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5307b0c
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The God of revealed religions--and by this I mean religions like yours, Taker religions--is a profoundly inarticulate God. No matter how many times he tries, he can't make himself clearly or completely understood. He speaks for centuries to the Jews but fails to make himself understood. At last he sends his only-begotten son, and his son can't seem to do any better. Jesus might have sat himself down with a scribe and dictated the answers to..
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Daniel Quinn |
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a6fee20
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A system based on exchanging products inevitably channels wealth to a few, and no governmental change will ever be able to correct that. It isn't a defect of the system, it's intrinsic to the
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Daniel Quinn |
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55858d3
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Karl Marx recognized that workers without a choice are workers in chains. But his idea of breaking chains was for us to depose the pharaohs and then build the pyramids for ourselves, as if building pyramids is something we just can't stop doing, we love it so much.
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Daniel Quinn |
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2a08d19
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Making food a commodity to be owned was one of the great innovations of our culture. No other culture in history has ever put food under lock and key--and putting it there is the cornerstone of our economy, for if the food wasn't under lock and key, who would work?
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Daniel Quinn |
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2cfa6da
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What about Saint Francis?" "Saint Francis relied on the bounty of farmers, not the bounty of God. Even the most fundamental of the fundamentalists plug their ears when Jesus starts talking about birds of the air and lilies of the field. They know damn well he's just yarning, just making pretty speeches." "So you think this is what's at the root of your revolution. You wanted and still want to have your lives in your own hands." "Yes. Absolu..
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Daniel Quinn |
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184b1cb
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Only slaves love being powerful. HANS ERICH NOSSACK
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Daniel Quinn |
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ce36f10
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What another would have done as well as you, do not do it. What another would have said as well as you, do not say it, written as well as you, do not write it. Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself--and thus make yourself indispensable.
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Daniel Quinn |
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1492fef
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WHAT you DO NOT KNOW YOURSELF, you CANNOT TEACH ANOTHER.
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Daniel Quinn |
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8460653
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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 h..
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Daniel Quinn |
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77b9a7f
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I've said that if there are still people here in 200 years, they won't be living the way we do, because if people go on living the way we do, there will BE no people here in 200 years. I stand by every word of this. That's how people WON'T be living. But what about how they WILL be living? What I've said in the past is that I could no more say how people will be living in 200 years than Thomas Aquinas could have said how people would be liv..
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Daniel Quinn |
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57ae978
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So I looked. Silly as it sounds now, I looked. By comparison, going after the Grail would have made more sense. I won't talk about it, it's too embarrassing. I looked until I wised up. I stopped making a fool of myself, but something died inside of me - something that I'd always sort of liked and admired. In its place grew a scar - a tough spot but also a sore spot.
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Daniel Quinn |
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26d7d99
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Diversity, not uniformity, is what works.
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lifestyle
systems
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Daniel Quinn |
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3a7f9ce
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The first time I read the ad, I choked and cursed and spat and threw the paper to the floor.
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Daniel Quinn |
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8857673
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Because the tribe is its members, the tribe is what its members want it to be--nothing more and nothing less.
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organization
systems
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Daniel Quinn |
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46002d8
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Slavery became a huge, international business, and of course would remain one down to the present moment. It's estimated that at the midpoint of the fifth century every third or fourth person in Athens was a slave. When Carthage fell to Rome in 146 B.C.E., fifty thousand of the survivors were sold as slaves. In 132 B.C.E. some seventy thousand Roman slaves rebelled; when the revolt was put down, twenty thousand were crucified, but this was ..
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Daniel Quinn |
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a48c8ca
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To each is given its moment in the blaze, its spark to be surrendered to another when it is sent, so that the blaze may go on.
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Daniel Quinn |
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92ed2ab
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My death is the life of another, and I will stand again in the windswept grasses and look through the eyes of the fox and take the air with the eagle and run in the track of the deer.
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Daniel Quinn |
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b51120e
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Animists are not so much people with a religion as people with a fundamentally religious way of looking at things.
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Daniel Quinn |
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44638bc
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What I said in Ishmael stands: There is no One Right Way to live. What we find among Leaver peoples is that each has a way that works well for them. We may not like one particular way, we may think it atrocious and cruel, but it's their way, not ours, and the most murderous culture in human history is hardly in a position to set itself up as the moral policeman of the world.
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Daniel Quinn |
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cdd9675
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I think what you're groping for is that people need more than to be scolded, more than to be made to feel stupid and guilty. They need more than a vision of doom. They need a vision of the world and of themselves that inspires them.
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Daniel Quinn |
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986247c
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The tribal life wasn't something humans sat down and figured out. It was the gift of natural selection, a proven success--not perfection but hard to improve on. Hierarchalism, on the other hand, has proven to be not merely imperfect but ultimately catastrophic for the earth and for us. When the plane's going down and someone offers you a parachute, you don't demand to see the warranty.
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Daniel Quinn |
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2f810ca
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You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
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Daniel Quinn |
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255d6d8
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If there are forty thousand people in an area that can only support thirty thousand, it's no kindness to bring in food from the outside to maintain them at forty thousand. That just guarantees that the famine will continue.
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Daniel Quinn |
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bda8d17
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Borders are always tricky, intriguing things. [...] Feral children fascinate because they stand at the border of the animal world. Gorillas and dolphins fascinate because they stand at the border of the human world. [...] Shakespeare's fools fascinate because they live at the border between sanity and madness. The heroes of tragedy fascinate because they walk the border between triumph and defeat. The borders between prehuman and human, bet..
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Daniel Quinn |
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d7e7a25
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once again I was thunderstruck--but this time by a feeling of profound relief, for I had been redeemed from oblivion. More, the error that caused me to live as an unwitting impostor for so many years had been corrected at last. I had been made whole as a person--not again but for the very first time.
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Daniel Quinn |
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394171a
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The world is a very, very fine place. It wasn't a mess. It didn't need to be conquered and ruled by man. In other words, the world doesn't belong to man - but it does need man to belong to it. creature had to be the first to go through this... creature had to find the way, and if that happened, then...there was no limit to what could happen here. In other words, man does have a place in the world, but it's not his place to rule...Man's p..
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teaching
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Daniel Quinn |
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09eb9f7
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We don't need prophets to tell us how to live; we can find out for ourselves by consulting what's actually there.
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Daniel Quinn |
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c4c7322
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Where are you looking at it from?" "Oh. From above. From outer space." "What are you doing up there?" "I don't know." "Why aren't you down on the surface?"
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Daniel Quinn |
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bca3ba5
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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.
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humanity
population-control
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Daniel Quinn |
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66af7bb
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In hierarchal organizations, the boss is a supreme being. In tribal organizations, the boss is just another worker.
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Daniel Quinn |
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c93e0c5
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We've discovered that any species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion.
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Daniel Quinn |
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47b84a2
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It applies to all species without distinction.
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Daniel Quinn |
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993913f
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The civilized want people to make their living individually, and they want them to live separately, behind locked doors--one family to a house, each house fully stocked with refrigerators, television sets, washing machines, and so on.
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Daniel Quinn |
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fa7c063
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All the major world religions (always excluding animism, of course), are founded on these notions: that man and man alone was the desired object of creation, that man occupies a preeminent place in the order of creation, that man has a value in God's eyes that is transcendently greater than that of all other creatures, that this world of matter is illusory, transitory, and worthless.
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Daniel Quinn |
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3aec937
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We are inclined to think of hunters and gatherers as poor because they don't have anything; perhaps better to think of them for that reason as free. MARSHALL SAHLINS
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Daniel Quinn |