201 Quotes by Daniel Quinn

This is what creationists say of evolution, that it’s “only” a theory, it hasn’t been proved, as though this in itself is grounds for dismissal. This misrepresents the point of formulating a theory, which is to make sense of some body of evidence.

Whenever a Taker couple talk about how wonderful it would be to have a big family, they’re reenacting this scene behind the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They’re saying to themselves, ‘Of course it’s our right to apportion life on this planet as we please. Why stop of four kids or six? We can have fifteen if we like. All we have to do is plow under another few hundres acres of rain forest – and who cares if a dozen other species disappear as a result?

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.

Anthropologist Marshall Sahlins has written: “The world’s most primitive people have few possessions, but they are not poor. Poverty is not a certain small amount of goods, nor is it just a relation between means and ends; above all it is a relation between people. Poverty is a social status. As such it is the invention of civilization.

Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable – and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way.

Among the primates only humans are hunters, because among the primates only humans have the biological equipment to make hunting a mainstay of life – and that equipment is strictly intellectual.

And this thought is a question: Why? “Why, why, why, why, why, why?” the tiger asks itself hour after hour, day after day, year after year, as it treads its endless path behind the bars of its cage. It cannot analyze the question or elaborate on it. If you were somehow able to ask the creature, “Why what?” it would be unable to answer you.

I pray about teeth-doesn’t everyone? I don’t have time to floss. You know. Hang in there, I tell them; I’ll get around to it before it’s too late.

We don’t want to know a way to live that works well. We want to know the one right way.