201 Quotes by Daniel Quinn

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. BUCKMINSTER FULLER.

The tribal life wasn’t something humans sat down and figured out. It was the gift of natural selection, a proven success – not perfection but hard to improve on. Hierarchalism, on the other hand, has proven to be not merely imperfect but ultimately catastrophic for the earth and for us. When the plane’s going down and someone offers you a parachute, you don’t demand to see the warranty.

You think it makes complete sense to have to work for what’s free for the taking to every other creature on earth. You alone lock food away from yourselves and then toil to get it back – and imagine that nothing could possibly make better sense.

The people of our culture are tremendous bullet-biters. Biting the bullet supposedly helps one tolerate pain. One first tries to avoid the pain, but if the pain must absolutely be borne, then one must “bite the bullet.” For most who write and think about our future, it’s a foregone conclusion that we’re all going to have to bite the bullet very hard in order to survive. It doesn’t occur to these thinkers and writers that it would be far less painful to start fresh.

It’s not MAN who is the scourge of the world, it’s a single culture. One culture out of hundreds of thousands of cultures. Our culture.

It applies to all species without distinction.

No, he wasn’t waiting; he was merely there, had been there before I arrived and would be there when I’d left. I had the feeling I was of no more significance to him than a passing cloud is to a shepherd resting on a hillside.

What he had to tell them was a story.

In hierarchal organizations, the boss is a supreme being. In tribal organizations, the boss is just another worker.