Quotes from The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“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.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“It's not MAN who is the scourge of the world, it's a single culture. One culture out of hundreds of thousands of cultures. Our culture.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“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.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“Because six billion of us are pursuing an evolutionarily unstable strategy, we’re fundamentally attacking the very ecological systems that keep us alive. Just like the goat that refuses to suckle its kids, we’re in the process of eliminating ourselves. Think about the time line Charles drew in his talk about the boiling frog. For the first six thousand years, the impact of our evolutionarily unstable strategy was minimal and confined to the Near East. Over the next two thousand years, the strategy spread to Eastern Europe and the Far East. In the next fifteen hundred years, the strategy spread throughout the Old World. In the next three hundred years, it became global. By the end of the next two hundred years—which is now—so many people were following the strategy that the impact was becoming catastrophic. We’re now about two generations away from finishing the job of making this unstable strategy extinct.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“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.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“Nothing in the community lives in isolation from the rest, not even the queens of the social insects. Nothing lives only in itself, needing nothing from the community. Nothing lives only for itself, owing nothing to the community. Nothing is untouchable or untouched. Every life is on loan from the community from birth and without fail is paid back to the community in death. The community is a web of life, and every strand of the web is a path to all the other strands. Nothing is exempt or excused. Nothing is special. Nothing lives on a strand by itself, unconnected to the rest. As you saw yesterday, nothing is wasted, not a drop of water or a molecule of protein—or the egg of a fly. This is the sweetness and the miracle of it all, Jared. Everything that lives is food for another. Everything that feeds is ultimately itself fed upon or in death returns its substance to the community.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“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.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“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 every conceivable theological question in absolutely unequivocal terms, but he chose not to, leaving subsequent generations to settle what Jesus had in mind with pogroms, purges, persecutions, wars, the burning stake, and the rack. Having failed through Jesus, God next tried to make himself understood through Muhammad, with limited success, as always. After a thousand years of silence he tried again with Joseph Smith, with no better results. Averaging it out, all God has been able to tell us for sure is that we should do unto others as we’d have them do unto us. What’s that—a dozen words? Not much to show for five thousand years of work, and we probably could have figured out that much for ourselves anyway. To be honest, I’d be embarrassed to be associated with a god as incompetent as that.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“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.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“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.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“The relevant measures are not ease and difficulty. The relevant measures are readiness and unreadiness. If the time isn’t right for a new idea, no power on earth can make it catch on, but if the time is right, it will sweep the world like wildfire.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“When one does not see what one does not see, one does not even see that one is blind. —Paul Veyne”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“When Jesus departed, he left no one behind who was the message.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“shattered for all time a complex of fundamental articles of our cultural faith: that the world was capable of repairing any damage we might do to it;”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“Among the primates only humans are hunters, because among the primates only humans have the biological equipment to make hunting a mainstay of life—and that equipment is strictly intellectual.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“For example, children in school are never encouraged to want the material rewards of success. Success is something to be sought for its own sake, certainly not for any wealth it might bring.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“If prophecies about Christ must wait upon their fulfillment to be understood, why shouldn’t the same be true of prophecies about Antichrist? In other words, we can’t really know what John was talking about until it actually happens, so the Antichrist is almost certain to be different from whatever we imagine him to be.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“The world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it'... that manifesto is doubted now, ladies and gentlemen... almost everywhere in our culture, in all walks of life, among the young and the old, but especially among the young, for whom the dream of a glittering future in which life will become ever sweeter and sweeter and sweeter, decade after decade, century after century, has been exploded and is meaningless. Your children know better. They know better in large part because you know better.

Only our politicians still insist that the world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it. They must, as a professional obligation, still affirm and proclaim the manifesto of our revolution. If they want to hold on to their jobs, they assure us with absolute conviction that a glorious future lies just ahead for us - provided that we march forward under the banner of conquest and rule. They assure us of this, and then they wonder, year after year, why fewer and fewer voters go to the poles.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“Human thought is thought that opens up into the future, and the future is inescapably the domain of the gods.”
― Daniel Quinn, quote from The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

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