Daniel Quinn Quotes & Sayings

The world doesn't belong to us, we belong to it. Always have, always will. We belong to the world. We belong to the community of life on this planet
it doesn't belong to us. We got confused about that, now it's time to set the record straight — Daniel Quinn

How easy it is first to leap to a false conclusion about someone and then to view everything he does in light of that conclusion. — Daniel Quinn

Many of the biggest and most far-reaching investments we make in our lives are investments that have little or nothing to do with money. — Daniel Quinn

We need schools to force kids to learn things they have no use for. — Daniel Quinn

[T]he 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. — Daniel Quinn

If the world is saved, it will not be by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all. Why not new minds with new programs? Because where you find people working on programs, you don't find new minds, you find old ones. Programs and old minds go together like buggy whips and buggies. — Daniel Quinn

Famine isn't unique to humans. All species are subject to it everywhere in the world. When the population of any species outstrips its food resources, that population declines until it's once again in balance with its resources. Mother Culture says that humans should be exempt from that process, so when she finds a population that has outstripped its resources, she rushes in food from the outside, thus making it a certainty that there will be even more of them to starve in the next generation. Because the population is never allowed to decline to the point at which it can be supported by its own resources, famine becomes a chronic feature of their lives. — Daniel Quinn

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

It applies to all species without distinction. — Daniel Quinn

The greatest discovery any alien anthropologist could make about our culture is our overriding response to failure: If it didn't work last year, do it AGAIN this year (and if possible do it MORE) — Daniel Quinn

Wow, just imagine missing school on the day when they were learning blue. You'd spend the rest of your life wondering what color the sky is. — Daniel Quinn

This is considered almost holy work by farmers and ranchers. Kill off everything you can't eat. Kill off anything that eats what you eat. Kill off anything that doesn't feed what you eat."
"It IS holy work, in Taker culture. The more competitors you destroy, the more humans you can bring into the world, and that makes it just about the holiest work there is. Once you exempt yourself from the law of limited competition, everything in the world except your food and the food of your food becomes an enemy to be exterminated. — Daniel Quinn

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. — Daniel Quinn

We've poured our poisons into the world as though it were a bottomless pit.. and we go on gobbling them up. It's hard to imagine how the world could survive another century of this abuse, but nobody's really doing anything about it. It's a problem our children will have to solve, or their children. — Daniel Quinn

WHAT you DO NOT KNOW YOURSELF, you CANNOT TEACH ANOTHER. — Daniel Quinn

Don't wait. Where do you expect to get by waiting? Doing is what teaches you. Doing is what leads to inspiration. Doing is what generates ideas. Nothing else, and nothing less. — Daniel Quinn

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. — Daniel Quinn

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. — Daniel Quinn

[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. — Daniel Quinn

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? — Daniel Quinn

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. — Daniel Quinn

If the world is saved, it will not be saved by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all. — Daniel Quinn

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. — Daniel Quinn

In fact, of course, there is no secret knowledge; no one knows anything that can't be found on a shelf in the public library. — Daniel Quinn

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

Wherever you go ... , you'll see Heaven and Hell on every side ... in us. Look for them and you'll soon know them. There on your left, Hell shuffles by, carrying a reluctant, gloomy chicken, his only comrade. There on your right, Heaven spring past, singing - a lunatic, a little too much for civilized contact.
Just the way it always was. — Daniel Quinn

Most beginning writers - and I was the same - are like chefs trying to cook great dishes that they've never tasted themselves. How can you make a great - or even an adequate - bouillabaisse if you've never had any? If you don't really understand why people read mysteries - or romances or literary novels or thrillers or whatever - then there's no way in the world you're going to write one that anyone wants to publish. This is the meaning of the well-known expression "Write what you know." — Daniel Quinn

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

Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere in the universe that creation came to an end with the birth of man? Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere out there that man was the climax toward which creation had been straining from the beginning? ... Very far from it. The universe went on as before, the planet went on as before. Man's appearance caused no more stir than the appearance of jellyfish. — Daniel Quinn

May the forests be with you and with your children. — Daniel Quinn

From the animist point of view, humans belong in a sacred place because they themselves are sacred. Not sacred in a special way, not more sacred than anything else, but merely as sacred as anything else
as sacred as bison or salmon or crows or crickets or bears or sunflowers. — Daniel Quinn

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. — Daniel Quinn

People will listen when they're ready to listen and not before. Don't waste time with people who want to argue. They'll keep you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to something new. — Daniel Quinn

Our schools are much like our prisons: they disappoint us because they only do what they're designed to do, and it annoys us that they don't do something else! — Daniel Quinn

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. None may deny its spark to the general blaze and live forever. Each is sent to another someday. You are sent; you are on your way. I am sent. To the wolf or the lion or the vulture or the grasses, I am sent.
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. — Daniel Quinn

Children don't need learning. They need access to what they want to learn outside the home. — Daniel Quinn

What he had to tell them was a story — 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? — Daniel Quinn

As the Takers see it, the gods gave man the same choice they gave Achilles: a brief life of glory, or a long, uneventful life in obscurity. And the Takers chose a brief life of glory. — Daniel Quinn

You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. ... You are captives - and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it? - your captivity and the captivity of the world. — Daniel Quinn

The world is a very, very fine place. It wasn't a mess. It didn't need to be conquered and ruled by man. In other words, the world doesn't belong to man - but it does need man to belong to it. Some creature had to be the first to go through this ... Some creature had to find the way, and if that happened, then ... there was no limit to what could happen here. In other words, man does have a place in the world, but it's not his place to rule ... 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 it's possible to do that - and then to make room for all the rest who are capable of becoming what he's become. And maybe, when the time comes, it's man's place to be the teacher of all the rest who are capable of becoming what he's become. Not the only teacher, not the ultimate teacher. Maybe only the first teacher, the kindergarten teacher - but even that wouldn't be too shabby. — Daniel Quinn

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

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. — Daniel Quinn

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

Yes,I'm afraid you're right. Trial and error isn't a bad way to learn how to build an aircraft,but it can be a disastrous way to learn how to build a civilization. — Daniel Quinn

Remember that your tracks are one strand of the web woven endlessly in the hand of god. They're tied to those of the mouse in the field, the eagle on the mountain, the crab in its hold, the lizard beneath its rock. The leaf that falls to the ground a thousand miles away touches your life. The impress of your foot in the soil is felt through a thousand generations. — Daniel Quinn

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. — Daniel Quinn

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. — Daniel Quinn

The people who are horrified by the idea of children learning what they want to learn when they want to learn it have not accepted the very elementary psychological fact that people (all people, of every age) remember the things that are important to them - the things they need to know - and forget the rest. — Daniel Quinn

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

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. — Daniel Quinn

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. — Daniel Quinn

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. — Daniel Quinn

Indigenous people believe that Man belongs to the World; civilized people believe that the World belongs to Man. — Daniel Quinn

That evening I went for a walk. To walk for the sake of walking is something I seldom do. Inside my apartment I'd felt inexplicably anxious. I needed to talk to someone. to be reassured or perhaps I needed to confess my sin: I was once again having impure thoughts about saving the world. Or it was neither of these - I was afraid I was dreaming. — Daniel Quinn

During your lifetime, the people of our culture are going to figure out how to live sustainably on this planet
or they're not. Either way, it's certainly going to be extraordinary. If they figure out how to live sustainably here, then hum anity will be able to see something it can't see right now: a future that extends into the indefinite future. If they don't figure this out, then I'm afraid the human race is going to take its place among the species that we're driving into extinction here every day
as many as 200
every day — Daniel Quinn

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. — Daniel Quinn

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. — Daniel Quinn

Don't wait. Writers are the only artists I know of who expect to get somewhere by waiting. Everyone knows you have to dance to be a dancer, you have to sing to be a singer, you have to act to be an actor, but far too many people seem to believe that you. don't have to write to be a writer. So, instead of writing, they wait. Isaac Asimov said it beautifully in just six words: "It's the writing that teaches you." Writing is what teaches you. Writing is what leads to "inspiration." Writing is what generates ideas. Nothing else-and nothing less. Don't meditate, don't do yoga, don't do drugs. Just write. — Daniel Quinn

With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla? — Daniel Quinn

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? — Daniel Quinn

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. — Daniel Quinn

Pity is always twinged with disgust. — Daniel Quinn

You need to take a step back from the problem in order to see it in global perspective. At present there are five and a half billion of you here, and, though millions of you are starving, you're producing enough food to feed six billion. And because you're producing enough food for six billion, it's a biological certainty that in three or four years there will be six billion of you. By that time, however (even though millions of you will still be starving), you'll be producing enough food for six and a half billion - which means that in another three or four years there will be six and a half billion. But by that time you'll be producing enough food for seven billion (even though millions of you will still be starving), which again means that in another three or four years there will be seven billion of you. In order to halt this process, you must face the fact that increasing food production doesn't feed your hungry, it only fuels your population explosion. — Daniel Quinn

We're straying from the path of salvation because we remember that we once belonged to the world and were content in that belonging. — Daniel Quinn

The deer aren't our prey or our possessions
they're us. They're us at one point in the cycle of life and we're them at another point in the cycle. The deer are twice your parents, for your mother and father are deer, and the deer that gave you its life today was mother and father to you as well, since you wouldn't be here if it weren't for that deer. — Daniel Quinn

[Y]our agricultural revolution is not an event like the Trojan War, isolated in the distant past and without relevance to your lives today. The work begun by those neolithic farmers in the Near East has been carried forward from one generation to the next without a single break, right into the present moment. It's the foundation of your vast civilization today in exactly the same way that it was the foundation of the very first farming village. — Daniel Quinn

There is no one right way to live. — Daniel Quinn

In effect, you're saying that if you knew how you oughtt to live, then the flaw is man could be controlled. If you knew how you ought to live, you wouldn't be forever screwing up the world. perhaps in fact the two things are actually one thing. Perhaps the flaw in man is exactly this: that he doesn't know how he ought to live. — Daniel Quinn

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 — Daniel Quinn

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

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. — Daniel Quinn

There are times when having too much to say can be as dumbfounding as having too little. — Daniel Quinn

All too often the people of our culture think they're really doing something if they're out there fighting bad things and getting laws passed. Just look at what we've accomplished by outlawing drugs and waging a trillion-dollar War on Drugs! (Nothing!) — Daniel Quinn

You know how to split atoms, how to send explorers to the moon, how to splice genes, but you don't know how people ought to live. — Daniel Quinn

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. - pg. 76 — Daniel Quinn

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 ... — Daniel Quinn

The theory I'm putting forward here is that storytelling is a genetic characteristic in the sense that early human hunters who were able to organize events into stories were more successful than hunters who weren't - and this success translated directly into reproductive success. In other words, hunters who were storytellers tended to be better represented in the gene pool than hunters who weren't, which (incidentally) accounts for the fact that storytelling isn't just found here and there among human cultures, it's found universally. — Daniel Quinn

Simple things are almost always the hardest to explain, Julie. Showing someone how to tie a shoelace is easy. Explaining it is almost impossible. — Daniel Quinn

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. — Daniel Quinn

Lies are like sleeping pills. You should only use them when you absolutely have to. They spoil everything if you make a habit of them. — Daniel Quinn

Don't try to drive the homeless into places we find suitable. Help them survive in places they find suitable. — Daniel Quinn

Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself. A community of a hundred million species can survive anything short of total global catastrophe. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature drop of twenty degrees - which would be a lot more devastating than it sounds. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature rise of twenty degrees. But a community of a hundred species or a thousand species has almost no survival value at all. — Daniel Quinn

It's the idea that people living close to nature tend to be noble. It's seeing all those sunsets that does it. You can't watch a sunset and then go off and set fire to your neighbor's tepee. Living close to nature is wonderful for your mental health. — Daniel Quinn

Because we imagine that we are what humanity was divinely destined to become, we assume that our prehistoric ancestors were trying to be us, but just lacked the tools and techniques to succeed. We invest our ancestors with our own predelictions in what seem to us primitive and unevolved forms. As an example of all this, we take it for granted that our religions represent humanity's ultimate and highest spiritual development and expect to find among our ancestors only crude, fumbling harbingers of these religions. We certainly don't expect to find robust, fully developed religions whose expressions are entirely different from ours. — Daniel Quinn

No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' ... That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species. — Daniel Quinn

Having saddled yourself with laws that you *assume* will be broken, you've never found anything to do that makes better sense than punishing people for doing exactly what you expected them to do in the first place. For ten thousand years you've been making and multiplying laws that you fully expect to be broken, until now I suppose you must have literally millions of them, many of them broken millions of times a day.[...]The very officials that you elect to uphold the laws break them. And at the same time your pillars of society somehow find it possible to become indignant over the fact that some people have little respect for the law. — Daniel Quinn

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. — Daniel Quinn

Because six billion of us are pursuing an evolutionarily unstable strategy, we're fundamentally attacking the very ecological systems that keep us alive. Just like the goat that refuses to suckle its kids, we're in the process of eliminating ourselves. Think about the time line Charles drew in his talk about the boiling frog. For the first six thousand years, the impact of our evolutionarily unstable strategy was minimal and confined to the Near East. Over the next two thousand years, the strategy spread to Eastern Europe and the Far East. In the next fifteen hundred years, the strategy spread throughout the Old World. In the next three hundred years, it became global. By the end of the next two hundred years - which is now - so many people were following the strategy that the impact was becoming catastrophic. We're now about two generations away from finishing the job of making this unstable strategy extinct. — Daniel Quinn

Karl Marx recognized that workers without a choice are workers in chains. But his idea of breaking chains was for us to depose the pharaohs and then build the pyramids for ourselves, as if building pyramids is something we just can't stop doing, we love it so much. — Daniel Quinn

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. — Daniel Quinn

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."
"True. But all the same, it's hard just to sit by and let them starve."
"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.' It is the gods who *let* these things, not you. — Daniel Quinn

He began to speak to me, not in the jocular way of visitors to the menagerie but rather as one speaks to the wind or to the waves crashing on a beach, uttering that which must be said but which must not be heard by anyone. — 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. — Daniel Quinn

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. — Daniel Quinn

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. — Daniel Quinn

When one does not see what one does not see, one does not even see that one is blind. - Paul Veyne — Daniel Quinn

It has happened that a species has tried to live in violation of the Law of Limited Competition. Or rather it has happened one time, in one human culture - ours. That's what our agricultural revolution is all about. That's the whole point of totalitarian agriculture: We hunt our competitors down, we destroy their food, and we deny them access to food. That's what makes it totalitarian. — Daniel Quinn

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. — Daniel Quinn

The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison. — Daniel Quinn