Top 40 Wade Davis Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.”

— Wade Davis

Featured in: Culture Quotes, Diversity Quotes

2. “The world can only appear monochromatic to those who persist in interpreting what they experience through the lens of a single cultural paradigm, their own. For those with the eyes to see and the heart to feel, it remains a rich and complex topography of the spirit.”

— Wade Davis

3. “Change is no threat to culture.”

— Wade Davis

4. “Heroes are never perfect, but they’re brave, they’re authentic, they’re courageous, determined, discreet, and they’ve got grit.”

— Wade Davis

5. “Language is an old-growth forest of the mind.”

— Wade Davis

6. “All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities for life. Change is the one constant in human history.”

— Wade Davis

7. “The measure of a society is not only what it does but the quality of its aspirations.”

— Wade Davis

8. “I tend to be a real optimist because I just find that pessimism is an indulgence and despair is kind of an insult to the imagination. And you know my father always said just do what you need to do and then ask whether it was possible or permissible.”

— Wade Davis

9. “So be patient. Do not compromise. And give your destiny time to find you.”

— Wade Davis

10. “These other cultures are not failed attempts to be us; they are unique manifestations of the spirit – other options, other visions of life itself.”

— Wade Davis

11. “Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does note destroy a culture. All societies are constantly evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo.”

— Wade Davis

12. “Genocide, the physical extinction of a people, is universally condemned, but ethnocide, the destruction of people’s way of life, is not only not condemned, it’s universally celebrated as part of a development strategy.”

— Wade Davis

13. “Its haunting to realize that half of the languages of the world are teetering on the brink of extinction.”

— Wade Davis

14. “To have that powder blown up your nose is rather like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with Baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity.”

— Wade Davis

15. “The surface of the Earth itself is an immense loom upon which the sun weaves the fabric of existence.”

— Wade Davis

16. “Risk discomfort and solitude for understanding.”

— Wade Davis

17. “What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your native tongue, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the elders, to anticipate the promise of the children. This tragic fate is indeed the plight of someone somewhere roughly every two weeks.”

— Wade Davis

18. “What is science but the pursuit of the truth? What is Buddhism but 2500 years of observation as to the nature of mind?”

— Wade Davis

19. “What is even more astonishing is that the entire science of wayfinding is based on dead reckoning. You only know where you are by knowing precisely where you have been and how you got to where you are.”

— Wade Davis

20. “In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises.”

— Wade Davis

21. “Sensitivity to nature is not an innate attribute of indigenous peoples. It is a consequence of adaptive choices that have resulted in the development of highly specialized peripheral skills. but those choices in turn spring from a comprehensive view of nature and the universe in which man and woman are perceived as but elements inextricably linked to the whole.”

— Wade Davis

22. “Every effort should be made, he argued, to understand the perspective of the other, to learn the way they perceive the world, and if at all possible, the very nature of their thoughts. This demanded, by definition, a willingness to step back from the constraints of one’s own prejudices and preconceptions. This.”

— Wade Davis

23. “If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite – the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singulary generic modern culture that takes for granted an impoverished environment – is a source of dismay. There is, indeed, a fire burning over the earth, taking with it plants and animals, cultures, languages, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Quelling this flame, and re-inventing the poetry of diversity is perhaps the most importent challenge of our times.”

— Wade Davis

24. “She had a hundred precocious ideas, and some were good and true, but they could never be hers until she found them alone, for ideas are but words unless they are sown in experience.”

— Wade Davis

25. “Our economic models are projections and arrows when they should be circles. To define perpetual growth on a finite planet as the sole measure of economic well-being is to engage in a form of slow collective suicide. To deny or exclude from the calculus of governance and economy the costs of violating the biological support systems of life is the logic of delusion.”

— Wade Davis

26. “He had nothing modern and yet he lived to a hundred and ten. Why? Because he lived in a world that made sense.”

— Wade Davis

27. “You know, once something freezes, it’s solid. That’s the key to the arctic – they didn’t fear the cold, they made use of it.”

— Wade Davis

28. “Only, in Haiti, I realized, is it possible to drink rum and haggle with a god.”

— Wade Davis

29. “There is no doubt that we are a very cruel people,′ Winston Churchill wrote home from the front. ‘Severity always,’ went the British motto, ’justice when possible.”

— Wade Davis

30. “Mining in BC’s Sacred Headwaters is like drilling for oil in the Sistine Chapel.”

— Wade Davis

31. “It was more than love at first sight. For Mallory it was as if a dam had burst and the impounded emotions of a young lifetime had found immediate release.”

— Wade Davis

32. “Death’s power lies in fear, which flourishes in the imagination and the unknown.”

— Wade Davis

33. “After several trips across the Andes, the pattern of the flora was gradually coming into focus. This to me was the great revelation of botany. When I knew nothing of plants, I experienced a forest only as a tangle of forms, shapes, and colors without meaning or depth, beautiful when taken as a whole but ultimately incomprehensible and exotic. Now the components of the mosaic had names, the names implied relationships, and the relationships resonated with significance.”

— Wade Davis

34. “On paper I would be a rather bold individual in our culture.”

— Wade Davis

35. “The full measure of a culture embraces both the actions of a people and the quality of their aspirations, the nature of the metaphors that propel their lives. And no description of a people can be complete without reference to the character of their homeland, the ecological and geographical matrix in which they have determined to live out their destiny. Just as a landscape defines character, culture springs from a spirit of place.”

— Wade Davis

36. “For the people of the village every activity was an affirmation of continuity. At dawn the first of the family to go outside formally greeted the sun.”

— Wade Davis

37. “Schultes was a naive photographer. For him a beautiful image was one of something beautiful.”

— Wade Davis

38. “They brought their whole intellectual energy to bear on their relationships; they wanted to know not only that they loved people but how and why they loved them, to understand the mechanism of their likings, the springs that prompted thought and emotion; to come to terms with themselves and with one another; to know where they were going and why.”

— Wade Davis

39. “Social mores, he argued, rules of protocol, concepts of rectitude and honor had no objective basis. They were only reflections of public and private fears.”

— Wade Davis

40. “They have no illusions of permanence,” she explains. “There is no time for regret. Despair is a sin against the imagination. Their grocery store is out there on the land and this creates an emotional life that’s so much bigger than that of those who live in cities. They deal with death every day. To live they must kill the things they most love. Blood on ice is not a sign of death but an affirmation of life. Eating meat becomes a sacramental experience.”

— Wade Davis

41. “In Africa, there is no separation between the sacred and the secular, between the holy and the profane, between the material and the spiritual.”

— Wade Davis

42. “It was amusing to look at that colorful case so symbolic of an entire nation. Haiti, it is said, is the place to discover how much can be done with little.”

— Wade Davis