Top 100 Daniel Quinn Quotes
#2. With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?
Daniel Quinn
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?
Daniel Quinn
#6. It applies to all species without distinction.
Daniel Quinn
#7. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#12. Indigenous people believe that Man belongs to the World; civilized people believe that the World belongs to Man.
Daniel Quinn
#13. I prefer to think about problems the way engineers do. If a valve doesn't work, they don't say, "Well, we must have valves, so let's try two valves." If a valve doesn't work, they say, "Well, what would work?" Their rule is, if it doesn't work, don't do it more, do something else.
Daniel Quinn
#14. [T]he price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.
Daniel Quinn
#15. 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
#16. He began to speak to me, not in the jocular way of visitors to the menagerie but rather as one speaks to the wind or to the waves crashing on a beach, uttering that which must be said but which must not be heard by anyone.
Daniel Quinn
#17. Don't try to drive the homeless into places we find suitable. Help them survive in places they find suitable.
Daniel Quinn
#18. 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
#19. You wouldn't know from experience that small children are the most powerful learning engines in the known universe.
Daniel Quinn
#20. Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable
and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way.
Daniel Quinn
#21. From the animist point of view, humans belong in a sacred place because they themselves are sacred. Not sacred in a special way, not more sacred than anything else, but merely as sacred as anything else
as sacred as bison or salmon or crows or crickets or bears or sunflowers.
Daniel Quinn
#22. 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
#23. [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
#24. This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world's divinely appointed ruler: 'I will not LET them starve. I will not LET the drought come. I will not LET the river flood.
Daniel Quinn
#25. 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
#26. You never actually know how you're going to handle a problem until you actually have it.
Daniel Quinn
#27. [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
#28. Blessed are those who do whatever they can wherever they are, for no one is devoid of resources or opportunities.
Daniel Quinn
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. In Ishmael I articulated a living mythology that is so integral to our culture that it's never examined or even noticed by anyone. It's like the sound of blood rushing through your veins - you hear it so constantly that you don't hear it at all.
Daniel Quinn
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. Watch over Honoria, will you? See she doesn't marry an idiot. (Daniel Smythe-Smith)
Julia Quinn
#35. You shouldn't have to settle for rabbits if what you want is deer
Daniel Quinn
#36. We had been taken from The Wild and brought together in one place, because, for some strange reason, people found us interesting.
Daniel Quinn
#37. But charisma only wins people's attention. Once you have their attention, you have to have something to tell them.
Daniel Quinn
#38. We have a system that works fabulously well for products. But the one we have for people stinks. This is the lesson we've got to learn - or the human future on this planet is going to be a very bleak one indeed.
Daniel Quinn
#39. Putting food under lock and key was one of the great innovations of your culture. No other culture in history has ever put food under lock and key - and putting it there is the cornerstone of your economy.[ ... ] Because if the food wasn't under lock and key, Julie, who would work?
Daniel Quinn
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. The obvious can sometimes be illuminating when perceived in an unhabitual way.
Daniel Quinn
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. I want you. I want you now, in every way a man can want a woman.
Julia Quinn
#49. 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
#50. No invention ever comes into being fully developed in a single step, from nothing.
Ten thousand inventions had to be in place before Edison could invent the electric light-bulb.
Daniel Quinn
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. Arts and disciplines of that kind are fundamentally selfish; they're all designed to benefit the pupil - not the world - "Ishmael
Daniel Quinn
#54. 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
#55. Animists are not so much people with a religion as people with a fundamentally religious way of looking at things.
Daniel Quinn
#56. 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
#57. From infancy onward, children are the most fantastic learners in the world.
Daniel Quinn
#58. Everyone in your culture knows this. Man was born to turn the world into paradise, but tragically he was born flawed. And so his paradise has always been spoiled by stupidty, greed, destructiveness, and shortsightedness.
Daniel Quinn
#59. 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
#60. Imagine that the gods have a care for everything that lives in the community of life on earth.
Daniel Quinn
#61.
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
#62. The world is not going to survive very much longer as humanity's captive.
Daniel Quinn
#63. 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
#65. 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
#66. There are indeed times when one should TRUST blindly, just as there are times when one should not. WISDOM consists in being able to tell one from the other.
Daniel Quinn
#67. 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
#68. Don't wait. Where do you expect to get by waiting? Doing is what teaches you. Doing is what leads to inspiration. Doing is what generates ideas. Nothing else, and nothing less.
Daniel Quinn
#69. Diversity, not uniformity, is what works. Our problem is not that people are living a bad way but rather that they're all living the same way. The earth can accommodate many people living in a voraciously wasteful and pollutive way, it just can't accommodate all of us living that way.
Daniel Quinn
#70. 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
#71. This law ... defines the limits of competition in the community of life. You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war.
Daniel Quinn
#72. When one does not see what one does not see, one does not even see that one is blind. - Paul Veyne
Daniel Quinn
#73. In hierarchal organizations, the boss is a supreme being. In tribal organizations, the boss is just another worker.
Daniel Quinn
#74. Wow, just imagine missing school on the day when they were learning blue. You'd spend the rest of your life wondering what color the sky is.
Daniel Quinn
#75. Has it ever occurred to you to wonder if the history we teach our children is a lie?
Daniel Quinn
#76. Because the tribe is its members, the tribe is what its members want it to be - nothing more and nothing less.
Daniel Quinn
#77. 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
#78. Alaric, go after her. Since Daniel forced the blood bond on her, Quinn has been different. Lost. She deserves better than for you to abandon her and, priest or no, you know it.
Alyssa Day
#79. Daniel held himself very still, waiting for the wave of jealousy that never came. He was furious with the man who'd taken advantage of her innocence, but he did not feel jealous. He did not need to be her first, he realized. He simply needed to be her last. Her only.
Julia Quinn
#80. 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
#81. 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
#82. We need schools to force kids to learn things they have no use for.
Daniel Quinn
#83. 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
#84. I went out and had a drink. I needed to talk to someone, and solitary drinkers are lucky in this regard - they always have someone to talk to.
Daniel Quinn
#85. For someone bent on achievement, education is a thing you get past and forget about as quickly as possible.
Daniel Quinn
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. I can't shake the crazy feeling that there is some small thing that we're being lied to about.
Daniel Quinn
#90. 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
#91. It's not MAN who is the scourge of the world, it's a single culture. One culture out of hundreds of thousands of cultures. Our culture.
Daniel Quinn
#92. This is what creationists say of evolution, that it's "only" a theory, it hasn't been proved, as though this in itself is grounds for dismissal. This misrepresents the point of formulating a theory, which is to make sense of some body of evidence.
Daniel Quinn
#93. Man's place is to be the first without being the last ... [I]t's man's place to be the teacher of all the rest who are capable of becoming what he's become.
Daniel Quinn
#95. 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
#96. The first time I read the ad, I choked and cursed and spat and threw the paper to the floor.
Daniel Quinn
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. If the world is saved, it will not be saved by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all.
Daniel Quinn
#100. Exactly. That's what's been happening here for the past ten thousand years: You've been doing what you damn well please with the world. And of course you mean to go right on doing what you damn well please with it, because the whole damn thing belongs to you.
Daniel Quinn
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