Quotes from Daniel Quinn

Whenever a Taker couple talk about how wonderful it would be to have a big family, they're reenacting this scene behind the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They're saying to themselves, 'Of course it's our right to apportion life on this planet as we please. Why stop of four kids or six? We can have fifteen if we like. All we have to do is plow under another few hundres acres of rain forest -- and who cares if a dozen other species disappear as a result?

Has it ever occurred to you to wonder if the history we teach our children is a lie?

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.

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 a thing falls outside the range of people's curiosity, then they simply cannot make inquiries about it. It constitutes a blind spot — a spot of blindness that you can't even know is there until someone draws your attention to it.

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.

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.

You wouldn't know from experience that small children are the most powerful learning engines in the known universe.

The world will not be saved by old minds with new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by new minds—with no programs.

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.

You must absolutely and forever relinquish the idea that you know who should live and who should die on this planet.

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.

With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?

I can't shake the crazy feeling that there is some small thing that we're being lied to about.

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?

Arts and disciplines of that kind are fundamentally selfish; they're all designed to benefit the pupil—not the world - Ishmael

Westereners often think that the East is one vast Buddhist temple, which is rather like thinking the West is one vast Carthusian monastery. If the [Western people who like Buddhism] were to visit the East, he'd certainly experience many new things, but he'd find first, that the food is under lock and key and second, that humans are considered to be a miserable, destructive, greedy lot, just as they are in the West.

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.

One thing I know people will say to me is 'Are you suggesting we go back to being hunter-gatherers?'" "That of course is an inane idea," Ishmael said. "The Leaver life-style isn't about hunting and gathering, it's about letting the rest of the community live—and agriculturalists can do that as well as hunter-gatherers.

Are you telling me my entire life has been a dream? Not your life, Greg, your past. Is there a distincition? Of course there is. In a very real sense, everyone's past is a dream; the past isn't a real thing you can reach back and touch; it's just something in your head. Your life, which is what's going on here and now at this table, is as real as anyone's...

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.

May the forests be with you and with your children.

once again I was thunderstruck—but this time by a feeling of profound relief, for I had been redeemed from oblivion. More, the error that caused me to live as an unwitting impostor for so many years had been corrected at last. I had been made whole as a person—not again but for the very first time.

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.

One never thinks, "Oh, I'd better look for some food." Food is everywhere, and one picks it up almost absent-mindedly, as one takes a breath of air. In fact, one does not think of feeding as a distinct activity at all. Rather, it's like a delicious music that plays in the background of all activities throughout the day. In fact, feeding became feeding for me only at the zoo, where twice daily great masses of tasteless fodder were pitched into our cages.