Quotes by Daniel Quinn

“It's the idea that people living close to nature tend to be noble. It's seeing all those sunsets that does it. You can't watch a sunset and then go off and set fire to your neighbor's tepee. Living...”

“There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them a...”

“The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'.”

“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 wh...”

“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 captivesand you have made a captive of the world itself. That's wha...”

“[A]ny species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion.”

“If you alone found out what the lie was, then you're probably rightit would make no great difference. But if you ALL found out what the lie was, it might conceivably make a very great difference in...”

“Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself. A community of a hundred million species can survive anything short of total global catastrophe. Within that hundred million will be thousan...”

“The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it. Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans an...”

“[I]n Africa I was a member of a familyof 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 t...”

“[T]he price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of th...”

“[Y]our agricultural revolution is not an event like the Trojan War, isolated in the distant past and without relevance to your lives today. The work begun by those neolithic farmers in the Near Eas...”

“No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species.”

“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 de...”

“If the world was made for us, then it BELONGS to us and we can do what we damn well please with it.”

“[N]ow we have a clearer idea what this story is all about: The world was made for man, and man was made to rule it.”

“This is considered almost holy work by farmers and ranchers. Kill off everything you can't eat. Kill off anything that eats what you eat. Kill off anything that doesn't feed what you eat.""It IS ho...”

“This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world's divinely appointed ruler: 'I will not LET them starve. I will not LET the drought come. I will not LET the river flood.”

“If you go to Singapore or Amsterdam or Seoul or Buenos Aires or Islamabad or Johannesburg or Tampa or Istanbul or Kyoto, you'll find that the people differ wildly in the way they dress, in their ma...”

“With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?”