Daniel Quinn World 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.

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.

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.

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.

The world was not made for any one species.

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.

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

We're straying from the path of salvation because we remember that we once belonged to the world and were content in that belonging.

The world of the Takers is one vast prison, and except for a handful of Leavers scattered across the world, the entire human race is now inside that prison.

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.

We're not destroying the world because we're clumsy. We're destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.

TEACHER seeks pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person.

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.

From infancy onward, children are the most fantastic learners in the world.

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.

The world doesn't belong to us, we belong to it. Always have, always will. We belong to the world. We belong to the community of life on this planet--it doesn't belong to us. We got confused about that, now it's time to set the record straight

If the world is saved, it will not be saved by old minds with new programs but by new minds with no programs at all.

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.