Daniel Quinn Quotations

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.

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

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

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

Animism is not a belief system, but a worldview: The world is a sacred place and we are part of it. The factuality of this statement is not the issue. To say that the world is a sacred place is to make a statement about values, not facts. It’s a statement about what you mean by ‘sacred,’ just as ‘Money can’t buy happiness’ is a statement about what you mean by ‘happiness.’ To put it all very simply, animism isn’t a belief system, it’s a value system.

The world is not going to survive very much longer as humanity's captive.

May the forests be with you and with your children.

The theory I'm putting forward here is that storytelling is a genetic characteristic in the sense that early human hunters who were able to organize events into stories were more successful than hunters who weren't—and this success translated directly into reproductive success. In other words, hunters who were storytellers tended to be better represented in the gene pool than hunters who weren't, which (incidentally) accounts for the fact that storytelling isn't just found here and there among human cultures, it's found universally.

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

[T]he 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.