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
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects on how societal systems trap individuals into destructive behaviors that harm the planet.
Daniel Quinn's quote critiques the modern civilization's structure, suggesting that people are unknowingly trapped within a system that requires them to engage in harmful practices for survival. The quote emphasizes the reciprocal nature of this captivity: as individuals are confined by societal norms and expectations, they simultaneously impose limitations on the world around them, leading to widespread ecological degradation.
Themes
CaptivityCivilizationDestructionWorldAwareness
In practice
Example use cases
This quote can be used in environmental seminars to emphasize the need for individual action against climate change.
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
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
Every life has dark tracts and long stretches of somber tint, and no representation is true to fact which dips its pencil only in light, and flings no shadows on the canvas.
Alexander MaclarenRead
Be neat, Philothea; let nothing be negligent about you. It is a kind of contempt of those with whom we converse, to frequent their company in uncomely apparel; but, at the same time, avoid all affectation, vanity, curiosity, or levity in your dress. Keep yourself always, as much as possible, on the side of plainness and modesty, which, without doubt, is the greatest ornament of beauty, and the best excuse for the want of it.
Saint Francis De SalesRead
She watched the sun bleed water out of the icicle. Warm and cold working together to make an icicle. Warm and cold anger working together to make a fury, a fury worthy enough to use as a weapon against the old things that still needed fighting.
Gregory MaguireRead
And since the portions of the great and the small are equal in number, so too all things would be in everything. Nor is it possible that they should exist apart, but all things have a portion of everything.
AnaxagorasRead
No philosophers so thoroughly comprehend us as dogs and horses.
Herman MelvilleRead
... A CLOCKWORK ORANGE- and I said: 'That's a fair gloopy title. Who ever heard of a clockwork orange?' Then I read a malenky bit out loud in a sort of very high type preaching goloss: '- The attempt to impose upon a man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my swordpen-
Anthony BurgessRead