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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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Daniel Quinn
Age: 82 †
Born: 1935
Born: October 11
Died: 2018
Died: February 17
Autobiographer
Novelist
Writer
Omaha
Nebraska
Daniel Clarence Quinn
World
Repair
Devastating
Attained
Mastery
Spite
Already
Stop
Devastation
Enough
Wrought

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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
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We need schools to force kids to learn things they have no use for.
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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.
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From infancy onward, children are the most fantastic learners in the world.
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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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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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Imagine that the gods have a care for everything that lives in the community of life on earth.
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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.
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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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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.
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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 lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable--and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary 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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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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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.
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The obvious can sometimes be illuminating when perceived in an unhabitual way.
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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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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.
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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.
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