Explore Quotes by Daniel Quinn

But why? Why do you need prophets to tell you how you ought to live? Why do you need anyone to tell you how you ought to live

There is no one right way to live.

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

The world must live. We are only one species among billions. The gods don't love us any more than they love spiders or bears or whales or water lilies.

Thinkers aren't limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they're limited by what puzzles them, because there's no way to become curious about something that doesn't puzzle you.

And every time the Takers stamp out a Leaver culture, a wisdom ultimately tested since the birth of mankind disappears from the world beyond recall.

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

Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable--and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way.

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.

Man's destiny was to conquer and rule the world, and this is what he's done.. almost. He hasn't quite made it, and it looks as though this may be his undoing. The problem is that man's conquest of the world has itself devastated the world. And in spite of all the mastery we've attained, we don't have enough mastery to stop devastating the world.. or to repair the devastation we've already wrought.

We are all captives of a story.

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.

There are indeed times when one should TRUST blindly, just as there are times when one should not. WISDOM consists in being able to tell one from the other.

From infancy onward, children are the most fantastic learners in the world.

You never actually know how you're going to handle a problem until you actually have it.

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

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.

With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?

If Mother Culture were to give an account of human history using these terms, it would go something like this: ' The Leavers were chapter one of human history -- a long and uneventful chapter. Their chapter of human history ended about ten thousand years ago with the birth of agriculture in the Near East. This event marked the beginning of chapter two, the chapter of the Takers. It's true there are still Leavers living in the world, but these are anachronisms, fossils -- people living in the past, people who just don't realize that their chapter of human history is over. '

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

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.