201 Quotes by Daniel Quinn

For example, children in school are never encouraged to want the material rewards of success. Success is something to be sought for its own sake, certainly not for any wealth it might bring.

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.

If prophecies about Christ must wait upon their fulfillment to be understood, why shouldn’t the same be true of prophecies about Antichrist? In other words, we can’t really know what John was talking about until it actually happens, so the Antichrist is almost certain to be different from whatever we imagine him to be.

Karl Marx recognized that workers without a choice are workers in chains. But his idea of breaking chains was for us to depose the pharaohs and then build the pyramids for ourselves, as if building pyramids is something we just can’t stop doing, we love it so much.

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.

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.

In the natural community, whenever a population’s food supply increases, that population increases. As that population increases, its food supply decreases, and as its food supply decreases, that population decreases. This interaction between food populations and feeder populations is what keeps everything in balance.

If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual – “Ishmael.

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.