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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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Daniel Quinn
Age: 82 †
Born: 1935
Born: October 11
Died: 2018
Died: February 17
Autobiographer
Novelist
Writer
Omaha
Nebraska
Daniel Clarence Quinn
Course
Public
Secret
Knowledge
Fact
Shelf
Facts
Shelves
Found
Library
Anything
Courses

More quotes by Daniel Quinn

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Don't wait. Where do you expect to get by waiting? Doing is what teaches you. Doing is what leads to inspiration. Doing is what generates ideas. Nothing else, and nothing less.
Daniel Quinn
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People will listen when they're ready to listen and not before. Don't waste time with people who want to argue. They'll keep you immobilized forever. Look for people who are already open to something new.
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.
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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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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In effect, you're saying that if you knew how you oughtt to live, then the flaw is man could be controlled. If you knew how you ought to live, you wouldn't be forever screwing up the world. perhaps in fact the two things are actually one thing. Perhaps the flaw in man is exactly this: that he doesn't know how he ought to live.
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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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 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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I have amazing news for you. Man is not alone on this planet. He is part of a community, upon which he depends absolutely.
Daniel Quinn
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What's normal is for things to work. What's not normal is for things to fail.
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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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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From the animist point of view, humans belong in a sacred place because they themselves are sacred. Not sacred in a special way, not more sacred than anything else, but merely as sacred as anything else -- as sacred as bison or salmon or crows or crickets or bears or sunflowers.
Daniel Quinn
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five severed fingers do not make a hand
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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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
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The world is not in any sense in danger from itself. The world is in fact not in any danger at all. It is we who are in danger.
Daniel Quinn
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From infancy onward, children are the most fantastic learners in the world.
Daniel Quinn
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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