201 Quotes by Daniel Quinn

No, the founders of our culture didn’t just fall into a lifestyle of total dependence on agriculture, they had to whip themselves into it, and the whip they used was this meme: Growing all your own food is the best way to live. Nothing less could imaginably have done this amazing trick.

When one does not see what one does not see, one does not even see that one is blind. – Paul Veyne.

I needed to confess my sin: I was once again having impure thoughts about saving the world.

The civilized want people to make their living individually, and they want them to live separately, behind locked doors – one family to a house, each house fully stocked with refrigerators, television sets, washing machines, and so on.

They made an ingenuous and disorganized effort to escape from captivity but ultimately failed, because they were unable to find the bars of the cage. If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual.

You’re captives of a civilization system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live.

Far and away the most futile admonition Christ ever offered was when he said, ‘Have no care for tomorrow. Don’t worry about whether you’re going to have something to eat. Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, but God takes perfect care of them. Don’t you think he’ll do the same for you?’ In our culture the overwhelming answer to that question is, ‘Hell no!’ Even the most dedicated monastics saw to their sowing and reaping and gathering into barns.

We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don’t have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free. MARSHALL SAHLINS.

The revolt hadn’t been put down, it had just dwindled away into a fashion statement.