Daniel Quinn

"So, this is the Taker vision: The world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it."

"It has happened that a species has tried to live in violation of the Law of Limited Competition. Or rather it has happened one time, in one human culture—ours. That’s what our agricultural revolution is all about. That’s the whole point of totalitarian agriculture: We hunt our competitors down, we destroy their food, and we deny them access to food. That’s what makes it totalitarian."

"Pursuing an evolutionarily unstable strategy doesn’t eliminate you instantly, Jared, it eliminates you eventually."

"In spite of everything he said, I felt sure he was showing us that our population explosion is a social problem, like, say, crime or race schism. I failed to hear him say that our population explosion is a biological problem, that if we pursue a policy that would be fatal for any species, then it will fatal for us in exactly the same way. We can’t will it to be otherwise. We can’t say, “Well, yes, our civilization is built on an evolutionarily unstable strategy but we can make it work anyhow, because we’re humans.” The world will not make an exception for us. And of course what the Church teaches is that God will make an exception for us. God will let us behave in a way that would be fatal for any other species, will somehow “fix it” so we can live in a way that is in a very real sense of self-eliminating. That is like expecting God to make our airplanes fly even if they’re aerodynamically incapable of flight."

"If the world is saved, it will not be saved by people with the old vision and new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by people with a new vision and no programs."

"The important thing to note is that the vision grew out of the lifestyle, the lifestyle didn’t grow out of the vision."

"If I were someone else, I’d try to console you with a fairy tale like the one they tell about Santa Claus every Christmas. I’d tell you that Mommy’s going to be taken up to heaven to live with God and the angels, and from there I’ll look down and watch over you. The truth is better than this—partly because it is the truth."

"Unlike the God whose name begins with a capital letter, our gods are not all-powerful, Louis. Can you imagine that? Any one of them can be vanquished by a flamethrower or a bulldozer or a bomb—silenced, driven away, enfeebled. Sit in the middle of a shopping mall at midnight, surrounded by half a mile of concrete in all directions, and there the god that was once as strong as a buffalo or a rhinoceros is as feeble as a moth sprayed with pyrethrin. Feeble—but not dead, not wholly extinguished. Tear down the mall and rip up the concrete, and within days that place will be pulsing with life again. Nothing needs to be done, beyond carting away the poisons. The god knows how to take care of that place. It will never be what it was before—but nothing is ever what it was before. It doesn’t need to be what it was before. You’ll hear people talk about turning the plains of North America back into what they were before the Takers arrived. This is nonsense. What the plains were five hundred years ago was not their final form, was not the final, sacrosanct form ordained for them from the beginning of time. There is no such form and never will be any such form. Everything here is on the way. Everything here is in process."

"“Would the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God have sent his only-begotten son to save those beetles and their household mites, Jared?” “No.” “But the god of this place has as great a care for them as for any other creature in the world. This is why I knew you could benefit from seeing those beetles yesterday. Those beetles are a manifestation of the gods’ unending abundance and a sign to be read by those who have eyes to read. I wanted you to see how the gods lavish care without stint on every thing: no less upon a beetle whose supreme achievement is burying a mouse than upon the brain of Einstein, no less upon a mite whose favorite dish is a fly’s egg than upon the eye of Michelangelo.”"

"You don’t have to understand what you see but you must at least make an effort to see what you see."

"“Nature is a phantom that sprang entirely from the Great Forgetting, which, after all, is precisely a forgetting of the fact that we are exactly as much a part of the processes and phenomena of the world as any other creature, and if there were such a thing as Nature, we would be as much a part of it as squirrels or squids or mosquitoes or daffodils. We are unable to alienate ourselves from Nature or to ’live against’ it. We can no more alienate ourselves from Nature than we can alienate ourselves from entropy. We can no more live against Nature than we can live against gravity. On the contrary, what we’re seeing here more and more clearly is that the processes and phenomena of the world are working on us in exactly the same way that they work on all other creatures. Our lifestyle is evolutionarily unstable—and is therefore in the process of eliminating itself in the perfectly ordinary way.”"

"These caves aren’t art galleries or shamanistic temples, they’re schools of the hunting arts—the equivalent of one of our museums of science and industry."

"All paths lie together like a web endlessly woven, and yours and mine are no greater or less than the beetle’s or the mouse’s. All are held together."

"I am at what seminarians used to call “the Company Farm,” which is where you go when you “need a little rest”—or a little vacation from booze—or the whispers about you and the altar boys are beginning to get a bit noisy. All the big orders have them, of course, some of them have several, thoughtfully specialized. Naturally they are not called penitentiaries anymore; nowadays they are called retreat centers."

"“And you actually authorized his assassination?” The man shrugged. “You said it very well, Jared: These days are still those days. Nothing’s changed in the last five hundred years—or the last thousand—except that heretics cannot longer be executed in public. I take all this as seriously as Pope Innocent the Third, who ordered up a crusade against the Albigenses. I take it all as seriously as Pius the Fifth, who, when he was the grand inquisitor, personally instigated the massacre of thousands of Protestants in southern Italy. I take it all as seriously as Thomas Aquinas, who said, ’if ordinary criminals may be justly put to death, then how much more may heretics be justly slain.’ For Thomas well knew that the murderer just shortens his neighbors’ temporal life, whereas the heretic deprives them of eternal life. If you no longer understand the difference—or if it no longer matters to you—then I assume you’ve lost your faith.”"

"I left, and because it seemed like a good time to start being a little less incredibly trusting, I didn’t turn my back on him till I was outside with the door shut between us."

"“The question is, can you do would B did?” “What exactly do you have in mind?” “You took in their insights, but do you have any of your own? Are you a thinker and a teacher or just a reciter of Holy Writ? If all you can do is chant the Scriptures, then you’re no more B than I am. You’re just an altar boy who has all the responses down pat.”"

"What works, evidently, is cultural diversity. This should not come as a surprise. If culture is viewed as a biological phenomenon, then we should expect to see diversity favored over uniformity. A thousand designs—one for every locale and situation—always works better than one design for all locals and situations. Birds are more likely to survive in ten thousand nest patterns than in one. Mammals are more likely to survive in ten thousand social patterns that in one. And humans are more likely to survive in ten thousand cultures than in one—as we are in the process of proving right now. We’re in the process of making the world unlivable for ourselves—precisely because everyone is being forced to live a single way. There would be no problem if only one person in ten thousand lived the way we live. The problem appears only as we approach the point where only one person in ten thousand is permitted to live any other way than the way we live. In a world of ten thousand cultures, one culture can be completely mad and destructive, and little harm will be done. In a world of one culture—and that one culture completely mad and destructive—catastrophe is inevitable."

"The world will not be saved by old minds with new programs. If the world is saved, it will be saved by new minds—with no programs."

"It means I’ve been changed, fundamentally and permanently. It means I cannot be put back to what I was. That’s why I am B: I cannot be put back to what I was."

"I wonder if you’ve ever considered how strange it is that the educational and character-shaping structures of our culture expose us but a single time in our lives to the ideas of Socrates, Plato, Euclid, Aristotle, Herodotus, Augustine, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Descartes, Rousseau, Newton, Racine, Darwin, Kant, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Schopenhauer, Goethe, Freud, Marx, Einstein, and dozens of others of the same rank, but expose us annually, monthly, weekly, and even daily to the ideas of persons like Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, and Buddha. Why is it, do you think, that we need quarterly lectures on charity, while a single lecture on the laws of thermodynamics is presumed to last us a lifetime? Why is the meaning of Christmas judged to be so difficult of comprehension that we must hear a dozen explications of it, not once in a lifetime, but every single year, year after year after year? Perhaps even more to the point, why do the pious (who already know every word of whatever text they find holy) need to have it repeated to them week after week after week, and even day after day after day?"

"A few years ago, when I begin speaking to audiences, I have the rather naive idea that it would be sufficient—indeed entirely sufficient—to say each thing exactly once. Only gradually did I understand that saying a thing once is tantamount to not saying it at all."

"What was forgotten in the Great Forgetting was the fact that, before the advent of agriculture and village life, humans had lived in a profoundly different way.…Paleontology made untenable the idea that humanity, agriculture, and civilization all began at roughly the same time."

"Q. Wasn’t agriculture developed as a response to famine? A. Agriculture is useless as a response to famine. You can no more respond to famine by planting a crop than you can respond to falling out of an airplane by knitting a parachute. But this really misses the point. To say that agriculture was developed as a response to famine is like saying that cigarette smoking was developed as a response to lung cancer. Agriculture doesn’t cure famine, it promotes famine—it creates the conditions in which famines occur. Agriculture makes it possible for more people to live in an area than that area can support—and that’s exactly where famines occur."

"Totalitarian agriculture is based on the premise that all the food in the world belongs to us, and there is no limit whatever to what we may take for ourselves and deny to all others."

"Five severed fingers do not make a hand."

"People say that I’m sour and misanthropic, and I tell them they’re probably right. Argument of any sort, on any subject, has always seemed like a waste of time to me."

"The Leavers and the Takers are enacting two separate stories, based on entirely different and contradictory premises."

"“As the Takers see it, the gods gave man the same choice they gave Achilles: a brief life of glory or a long, uneventful life in obscurity. And the Takers chose a brief life of glory.” “Yes, that’s certainly how it’s understood. People just shrug and say, ‘Well, this is the price that had to be paid for indoor plumbing and central hearing and air conditioning and automobiles and all the rest.’” I gave him a quizzical look. “And what are you saying?” “I’m saying that the 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.”"

"The problem is that man’s conquest of the world has itself devastated the world."

"It’s pointless to argue with mythology."

"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."

"We don’t need prophets to tell us how to live; we can find out for ourselves by consulting what’s actually there."

"The law we’re looking for here is much like that with respect to civilizations. It’s not about civilizations, but it applies to civilizations in the same way that it applies to flocks of birds and herds of deer. It makes no distinction between human civilizations and beehives. It applies to all species without distinction. This is one reason why the law has remained undiscovered in your culture. According to Taker mythology, man is by definition a biological exception. Out of all the millions of species, only one is an end product."

"But, alas, a law is catching up to them. They don’t know such a law even exists, but this ignorance affords them no protection from its effects."

"The gazelle and the lion are enemies only in the minds of the Takers."

"I no longer think of what we’re doing as a blunder. 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."

"Once you exempt yourself from the law of limited competition, everything in the world except your food and the food of your food becomes an enemy to be exterminated."

"“‘Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population.’ Peter Farb said it in Humankind.” “You said it was a paradox?” “No, he said it was a paradox.” “Why?” Ishmael shrugged. “I’m sure he knows that any species in the wild will invariably expand to the extent that its food supply expands. But, as you know, Mother Culture teaches that such laws do not apply to man.”"

"Increasing food production to feed an increased population results in yet another increase in population. Obviously it has to have this result, and to predict any other is simply to indulge in biological and mathematical fantasies."

"Within your culture as a whole, there is in fact no significant thrust toward global population control. The point to see is that there never will be such a thrust so long as you’re enacting a story that says the gods made the world for man. For as long as you enact that story, Mother Culture will demand increased food production today—and promise population control tomorrow."

"This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world’s divinely appointed ruler."

"You must face the fact that increasing food production doesn’t feed your hungry, it only fuels your population explosion."

"If the will is there, the method will be found."

"Obviously Mother Culture must be finished off if you’re going to survive, and that’s something the people of your culture can do. She has no existence outside your minds. Once you stop listening to her, she ceases to exist."

"The world was not made for any one species."

"Mankind was not needed to bring order to the world."

"“Whenever a Taker couple talk about how wonderful it would be to have a big family, they’re reenacting the scene beside the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. They’re saying to themselves, ‘Of course it’s our right to apportion life on this planet as we please. Why stop at four kids or six? We can have fifteen if we like. All we have to do is plow under another few hundred acres of rain forest—and who cares if a dozen other species disappear as a result?’”"

"Adam wasn’t the progenitor of our race, he was the progenitor of our culture."

"In order to make their story come true, the Takers have to put an end to creation itself—and they’re doing a damned good job of it."