Quotes by Daniel Quinn

About Daniel Quinn:

Daniel Quinn is an American writer (primarily, novelist and fabulist), cultural critic, and former publisher of educational texts, best known for his novel Ishmael, which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991 and was published the following year. Quinn's ideas are popularly associated with environmentalism, though he criticizes this term, claiming that it portrays the environment as somehow separate from human life and thus creates a false dichotomy. Quinn specifically identifies his philosophy as new tribalism.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

A castaway in the sea was going down for the third time when he caught sight of a passing ship. Gathering his last strength, he waved frantically and called for help. Someone on board peered at him scornfully and shouted back, "Get a boat!

Daniel Quinn

The greatest discovery any alien anthropologist could make about our culture is our overriding response to failure:

Daniel Quinn

Diversity, not uniformity, is what works.

Daniel Quinn

The evening I went for a walk. To walk for the sake of walking is something I seldom do.Inside my apartment I'd felt inexplicably anxious. I needed to talk to someone, to be reassured. Or perhaps I needed to confess my sin: I was once again having im...

Daniel Quinn

Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again to the people of your culture, you’ll never stop being conscious of it. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you’ll be te...

Daniel Quinn

The journey itself is going to change you, so you don’t have to worry about memorizing the route we took to accomplish that change.

Daniel Quinn

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 th...

Daniel Quinn

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 at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live ...

Daniel Quinn

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 Quinn

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

Daniel Quinn

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 and the elements. According to your mythology, this is ...

Daniel Quinn

[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...

Daniel Quinn

[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 the world.

Daniel Quinn

[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 East has been carried forward from one generation to the...

Daniel Quinn

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.

Daniel Quinn

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 co...

Daniel Quinn

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

Daniel Quinn

[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.

Daniel Quinn

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.

Daniel Quinn

It is in fact an orderly community. The green plants are food for the plant eaters, which are food for the predators, and some of those predators are food for still other predators. And what's left over is food for the scavengers, who return to the e...

Daniel Quinn

Author Bio

  • NameDaniel Quinn
  • DescriptionAmerican writer
  • BornOctober 11, 1935
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionWriter; Novelist