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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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Daniel Quinn
Age: 82 †
Born: 1935
Born: October 11
Died: 2018
Died: February 17
Autobiographer
Novelist
Writer
Omaha
Nebraska
Daniel Clarence Quinn
Way
World
Clumsy
Literal
Deliberate
Destroying
War

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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There are indeed times when one should TRUST blindly, just as there are times when one should not. WISDOM consists in being able to tell one from the other.
Daniel Quinn
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Children don't need learning. They need access to what they want to learn outside the home.
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 the world is saved, it will not be saved by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all.
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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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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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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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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 the captivity of the world.
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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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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Imagine that the gods have a care for everything that lives in the community of life on earth.
Daniel Quinn
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The sign stopped me-- or rather, this text stopped me. Words are my profession I seized these and demanded that they explain themselves, that they cease to be ambiguous.
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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We need schools to force kids to learn things they have no use for.
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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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.
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