Quotes from Daniel Quinn

There is no one right way to live.

I have amazing news for you. Man is not alone on this planet. He is part of a community, upon which he depends absolutely.

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.

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

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.

The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. … The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A]ny species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion.

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.

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.

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.

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

But charisma only wins people's attention. Once you have their attention, you have to have something to tell them.

Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable--and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way.

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.

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.

With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?