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Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable--and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way.

Daniel Quinn

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Daniel Quinn
Age: 82 †
Born: 1935
Born: October 11
Died: 2018
Died: February 17
Autobiographer
Novelist
Writer
Omaha
Nebraska
Daniel Clarence Quinn
Way
Eliminating
Unstable
Perfectly
Lifestyle
Therefore
Ordinary
Process

More quotes by Daniel Quinn

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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 what he was BORN to do.
Daniel Quinn
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Lies are like sleeping pills. You should only use them when you absolutely have to. They spoil everything if you make a habit of them.
Daniel Quinn
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Imagine that the gods have a care for everything that lives in the community of life on earth.
Daniel Quinn
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There are times when having too much to say can be as dumbfounding as having too little.
Daniel Quinn
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We need schools to force kids to learn things they have no use for.
Daniel Quinn
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Courage is the virtue of the free.
Daniel Quinn
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Increasing food production to feed an increased population results in yet another increase in population.
Daniel Quinn
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And in spite of all the mastery we've attained, we don't have enough mastery to stop devastating the world, or to repair the devastation we've already wrought.
Daniel Quinn
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Everyone in your culture knows this. Man was born to turn the world into paradise, but tragically he was born flawed. And so his paradise has always been spoiled by stupidty, greed, destructiveness, and shortsightedness.
Daniel Quinn
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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 Quinn
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I didn't want a guru or a kung fu master or a spiritual director. I didn't want to become a sorcerer or learn the zen of archery or meditate or align my chakras or uncover mast incarnations...I was after something else entirely, but it wasn't in the Yellow Pages or anywhere else that I could discover.
Daniel Quinn
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There is a difference between the inmates of your criminal prisons and the inmates of your cultural prison: The former understand that the distribution of wealth and power inside the prison had nothing to do with justice.
Daniel Quinn
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If we continue...to consume the world until there's no more to consume, then there's going to come a day, sure as hell, when our children or their children or their children's children are going to look back on us - on you and me - and say to themselves, My God, what kind of monsters were these people?
Daniel Quinn
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In fact, of course, there is no secret knowledge no one knows anything that can't be found on a shelf in the public library.
Daniel Quinn
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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 Quinn
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....he began to speak to me, not in the jocular way of visitors to the menagerie but rather as one speaks to the wind or to the waves crashing on a beach, uttering that which must be said but which must not be heard by anyone.
Daniel Quinn
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We're straying from the path of salvation because we remember that we once belonged to the world and were content in that belonging.
Daniel Quinn
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You shouldn't have to settle for rabbits if what you want is deer
Daniel Quinn
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I hope it will not be too long before the technologies that support our population explosion begin to be perceived as no less hazardous to the future of life on this planet than the endless production of radioactive wastes.
Daniel Quinn
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The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison.
Daniel Quinn