Daniel Quinn Quotes

Five severed fingers do not make a hand.

Nature is a phantom that sprang entirely from the Great Forgetting, which, after all, is precisely a forgetting of the fact that we are exactly as much a part of the processes and phenomena of the world as any other creature, and if there were such a thing as Nature, we would be as much a part of it as squirrels or squids or mosquitoes or daffodils. We are unable to alienate ourselves from Nature or to 'live against' it. We can no more alienate ourselves from Nature than we can alienate ourselves from entropy. We can no more live against Nature than we can live against gravity. On the contrary, what we're seeing here more and more clearly is that the processes and phenomena of the world are working on us in exactly the same way that they work on all other creatures. Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable—and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way.

The God of revealed religions—and by this I mean religions like yours, Taker religions—is a profoundly inarticulate God. No matter how many times he tries, he can’t make himself clearly or completely understood. He speaks for centuries to the Jews but fails to make himself understood. At last he sends his only-begotten son, and his son can’t seem to do any better. Jesus might have sat himself down with a scribe and dictated the answers to every conceivable theological question in absolutely unequivocal terms, but he chose not to, leaving subsequent generations to settle what Jesus had in mind with pogroms, purges, persecutions, wars, the burning stake, and the rack. Having failed through Jesus, God next tried to make himself understood through Muhammad, with limited success, as always. After a thousand years of silence he tried again with Joseph Smith, with no better results. Averaging it out, all God has been able to tell us for sure is that we should do unto others as we’d have them do unto us. What’s that—a dozen words? Not much to show for five thousand years of work, and we probably could have figured out that much for ourselves anyway. To be honest, I’d be embarrassed to be associated with a god as incompetent as that.

It’s pointless to argue with mythology.

I am at what seminarians used to call “the Company Farm,” which is where you go when you “need a little rest”—or a little vacation from booze—or the whispers about you and the altar boys are beginning to get a bit noisy. All the big orders have them, of course, some of them have several, thoughtfully specialized. Naturally they are not called penitentiaries anymore; nowadays they are called retreat centers.

They’re sure that there must be all sorts of things wrong with ever tribal way of life, and of course they’re correct—if you mean by “wrong” something you don’t like.

Adam wasn’t the progenitor of our race, he was the progenitor of our culture.

Of course it’s not enough. But if you begin anywhere else, there’s no hope at all.

We don’t need prophets to tell us how to live; we can find out for ourselves by consulting what’s actually there.

So, this is the Taker vision: The world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it.

If the world is saved, it will not be saved by people with the old vision and new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with a new vision and no programs.

I no longer think of what we’re doing as a blunder. 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.

No one has ever specifically asked me what I have against birth control, but I’ll answer the question anyway. I don’t have a thing against birth control as such. It just represents a very poor problem-solving strategy. The rule in crisis management is, Don’t make it your goal to control effects, make it your goal to control causes. If you control causes, then you don’t have to control effects.

This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world’s divinely appointed ruler.

All paths lie together like a web endlessly woven, and yours and mine are no greater or less than the beetle’s or the mouse’s. All are held together.