Quotes from Daniel Quinn

There must be something terribly wrong with me that I'm unable to find joy in the world of work. He always wrote. And of course all his friends were forever saying to him What's wrong with you that you can't get this wonderful program? Perhaps you understand for the first time now that my role here is to bring you this tremendous news, that there's nothing wrong here with YOU. You are not what's wrong.

We're on our way to discovering what lies at the very root of your fear and loathing of the Leaver life. We're on our way to discovering why you feel you must carry the revolution forward even if it destroys you and the entire world. We're on our way to discovering what your revolution was a revolution against.

There is enormous pressure on you to take a place in the story your culture is enacting in the world— any place at all.

I went out and had a drink. I needed to talk to someone, and solitary drinkers are lucky in this regard— they always have someone to talk to.

The rules that govern competition between species are (and must be) very different from the rules that govern competition within species.

The tribal life doesn't turn people into saints; it enables ordinary people to make a living together with a minimum of stress year after year, generation after generation.

All paths lie together in the hand of god like a web endlessly woven, and yours and mine are no greater or less than the beetle's or the squirrel's or the sparrow's. All are held together.

I prefer to think about problems the way engineers do. If a valve doesn't work, they don't say, "Well, we must have valves, so let's try two valves." If a valve doesn't work, they say, "Well, what would work?" Their rule is, if it doesn't work, don't do it more, do something else.

We don't need prophets to tell us how to live; we can find out for ourselves by consulting what's actually there.

A battered wife will invest all her feelings of self-worth in her battering husband. She has totally accepted her husband's valuation of her, and this is why she stays: She hopes to redeem herself in her husband's eyes—and therefore in her own.

We all know what the business of government is: making and enforcing regulations. Governments approach all problems as problems of making and enforcing regulations. They reduce all problems to things about which regulations can be made and enforced. This upstart citizen was trying to propose an approach to the problem that had nothing to do with regulations, and so she was ignored—and

We made it back to the airport without getting mugged, stoned, shot at, pounced on, bombed, shelled, garroted, gassed, pitched into, caught in a cross fire, sniped at, blockaded, napalmed, or trip-wired. No one even hit us with a water balloon.

The God of revealed religions - and by this I mean religions like yours - is a profoundly inarticulate God. No matter how many times he tries, he can't make himself clearly or completely understood. He speaks for centuries to the Jews, but fails to make himself understood. At last he sends his only-begotten son, and his son can't seem to do any better.

Newton's achievement was not in discovering the phenomenon of gravity, it was in formulating the phenomenon as a law.

We had been taken from The Wild and brought together in one place, because, for some strange reason, people found us interesting.

culture. A culture is a people enacting a story." "A people enacting a story. And a story again is …?" "A scenario interrelating man, the world, and the gods." "Okay. So you're saying that the people of my culture are enacting their own story about man, the world, and the gods." "That's right.

Diversity, not uniformity, is what works.

No undesirable behavior has ever been eliminated by passing a law against it.

Is it so easy to change a cultural vision? Ease and difficulty are not the relevant measures. Here are the relevant measures: Readiness and unreadiness. If people aren't ready for it, then no power on earth can make a new idea catch on. But if people are ready for it (and I think they are), then a new idea will sweep the world like wildfire.

All the major world religions (always excluding animism, of course), are founded on these notions: that man and man alone was the desired object of creation, that man occupies a preeminent place in the order of creation, that man has a value in God's eyes that is transcendently greater than that of all other creatures, that this world of matter is illusory, transitory, and worthless.

What's normal is for things to work. What's not normal is for things to fail.

No invention ever comes into being fully developed in a single step, from nothing. Ten thousand inventions had to be in place before Edison could invent the electric light-bulb.

The tribal life wasn't something humans sat down and figured out. It was the gift of natural selection, a proven success—not perfection but hard to improve on. Hierarchalism, on the other hand, has proven to be not merely imperfect but ultimately catastrophic for the earth and for us. When the plane's going down and someone offers you a parachute, you don't demand to see the warranty.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. BUCKMINSTER FULLER