Daniel Quinn Quotes

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

It means I’ve been changed, fundamentally and permanently. It means I cannot be put back to what I was.
That’s why I am B: I cannot be put back to what I was.

Those who wish to imagine that God called every species to life in a final, changeless form are welcome to do so, but I’m incapable of embracing such a primitive scenario.

In spite of everything he said, I felt sure he was showing us that our population explosion is a social problem, like, say, crime or race schism. I failed to hear him say that our population explosion is a biological problem, that if we pursue a policy that would be fatal for any species, then it will fatal for us in exactly the same way. We can’t will it to be otherwise. We can’t say, “Well, yes, our civilization is built on an evolutionarily unstable strategy but we can make it work anyhow, because we’re humans.” The world will not make an exception for us. And of course what the Church teaches is that God will make an exception for us. God will let us behave in a way that would be fatal for any other species, will somehow “fix it” so we can live in a way that is in a very real sense of self-eliminating. That is like expecting God to make our airplanes fly even if they’re aerodynamically incapable of flight.

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.

I’ve said that this new era of the collapse of values began in 1960. Strictly speaking, it should be dated to 1962, the year of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, the first substantive challenge ever issued to the motivating vision of our culture.

The world will not be saved by old minds with new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by new minds—with no programs.

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.

The question is, can you do would B did?
"What exactly do you have in mind?"
"You took in their insights, but do you have any of your own? Are you a thinker and a teacher or just a reciter of Holy Writ? If all you can do is chant the Scriptures, then you're no more B than I am. You're just an altar boy who has all the responses down pat."

Totalitarian agriculture is based on the premise that all the food in the world belongs to us, and there is no limit whatever to what we may take for ourselves and deny to all others.

I told him these numbers were hard to believe.
“Do the arithmetic yourself sometime, then you won’t have to believe it, you’ll know it.

A few years ago, when I begin speaking to audiences, I have the rather naive idea that it would be sufficient—indeed entirely sufficient—to say each thing exactly once. Only gradually did I understand that saying a thing once is tantamount to not saying it at all.

The law we’re looking for here is much like that with respect to civilizations. It’s not about civilizations, but it applies to civilizations in the same way that it applies to flocks of birds and herds of deer. It makes no distinction between human civilizations and beehives. It applies to all species without distinction. This is one reason why the law has remained undiscovered in your culture. According to Taker mythology, man is by definition a biological exception. Out of all the millions of species, only one is an end product.

Any culture will become an obscenity when blown up into a universal world culture to which all must belong.

One thing I know people will say to me is 'Are you suggesting we go back to being hunter-gatherers?'
"That of course is an inane idea," Ishmael said. "The Leaver life-style isn't about hunting and gathering, it's about letting the rest of the community live—and agriculturalists can do that as well as hunter-gatherers."