Quotes from Daniel Quinn

You shouldn't have to settle for rabbits if what you want is deer.

If you alone found out what the lie was, then you're probably right - it would make no great difference. But if you ALL found out what the lie was, it might conceivably make a very great difference indeed.

Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, with a single powerful blow, shattered for all time a complex article of fundamental articles of our cultural faith; that the world was capable of repairing any damage we might do to it; that the world was designed to do this, that the world was on our side; that God himself had fashioned the world specifically to support our efforts to conquer and rule it.

And so your account of creation ends, 'And finally man appeared.'

I can confidently predict that if the world is saved, it will not be because some old minds came up with some new programs. Programs never stop the things they're launched to stop. No program has ever stopped poverty, drug abuse, or crime, and no program ever will stop them. And no program will ever stop us from devastating the world.

Yes. The Takers accumulate knowledge about what works well for things. The Leavers accumulate knowledge about what works well for people.

it's the work of animism to read the Law of Life that is written in the community of life.

But when it's read another way, the explanation makes perfectly good sense: Man can never have the wisdom the gods use to rule the world, and if he tries to preempt that wisdom, the result won't be enlightenment, it will be death.

WE NOW KNOW TWO HIGHLY important things about people," Ishmael said, "at least according to Taker mythology. One, there's something fundamentally wrong with them, and, two, they have no certain knowledge about how they ought to live—and never will have any. It seems as though there should be a connection between these two things.

shattered for all time a complex of fundamental articles of our cultural faith: that the world was capable of repairing any damage we might do to it;

Among the primates only humans are hunters, because among the primates only humans have the biological equipment to make hunting a mainstay of life—and that equipment is strictly intellectual.

We went wrong by failing to take into account a great truth, namely, that teals are stupid and lazy and perfectly content to stay that way.

Every year, without fail, we outlaw more things, catch more people doing them, and put more of them in jail. The outlawed behavior never goes away, because, directly or indirectly, it's supported by the strong, invisible, unrelenting force called vision. This explains why police officers are much more likely to take up crime than criminals are to take up law enforcement. It's called 'going with the flow.

I'm saying that the 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.

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.

If the tillers of the soil from the north were Caucasians, I said, then the mark of Cain is this. I pointed to my own fair or maggot-colored face. ...The mark was given to Cain as a warning to others: 'Leave this man alone. This is a dangerous man, one who enacts a sevenfold vengeance.' Certainly a lot of people all over the world have learned that it doesn't pay to mess with people with white faces.

MI 16 or the CIA.

Nobody's out to save the world, because nobody gives a damn about the world, that was just a bunch of goofy kids talking.

In other words, man does have a place in the world, but it's not his place to rule. The gods have that in hand. Man's place is to be the first. Man's place is to be the first without being the last. Man's place is to figure out how its possible to do that--and then to make some room for all the rest who are capable of becoming what he's become.

Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has written: "The world's most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.

To a mind ready for mythology, he was the beginning of what is meant by godlike.

it doesn't make any difference. Whether we're being lied to or not, we still have to get up and go to work and pay the bills and all the rest.

No, he wasn't waiting; he was merely there, had been there before I arrived and would be there when I'd left. I had the feeling I was of no more significance to him than a passing cloud is to a shepherd resting on a hillside.

They made an ingenuous and disorganized effort to escape from captivity but ultimately failed, because they were unable to find the bars of the cage. If you can't discover what's keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual.