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But why? Why do you need prophets to tell you how you ought to live? Why do you need anyone to tell you how you ought to live

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
Anyone
Tell
Live
Need
Needs
Prophets
Prophet
Ought

More quotes by Daniel Quinn

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The obvious can sometimes be illuminating when perceived in an unhabitual way.
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You know how to split atoms, how to send explorers to the moon, how to splice genes, but you don't know how people ought to live.
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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.
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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.
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There are times when having too much to say can be as dumbfounding as having too little.
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When you send off a short story, it sits on the editor's desk in the same pile with stories by the most famous and honored names in present-day writing-and it's not going to be accepted unless it's as good as theirs. (And it'll probably have to be better.)
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We've poured our poisons into the world as though it were a bottomless pit.. and we go on gobbling them up. It's hard to imagine how the world could survive another century of this abuse, but nobody's really doing anything about it. It's a problem our children will have to solve, or their children.
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What's normal is for things to work. What's not normal is for things to fail.
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From infancy onward, children are the most fantastic learners in the world.
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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.
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Thinkers aren't limited by what they know, because they can always increase what they know. Rather they're limited by what puzzles them, because there's no way to become curious about something that doesn't puzzle you.
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The people who are horrified by the idea of children learning what they want to learn when they want to learn it have not accepted the very elementary psychological fact that people (all people, of every age) remember the things that are important to them - the things they need to know - and forget the rest.
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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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Our schools are much like our prisons: they disappoint us because they only do what they're designed to do, and it annoys us that they don't do something else!
Daniel Quinn
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We're not destroying the world because we're clumsy. We're destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.
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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
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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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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
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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?
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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