Wade Davis Quotes & Sayings

During his four-day vision quest, the Indian built a sweat lodge of willow and hides, fasted, cleansed himself with sage and cedar, and endured the heat of the fire until his spirit was released to soar over a field of snakes. His ordeal ended when a vision of his mother appeared and told him to go back home because he had forgotten his pipe. — Wade Davis

Language is an old-growth forest of the mind. — Wade Davis

Genocide, the physical extinction of a people, is universally condemned, but ethnocide, the destruction of people's way of life, is not only not condemned, it's universally celebrated as part of a development strategy. — Wade Davis

The measure of a society is not only what it does but the quality of its aspirations. — Wade Davis

Sensitivity to nature is not an innate attribute of indigenous peoples. It is a consequence of adaptive choices that have resulted in the development of highly specialized peripheral skills. but those choices in turn spring from a comprehensive view of nature and the universe in which man and woman are perceived as but elements inextricably linked to the whole. — Wade Davis

The surface of the Earth itself is an immense loom upon which the sun weaves the fabric of existence. — Wade Davis

After several trips across the Andes, the pattern of the flora was gradually coming into focus. This to me was the great revelation of botany. When I knew nothing of plants, I experienced a forest only as a tangle of forms, shapes, and colors without meaning or depth, beautiful when taken as a whole but ultimately incomprehensible and exotic. Now the components of the mosaic had names, the names implied relationships, and the relationships resonated with significance. — Wade Davis

Schultes was a naive photographer. For him a beautiful image was one of something beautiful. — Wade Davis

Risk discomfort and solitude for understanding. — Wade Davis

All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities for life. Change is the one constant in human history. — Wade Davis

If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite - the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singulary generic modern culture that takes for granted an impoverished environment - is a source of dismay. There is, indeed, a fire burning over the earth, taking with it plants and animals, cultures, languages, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Quelling this flame, and re-inventing the poetry of diversity is perhaps the most importent challenge of our times. — Wade Davis

Every effort should be made, he argued, to understand the perspective of the other, to learn the way they perceive the world, and if at all possible, the very nature of their thoughts. This demanded, by definition, a willingness to step back from the constraints of one's own prejudices and preconceptions. This — Wade Davis

The full measure of a culture embraces both the actions of a people and the quality of their aspirations, the nature of the metaphors that propel their lives. And no description of a people can be complete without reference to the character of their homeland, the ecological and geographical matrix in which they have determined to live out their destiny. Just as a landscape defines character, culture springs from a spirit of place. — Wade Davis

The problem is that those of us sympathetic with the plight of indigenous people view them as quaint and colorful, but somehow reduced to margins of history as the real world [(our world)] moves on We will be known as an era in which we stood by and either actively endorsed or passively accepted the massive destruction of both biological and cultural diversity on the planet. — Wade Davis

We settled long ago," he later reflected, "that there's no reckoning with death. — Wade Davis

We have this extraordinary conceit in the West that while we've been hard at work in the creation of technological wizardry and innovation, somehow the other cultures of the world have been intellectually idle. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nor is this difference due to some sort of inherent Western superiority. We now know to be true biologically what we've always dreamed to be true philosophically, and that is that we are all brothers and sisters. We are all, by definition, cut from the same genetic cloth. That means every single human society and culture, by definition, shares the same raw mental activity, the same intellectual capacity. And whether that raw genius is placed in service of technological wizardry or unraveling the complex thread of memory inherent in a myth is simply a matter of choice and cultural orientation. — Wade Davis

Social mores, he argued, rules of protocol, concepts of rectitude and honor had no objective basis. They were only reflections of public and private fears. — Wade Davis

These other cultures are not failed attempts to be us; they are unique manifestations of the spirit - other options, other visions of life itself. — Wade Davis

Only, in Haiti, I realized, is it possible to drink rum and haggle with a god. — Wade Davis

Actual places, landscapes that exist[ed] simultaneously in both physical and metaphysical space ... true geographical refugia, verdant valleys dominated by protective mountain deities where people could seek solace as lonely pilgrims, or flee violence as a community in time of war. — Wade Davis

In my humble opinion," (Ghandi) told the court, "non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is co-operation with good. — Wade Davis

To have that powder blown up your nose is rather like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with Baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity. — Wade Davis

They brought their whole intellectual energy to bear on their relationships; they wanted to know not only that they loved people but how and why they loved them, to understand the mechanism of their likings, the springs that prompted thought and emotion; to come to terms with themselves and with one another; to know where they were going and why. — Wade Davis

Heroes are never perfect, but they're brave, they're authentic, they're courageous, determined, discreet, and they've got grit. — Wade Davis

There is no doubt that we are a very cruel people,' Winston Churchill wrote home from the front. 'Severity always,' went the British motto, 'justice when possible. — Wade Davis

On paper I would be a rather bold individual in our culture. — Wade Davis

A simple intuition, a single observation, can open vistas of unimagined potential. Once caught in the web of an idea, the researcher is happily doomed, for the outcome is always uncertain, and the resolution of the mystery may take years to unfold. Such was the case in my encounter with the magic toads of the Americas. — Wade Davis

The world can only appear monochromatic to those who persist in interpreting what they experience through the lens of a single cultural paradigm, their own. For those with the eyes to see and the heart to feel, it remains a rich and complex topography of the spirit. — Wade Davis

She had a hundred precocious ideas, and some were good and true, but they could never be hers until she found them alone, for ideas are but words unless they are sown in experience. — Wade Davis

In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises. — Wade Davis

You know, once something freezes, it's solid. That's the key to the arctic - they didn't fear the cold, they made use of it. — Wade Davis

Culture is not trivial. It is not a decoration or artifice, the songs we sing or even the prayers we chant. It is a blanket of comfort that gives meaning to lives. It is a body of knowledge that allows the individual to make sense out of the infinite sensations of consciousness, to find meaning and order in a universe that ultimately has neither. Culture is a body of laws and traditions, a moral and ethical code that insulates a people from the barbaric heart that lies just beneath the surface of all human societies and indeed all human beings. Culture alone allows us to reach, as Abraham Lincoln said, for the better angels of our nature. — Wade Davis

What is science but the pursuit of the truth? What is Buddhism but 2500 years of observation as to the nature of mind? — Wade Davis

The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit. — Wade Davis

If we accept that we are all cut from the same genetic cloth, all cultures share the same genius. And whether that genius is placed into technological wizardry which has been our great achievement, or, by contrast, placed into the unraveling of complex threads of memory inherent in a myth is simply a matter of choice. — Wade Davis

Marsh had travelled on foot to the source of the Nile and once stood down a charging rhinoceros by intrepidly opening a pink umbrella in its face. — Wade Davis

What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the elders, to anticipate the promise of the children. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of someone somewhere roughly every two weeks. — Wade Davis

So be patient. Do not compromise. And give your destiny time to find you. — Wade Davis

I want to lose all harshness of jagged nerves, to be above all gentle. I feel we have achieved victory for that almost more than anything-to be able to cultivate gentleness.
George Malory to his wife Ruth at the end of the Great War — Wade Davis

The healing repertoire of the Egyptians included herbal remedies for crocodile bites. — Wade Davis

It's haunting to realize that half of the languages of the world are teetering on the brink of extinction. — Wade Davis

Death's power lies in fear, which flourishes in the imagination and the unknown. — Wade Davis

Even now I am haunted by the touching look of the young, bright, anxious eyes as we passed along the rows of sufferers. There, all around us, lying maimed and battered and dying, was the flower of Britain's youth. — Wade Davis

It was more than love at first sight. For Mallory it was as if a dam had burst and the impounded emotions of a young lifetime had found immediate release. — Wade Davis

A young Harvard student, traveled west to Oklahoma to live among the Kiowa and participate in the solemn rites of the peyote cult. In one photograph the land appears as a blur of dust, the sky fading to gray, the air darkened by soil worked loose by the wind, the farmhouses — Wade Davis

Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does note destroy a culture. All societies are constantly evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo. — Wade Davis

We accept it as normal that people who have never been on the land, who have no history or connection to the country, may legally secure the right to come in and, by the very nature of their enterprises, leave in their wake a cultural and physical landscape utterly transformed and desecrated. What's more, in granting such mining concessions, often initially for trivial sums to speculators from distant cities, companies cobbled together with less history than my dog, the government places no cultural or market value on the land itself. — Wade Davis

Change is no threat to culture. — Wade Davis