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.
Daniel QuinnRead
Yes,I'm afraid you're right. Trial and error isn't a bad way to learn how to build an aircraft,but it can be a disastrous way to learn how to build a civilization.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Learning through trial and error is valuable, but when it comes to societal development, it can lead to dire consequences.
Daniel Quinn's quote highlights the distinction between learning processes in different contexts. While trial and error can effectively teach us practical skills, such as building an aircraft, applying this haphazard approach to constructing a civilization can result in significant failures and harm to people. The quote emphasizes the need for more deliberate and thoughtful methods when addressing complex societal issues.
Themes
Trial And ErrorLearningCivilizationWisdomSociety
In practice
Example use cases
In a classroom setting to emphasize the importance of careful planning in projects.
More from Daniel Quinn
All quotes →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
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
Similar quotes
We should be as careful of our words as of our actions.
Marcus Tullius CiceroRead
What folly made young people, even those in middle age, think they were immortal? How much better, their lives, if they could remember the end. Carrying your death with you every day would make it hard to waste time on unkindness and anger and bitterness, on anything petty. That was the secret: remembering your dying time, in order to keep the stupid and the ugly out of your living time.
Rohinton MistryRead
Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the government take care of him better take a closer look at the American Indian.
Henry FordRead
You have discovered the spiritual universe. Many others have discovered this same world, but each must make the discovery for himself. You are going to have a lot of joy sailing around this world of yours. Don't fight the opinions of others, or waste your time arguing over these things. Follow the inward gleam of your consciousness and you will arrive.
Ernest HolmesRead
No one's hurt is too small, no worry too removed, no blessing so elusive that it cannot be seen by the eyes in the back of the human heart.
Jerry SpinelliRead
Defeat in this world is no disgrace and that is what they cannot understand. If you really fought well and fought for the right thing.
Katherine Anne PorterRead