Daniel Quinn Quotes
-
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.
→ -
You shouldn't have to settle for rabbits if what you want is deer
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
What's normal is for things to work. What's not normal is for things to fail.
→ -
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.
→ -
If Mother Culture were to give an account of human history using these terms, it would go something like this: ' The Leavers were chapter one of human history -- a long and uneventful chapter. Their chapter of human history ended about ten thousand years ago with the birth of agriculture in the Near East. This event marked the beginning of chapter two, the chapter of the Takers. It's true there are still Leavers living in the world, but these are anachronisms, fossils -- people living in the past, people who just don't realize that their chapter of human history is over. '
→ -
From infancy onward, children are the most fantastic learners in the world.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
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!
→ -
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.)
→ -
five severed fingers do not make a hand
→ -
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
→ -
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.
→ -
You've been in love with someone for a decade - someone who barely knows you're alive. You've done everything, tried everything to make this person see that you're a valuable, estimable person, and that your love is worth something. Then one day you open the paper and glance at the Personals column, and there you see that your loved one has placed an ad... seeking someone worthwhile to love and be loved by.
→ -
We need schools to force kids to learn things they have no use for.
→ -
I have amazing news for you. Man is not alone on this planet. He is part of a community, upon which he depends absolutely.
→ -
If the world is saved, it will not be by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all. Why not new minds with new programs? Because where you find people working on programs, you don't find new minds, you find old ones. Programs and old minds go together like buggy whips and buggies.
→ -
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.
→ -
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.
→ -
The obvious can sometimes be illuminating when perceived in an unhabitual way.
→ -
If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual - "Ishmael
→ -
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.
→ -
We are all captives of a story.
→ -
[I]n Africa I was a member of a family—of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven't known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you that their family is like a hand, of which they are the fingers. They are fully aware of being a family but are very little aware of being individuals. Here in the zoo there were other gorillas—but there was no family. Five severed fingers do not make a hand.
→ -
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
→ -
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.
→ -
And in spite of all the mastery we've attained, we don't have enough mastery to stop devastating the world, or to repair the devastation we've already wrought.
→
Related Authors
-
Richard Heinberg Journalist -
Theodore Kaczynski Mathematician -
Theodor Adorno Sociologist -
Chellis Glendinning Author -
Bob Black Author -
Jack D. Forbes Writer -
John Zerzan Philosopher -
Guy Debord Writer -
-
Hakim Bey Author -
Derrick Jensen Author -
David Abram Philosopher -
Ray Anderson Business person -
Jean Baudrillard Philosopher -
Paul Hawken Environmentalist -
Jerry Mander Activist -
Henry David Thoreau Author -
Ivan Illich Philosopher -
Chris Hedges Author -
Jared Diamond Scientist