DO NOT KNOW YOURSELF, you CANNOT TEACH ANOTHER.
Daniel Quinn
#85. You know how to split atoms, how to send explorers to the moon, how to splice genes, but you don't know how people ought to live.
Daniel Quinn
#86. I find that the longer I live, the more I worry about people and the less I worry about rules.
Daniel Quinn
#87. May the forests be with you and with your children.
Daniel Quinn
#88. All paths lie together in the hand of god like a web endlessly woven, and yours and mine are no greater or less than the beetle's or the squirrel's or the sparrow's. All are held together.
Daniel Quinn
#89. If you can't discover what's keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual - Ishmael
Daniel Quinn
#90. No story is devoid of meaning ... If you know how to look for it.
Daniel Quinn
#91. Making food a commodity to be owned was one of the great innovations of our culture. No other culture in history has ever put food under lock and key - and putting it there is the cornerstone of our economy, for if the food wasn't under lock and key, who would work?
Daniel Quinn
#92. The rules that govern competition between species are (and must be) very different from the rules that govern competition within species.
Daniel Quinn
#93. TEACHER seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.
Daniel Quinn
#94. The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. ... The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'.
Daniel Quinn
#95. We're straying from the path of salvation because we remember that we once belonged to the world and were content in that belonging.
Daniel Quinn
#96. I don't think there's any loneliness greater than the loneliness to be found in a bad marriage. In solitary confinement, everyone knows you're lonely and feels sorry for you. In a bad marriage loneliness is your darkest secret, one you dare not even share with your spouse.
Daniel Quinn
#97. We made it back to the airport without getting mugged, stoned, shot at, pounced on, bombed, shelled, garroted, gassed, pitched into, caught in a cross fire, sniped at, blockaded, napalmed, or trip-wired. No one even hit us with a water balloon.
Daniel Quinn
#98. Increasing food production to feed an increased population results in yet another increase in population.
Daniel Quinn
#99. Only slaves love being powerful. HANS ERICH NOSSACK
Daniel Quinn
#100. What's normal is for things to work. What's not normal is for things to fail.
Daniel Quinn
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