Quotes from Daniel Quinn

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.

The world is not going to survive very much longer as humanity's captive.

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.

Animists are not so much people with a religion as people with a fundamentally religious way of looking at things.

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.

TEACHER seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.

Imagine that the gods have a care for everything that lives in the community of life on earth.

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.

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.

Children don't need learning. They need access to what they want to learn outside the home.

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.

Indigenous people believe that Man belongs to the World; civilized people believe that the World belongs to Man.

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.

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)

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.

You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live... I think there are many among you who would be glad to release the world from captivity... This is what prevents them: They're unable to find the bars of the cage.

A castaway in the sea was going down for the third time when he caught sight of a passing ship. Gathering his last strength, he waved frantically and called for help. Someone on board peered at him scornfully and shouted back, Get a boat!

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.

If you can't discover what's keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual - Ishmael

The obvious can sometimes be illuminating when perceived in an unhabitual way.

TEACHER seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.

Blessed are those who do whatever they can wherever they are, for no one is devoid of resources or opportunities.

five severed fingers do not make a hand

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.