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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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Daniel Quinn
Age: 82 †
Born: 1935
Born: October 11
Died: 2018
Died: February 17
Autobiographer
Novelist
Writer
Omaha
Nebraska
Daniel Clarence Quinn
Culture
Spoiled
Always
Flawed
Men
Paradise
Life
Greed
World
Turn
Turns
Shortsightedness
Everyone
Destructiveness
Born
Tragically

More quotes by Daniel Quinn

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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.
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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Increasing food production to feed an increased population results in yet another increase in population.
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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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The obvious can sometimes be illuminating when perceived in an unhabitual way.
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 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 are times when having too much to say can be as dumbfounding as having too little.
Daniel Quinn
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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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We need schools to force kids to learn things they have no use for.
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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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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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.
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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From infancy onward, children are the most fantastic learners in the world.
Daniel Quinn
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All paths lie together in the hand of god like a web endlessly woven, and yours and mine are no greater or less than the beetle's or the squirrel's or the sparrow's. All are held together.
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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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.)
Daniel Quinn