Daniel Quinn - Ishmael (1992)

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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.

Daniel Quinn
Yes, I'm afraid you're right. Trial and error isn't a bad way to learn how to build an aircraft, but it can be a disastrous way to learn how to build a civilization.

Daniel Quinn
No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' … That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species.

Daniel Quinn
Increasing food production to feed an increased population results in yet another increase in population.

Daniel Quinn
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.

Daniel Quinn
Everyone in your culture knows this. Man was born to turn the world into paradise, but tragically he was born flawed. And so his paradise has always been spoiled by stupidty, greed, destructiveness, and shortsightedness.

Daniel Quinn
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.

Daniel Quinn
That evening I went for a walk. To walk for the sake of walking is something I seldom do. Inside my apartment I'd felt inexplicably anxious. I needed to talk to someone. to be reassured or perhaps I needed to confess my sin: I was once again having impure thoughts about saving the world. Or it was neither of these - I was afraid I was dreaming.

Daniel Quinn
Man's destiny was to conquer and rule the world, and this is what he's done.. almost. He hasn't quite made it, and it looks as though this may be his undoing. The problem is that man's conquest of the world has itself devastated the world. 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
In fact, of course, there is no secret knowledge; no one knows anything that can't be found on a shelf in the public library.

Daniel Quinn
Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere in the universe that creation came to an end with the birth of man? Do you see the slightest evidence anywhere out there that man was the climax toward which creation had been straining from the beginning?...Very far from it. The universe went on as before, the planet went on as before. Man's appearance caused no more stir than the appearance of jellyfish.

Daniel Quinn
You've been in love with someone for a decade - someone who barely knows you're alive. You've done everything, tried everything to make this person see that you're a valuable, estimable person, and that your love is worth something. Then one day you open the paper and glance at the Personals column, and there you see that your loved one has placed an ad... seeking someone worthwhile to love and be loved by.

Daniel Quinn
If the world was made for us, then it BELONGS to us and we can do what we damn well please with it.

Daniel Quinn
What's normal is for things to work. What's not normal is for things to fail.

Daniel Quinn
Within your culture as a whole, there is in fact no significant thrust toward global population control. The point to see is that there never will be such a thrust so long as you're enacting a story that says the gods made the world for man. For as long as you enact that story, Mother Culture will demand increased food production today- and promise population control tomorrow.

Daniel Quinn
No story is devoid of meaning... If you know how to look for it.

Daniel Quinn
We need schools to force kids to learn things they have no use for.

Daniel Quinn
The price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.

Daniel Quinn
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.

Daniel Quinn
The journey itself is going to change you, so you don't have to worry about memorizing the route we took to accomplish that change.

Daniel Quinn
You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world.

Daniel Quinn
The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. … The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'.

Daniel Quinn
The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it. Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans and the elements. According to your mythology, this is what he was BORN to do.

Daniel Quinn
And every time the Takers stamp out a Leaver culture, a wisdom ultimately tested since the birth of mankind disappears from the world beyond recall.

Daniel Quinn
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.

Daniel Quinn
If you alone found out what the lie was, then you're probably right—it would make no great difference. But if you ALL found out what the lie was, it might conceivably make a very great difference indeed.

Daniel Quinn
You shouldn't have to settle for rabbits if what you want is deer

Daniel Quinn
In effect, you're saying that if you knew how you oughtt to live, then the flaw is man could be controlled. If you knew how you ought to live, you wouldn't be forever screwing up the world. perhaps in fact the two things are actually one thing. Perhaps the flaw in man is exactly this: that he doesn't know how he ought to live.

Daniel Quinn
If you can't discover what's keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual - "Ishmael

Daniel Quinn
Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again to the people of your culture, you'll never stop being conscious of it. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, you'll be tempted to say to the people around you, how can you listen to this stuff and not recognize it for what it is?

Daniel Quinn