Daniel Quinn
Daniel Quinn
Daniel Quinnis an American writer, cultural critic, and former publisher of educational texts, best known for his novel Ishmael, which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991 and was published the following year. Quinn's ideas are popularly associated with environmentalism, though he criticizes this term, claiming that it portrays the environment as somehow separate from human life and thus creates a false dichotomy. Quinn specifically identifies his philosophy as new tribalism...
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth11 October 1935
CityOmaha, NE
There are indeed times when one should TRUST blindly, just as there are times when one should not. WISDOM consists in being able to tell one from the other.
To you, Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism look very different, but to me they look the same. Many of you would say that something like Buddhism doesn't even belong on the list, since it doesn't link salvation to divine worship, but to me this is just a quibble. Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism all perceive human beings as flawed, wounded creatures in need of salvation, and all rely fundamentally on revelations that spell out how salvation is to be attained, either by departing from this life or rising above it.
What's normal is for things to work. What's not normal is for things to fail.
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.
[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.
five severed fingers do not make a hand
If you can’t discover what’s keeping you in, the will to get out soon becomes confused and ineffectual - "Ishmael
There is a difference between the inmates of your criminal prisons and the inmates of your cultural prison: The former understand that the distribution of wealth and power inside the prison had nothing to do with justice.
Pity is always twinged with disgust.
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.
During your lifetime, the people of our culture are going to figure out how to live sustainably on this planet--or they're not. Either way, it's certainly going to be extraordinary. If they figure out how to live sustainably here, then hum anity will be able to see something it can't see right now: a future that extends into the indefinite future. If they don't figure this out, then I'm afraid the human race is going to take its place among the species that we're driving into extinction here every day--as many as 200--every day
The world is not going to survive very much longer as humanity's captive.
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.
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.