Daniel Quinn quotes

Increasing food production to feed an increased population results in yet another increase in population. (Daniel Quinn)
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
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
You shouldn't have to settle for rabbits if what you want is deer.
Daniel Quinn
Animists are not so much people with a religion as people with a fundamentally religious way of looking at things.
Daniel Quinn
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
Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again to the people of your culture, you'll never stop being conscious of it. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you'll be tempted to say to the people around you, "how can you listen to this stuff and not recognize it for what it is?
Daniel Quinn
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
Indigenous people believe that Man belongs to the World; civilized people believe that the World belongs to Man.
Daniel Quinn
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
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)
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
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
There is no one right way to live.
Daniel Quinn
Man's destiny was to conquer and rule the world, and this is what he's done.. almost. He hasn't quite made it, and it looks as though this may be his undoing. The problem is that man's conquest of the world has itself devastated the world. 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.
Daniel Quinn
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
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
Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere in the universe that creation came to an end with the birth of man? Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere out there that man was the climax toward which creation had been straining from the beginning? ...Very far from it. The universe went on as before, the planet went on as before. Man's appearance caused no more stir than the appearance of jellyfish.
Daniel Quinn
[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
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
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)
TEACHER seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.
Daniel Quinn
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
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
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.
Daniel Quinn