Quotes from Daniel Quinn

For someone bent on achievement, education is a thing you get past and forget about as quickly as possible.

If there are forty thousand people in an area that can only support thirty thousand, it's no kindness to bring in food from the outside to maintain them at forty thousand. That just guarantees that the famine will continue.

A system based on exchanging products inevitably channels wealth to a few, and no governmental change will ever be able to correct that. It isn't a defect of the system, it's intrinsic to the

This is what creationists say of evolution, that it's "only" a theory, it hasn't been proved, as though this in itself is grounds for dismissal. This misrepresents the point of formulating a theory, which is to make sense of some body of evidence.

Revolutios don't occur among people who are thinking in the same old way. Can't changed social or economic conditions produce a revolution? Surely you don't mean that. People produce revolutions, not conditions.

Making food a commodity to be owned was one of the great innovations of our culture. No other culture in history has ever put food under lock and key—and putting it there is the cornerstone of our economy, for if the food wasn't under lock and key, who would work?

This is of course a startling idea, the idea that laws could be anything but invented - but that's exactly the point to be made about tribal laws. Tribal laws are never invented laws, they're always received laws.

Where are you looking at it from?" "Oh. From above. From outer space." "What are you doing up there?" "I don't know." "Why aren't you down on the surface?

Within your culture as a whole, there is in fact no significant thrust toward global population control. The point to see is that there never will be such a thrust so long as you're enacting a story that says the gods made the world for man. For as long as you enact that story, Mother Culture will demand increased food production today- and promise population control tomorrow.

And this thought is a question: Why? "Why, why, why, why, why, why?" the tiger asks itself hour after hour, day after day, year after year, as it treads its endless path behind the bars of its cage. It cannot analyze the question or elaborate on it. If you were somehow able to ask the creature, "Why what?" it would be unable to answer you.

I find that the longer I live, the more I worry about people and the less I worry about rules.

We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don't have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free. MARSHALL SAHLINS

Every one of the Leavers' ways came into being by evolution, by a process of testing that began even before people had a word for it. No one said, 'Okay, let's form a committee to write up a set of laws for us to follow.' None of these cultures were inventions. But that's what all our lawgivers give us--inventions. Contrivances. Not things that have proved out over thousands of generations, but rather arbitrary pronouncements about the one right way to live.

People think I am being modest when I tell them I know absolutely nothing about art. But if they show me a piece of student work, I won't have the slightest idea whether it's art or even good. What I do know is whether such things hang or stand in the houses of the rich - or in the museums where the rich allow their treasures to be seen. And when people understand this, they'll instantly agree with what I said in the first place, that I know absolutely nothing about art.

In Ishmael I articulated a living mythology that is so integral to our culture that it's never examined or even noticed by anyone. It's like the sound of blood rushing through your veins—you hear it so constantly that you don't hear it at all.

Man's place is to be the first without being the last . . . . [I]t's man's place to be the teacher of all the rest who are capable of becoming what he's become.

the story of our agricultural revolution as told by some of the earliest victims of that revolution.

a tribe is nothing more than a coalition of people working together as equals to make a living.

For example, children in school are never encouraged to want the material rewards of success. Success is something to be sought for its own sake, certainly not for any wealth it might bring.

I don't think there's any loneliness greater than the loneliness to be found in a bad marriage. In solitary confinement, everyone knows you're lonely and feels sorry for you. In a bad marriage loneliness is your darkest secret, one you dare not even share with your spouse.

Diversity, not uniformity, is what works. Our problem is not that people are living a bad way but rather that they're all living the same way. The earth can accommodate many people living in a voraciously wasteful and pollutive way, it just can't accommodate all of us living that way.

The current controversy over God's sex doesn't strike anyone as being the least bit primitive. If God is going to be like us, then there must be sexual equipment of one kind or the other, even though it presumably doesn't get much use.

So I looked. Silly as it sounds now, I looked. By comparison, going after the Grail would have made more sense. I won't talk about it, it's too embarrassing. I looked until I wised up. I stopped making a fool of myself, but something died inside of me - something that I'd always sort of liked and admired. In its place grew a scar - a tough spot but also a sore spot.

The first time I read the ad, I choked and cursed and spat and threw the paper to the floor.