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 QuinnRead
What is crucial to your survival as a race is not the redistribution of power and wealth within the prison but rather the destruction of the prison itself.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes that true progress requires dismantling oppressive systems, rather than merely managing them.
Daniel Quinn highlights the importance of not just redistributing power and wealth in existing oppressive structures, but instead, focusing on the need to eliminate these structures entirely. He suggests that real change and survival depend on addressing the root of the problem rather than making superficial adjustments that do not challenge the core issues.
Themes
FreedomPowerChangeOppressionRevolution
In practice
Example use cases
In a speech about social justice, this quote can be used to emphasize the need for systemic change.
More from Daniel Quinn
All quotes →This law … defines the limits of competition in the community of life. You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war.
Daniel QuinnRead
[I]n Africa I was a member of a family—of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven't known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you that their family is like a hand, of which they are the fingers. They are fully aware of being a family but are very little aware of being individuals. Here in the zoo there were other gorillas—but there was no family. Five severed fingers do not make a hand.
Daniel QuinnRead
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 QuinnRead
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 QuinnRead
The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. … The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'.
Daniel QuinnRead
Similar quotes
My disenchantment? Oh no, my dear, there are no disenchantments, merely progressions and styles of possession. To exist is to be spellbound.
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Man is man so long as he is struggling to rise above nature, and this nature is both internal and external.
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When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then nature remembers the physical perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god-not many, but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her.
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In your big mind, everything has the same value...In your practice you should accept everything as it is, giving to each thing the same respect given to a Buddha. Here there is Buddhahood
Shunryu SuzukiRead
I walk up and down the rows. The heads look like rubber halloween masks. They also look like human heads, but my brain has no precedent for human heads on tables or in roasting pans or anywhere other than on top of a human bodies, and so I think it has chosen to interpret the sight in a more comforting manner. - Here we are at the rubber mask factory. Look at the nice men and woman working on the masks.
Mary RoachRead
For no man can forbid the spark nor tell whence it may come.
Francis BaconRead