Top 100 Daniel Quinn Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “We don’t need prophets to tell us how to live; we can find out for ourselves by consulting what’s actually there.”

— Daniel Quinn

52. “Every one of the Leavers’ ways came into being by evolution, by a process of testing that began even before people had a word for it. No one said, ‘Okay, let’s form a committee to write up a set of laws for us to follow.’ None of these cultures were inventions. But that’s what all our lawgivers give us – inventions. Contrivances. Not things that have proved out over thousands of generations, but rather arbitrary pronouncements about the one right way to live.”

— Daniel Quinn

53. “Pity is always twinged with disgust.”

— Daniel Quinn

54. “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.”

— Daniel Quinn

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

— Daniel Quinn

56. “Animists are not so much people with a religion as people with a fundamentally religious way of looking at things.”

— Daniel Quinn

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

— Daniel Quinn

58. “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.”

— Daniel Quinn

59. “There are times when having too much to say can be as dumbfounding as having too little.”

— Daniel Quinn

60. “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.”

— Daniel Quinn

61. “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.”

— Daniel Quinn

62. “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

63. “You must absolutely and forever relinquish the idea that you know who should live and who should die on this planet.”

— Daniel Quinn

64. “The world must live. We are only one species among billions. The gods don’t love us any more than they love spiders or bears or whales or water lilies.”

— Daniel Quinn

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

— Daniel Quinn

66. “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

67. “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

68. “The world is not in any sense in danger from itself. The world is in fact not in any danger at all. It is we who are in danger.”

— Daniel Quinn

69. “Courage is the virtue of the free.”

— Daniel Quinn

70. “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.”

— Daniel Quinn

71. “I don’t think there’s any loneliness greater than the loneliness to be found in a bad marriage. In solitary confinement, everyone knows you’re lonely and feels sorry for you. In a bad marriage loneliness is your darkest secret, one you dare not even share with your spouse.”

— Daniel Quinn

72. “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.”

— Daniel Quinn

73. “Many of the biggest and most far-reaching investments we make in our lives are investments that have little or nothing to do with money.”

— Daniel Quinn

74. “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.”

— Daniel Quinn

75. “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.”

— Daniel Quinn

76. “Imagine that the gods have a care for everything that lives in the community of life on earth.”

— Daniel Quinn

77. “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.”

— Daniel Quinn

78. “You never actually know how you’re going to handle a problem until you actually have it.”

— Daniel Quinn

79. “The tribal life doesn’t turn people into saints; it enables ordinary people to make a living together with a minimum of stress year after year, generation after generation.”

— Daniel Quinn

80. “So I looked. Silly as it sounds now, I looked. By comparison, going after the Grail would have made more sense. I won’t talk about it, it’s too embarrassing. I looked until I wised up. I stopped making a fool of myself, but something died inside of me – something that I’d always sort of liked and admired. In its place grew a scar – a tough spot but also a sore spot.”

— Daniel Quinn

81. “We went wrong by failing to take into account a great truth, namely, that teals are stupid and lazy and perfectly content to stay that way.”

— Daniel Quinn

82. “The world was not made for any one species.”

— Daniel Quinn

83. “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.”

— Daniel Quinn

84. “Our schools are much like our prisons: they disappoint us because they only do what they’re designed to do, and it annoys us that they don’t do something else!”

— Daniel Quinn

85. “May the forests be with you and with your children.”

— Daniel Quinn

86. “This is of course a startling idea, the idea that laws could be anything but invented – but that’s exactly the point to be made about tribal laws. Tribal laws are never invented laws, they’re always received laws.”

— Daniel Quinn

87. “The sign stopped me – or rather, this text stopped me. Words are my profession; I seized these and demanded that they explain themselves, that they cease to be ambiguous.”

— Daniel Quinn

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

— Daniel Quinn

89. “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.”

— Daniel Quinn

90. “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.”

— Daniel Quinn

91. “Donald Trump can do a lot of things I can’t, but he can no more get out of the prison than I can.”

— Daniel Quinn

92. “A system based on exchanging products inevitably channels wealth to a few, and no governmental change will ever be able to correct that. It isn’t a defect of the system, it’s intrinsic to the.”

— Daniel Quinn

93. “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.”

— Daniel Quinn

94. “I hope it will not be too long before the technologies that support our population explosion begin to be perceived as no less hazardous to the future of life on this planet than the endless production of radioactive wastes.”

— Daniel Quinn

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

— Daniel Quinn

96. “There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will ACT like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.”

— Daniel Quinn

97. “Newton’s achievement was not in discovering the phenomenon of gravity, it was in formulating the phenomenon as a law.”

— Daniel Quinn

98. “What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it, written as well as you, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself – and thus make yourself indispensable.”

— Daniel Quinn

99. “Where are you looking at it from?” “Oh. From above. From outer space.” “What are you doing up there?” “I don’t know.” “Why aren’t you down on the surface?”

— Daniel Quinn

100. “It applies to all species without distinction.”

— Daniel Quinn