Quotes from Daniel Quinn

In hierarchal organizations, the boss is a supreme being. In tribal organizations, the boss is just another worker.

a paradox: 'Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population.

In the natural community, whenever a population's food supply increases, that population increases. As that population increases, its food supply decreases, and as its food supply decreases, that population decreases. This interaction between food populations and feeder populations is what keeps everything in balance.

Far and away the most futile admonition Christ ever offered is when he said, 'Have no care for tomorrow. Don't worry about whether you're going to have something to eat. Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, but God takes perfect care of them. Don't you think he'll do the same for you?' In our culture the overwhelming answer to that question is, 'Hell no!' Even the most dedicated monastics saw to their sowing and reaping and gathering into barns.

Even the most fundamental of the fundamentalists plug their ears when Jesus starts talking about birds of the air and lilies of the field. They know damn well he's just yarning, just making pretty speeches.

We don't want to know a way to live that works well. We want to know the one right way.

And if being civilized means anything at all, it should mean you're the leaders of the club, not its only criminals and destroyers.

Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population.

WHAT you DO NOT KNOW YOURSELF, you CANNOT TEACH ANOTHER.

We've discovered that any species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion.

reversing millions of years of human development by devouring all cultures on this planet and turning them into a single culture, our own.

Tribal people get more out of life.

it just sat there hour after hour pushing the button and giving itself jolts of pleasure. It passed up food, it passed up sex.

I pray about teeth-doesn't everyone? I don't have time to floss. You know. Hang in there, I tell them; I'll get around to it before it's too late.

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

The civilized want people to make their living individually, and they want them to live separately, behind locked doors—one family to a house, each house fully stocked with refrigerators, television sets, washing machines, and so on.

Because the tribe is its members, the tribe is what its members want it to be—nothing more and nothing less.

To each is given its moment in the blaze, its spark to be surrendered to another when it is sent, so that the blaze may go on.

My death is the life of another, and I will stand again in the windswept grasses and look through the eyes of the fox and take the air with the eagle and run in the track of the deer.

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

What I said in Ishmael stands: There is no One Right Way to live. What we find among Leaver peoples is that each has a way that works well for them. We may not like one particular way, we may think it atrocious and cruel, but it's their way, not ours, and the most murderous culture in human history is hardly in a position to set itself up as the moral policeman of the world.

Human thought is thought that opens up into the future, and the future is inescapably the domain of the gods.

You think it makes complete sense to have to work for what's free for the taking to every other creature on earth. You alone lock food away from yourselves and then toil to get it back—and imagine that nothing could possibly make better sense.

contradict unquestioned beliefs of our culture: that the knowledge of good and evil, far from being harmful, is wholesome and beneficial; that agriculture is a blessing, not a curse; that no enmity exists between herders and tillers of the soil, and the foods they produce are equally worthy of divine blessing.