The Story of B Quotes

“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, The Story of B

“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, 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, 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, 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, The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“The earth was made for Man and Man was made to conquer and rule it” was not doubted by the builders of the ziggurats of Ur or the pyramids of Egypt. It wasn’t doubted by the hundreds of thousands who labored to wall of China from the rest of the world…scribes of the Hittites, Darius of Persia, Alexander the Great…Confucious or Aristotle. It wasn’t doubted by the architects of the United Nations. It wasn’t doubted by the hundreds of millions who in the postwar years dreamed of a coming utopia where people would rest and all labor would be performed by robots…

But that manifesto is doubted now, almost everywhere in our culture, in all walks of life, among the young and old, for whom the dream of a glittering future in which life will become even sweeter and sweeter has been exploded and is meaningless. Your children know better. Only our politicians still insist that the world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it.”
― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

“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?”
― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

“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, The Story of B

“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, The Story of B

“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, The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“We are straying from the path of salvation, exactly as religious leaders feared we might but not for sin or corruption, as they imagined we might. We are straying from the path of salvation because we remember that we once belonged to the world and were content in the belonging. We’re straying from the path of salvation -but not for the love of vice and wickedness as you contemptuously imagined we might. We’re straying from the path of salvation for love of the world, as you never once dreamed in a thousand years of dreaming.”
― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

“The origin and cause of human suffering – and the means of ending it- became the first great intellectual and spiritual preoccupation of our culture, beginning about four thousand years ago. The next three millennia would see the development of all those religions that were destined to be the major religions of our culture- Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam- and each had its own theory about the origin and cause and its own approach to ending it, transcending it, or putting up with it. But they were all united in a single, central vision. Whether its release from the endless rounds of death and rebirth or blissful union with God in heaven, salvation is the highest goal in human life, and each of us is utterly alone in the universe with it. There is not marketplace where you can buy nirvana, merit, grace; no parent, friend, teacher can obtain it for you. And because nothing remotely compares in value, salvation is the one thing about which you may be totally and blamelessly selfish.”
― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

“Language developed because it conferred advantages. It didn't have to confer only one advantage. Language ability made you valuable as a hunting partner - therefore it also made you valuable as a mate. Language ability meant you were both more likely to survive and more likely to reproduce. [...] We became human not just by hunting but by hunting and talking.”
― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

“Revolutios don't occur among people who are thinking in the same old way.
Can't changed social or economic conditions produce a revolution?
Surely you don't mean that. People produce revolutions, not conditions.”
― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

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

“We are experiencing a cultural collapse. The very same collapse that was experienced by the Plains Indians when their way of life was destroyed and they were herded onto reservations. The very same collapse that was experiences by aboriginal people overrun by us in Africa, everywhere. For all of us, in just a few decades, shocking realities invalidated our vision of the world and made nonsense of a destiny that had always seemed self evident. The outcome: things fall apart. Order and purpose are replaced by chaos and bewilderment. People lose the will to live, become listless, violent, suicidal, addicted. The frog smiled for ten thousand years, as the water got hotter and hotter and hotter, but eventually when the water began to boil , the frog was dead.”
― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

“Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, with a single powerful blow, shattered for all time a complex article of fundamental articles of our cultural faith; that the world was capable of repairing any damage we might do to it; that the world was designed to do this, that the world was on our side; that God himself had fashioned the world specifically to support our efforts to conquer and rule it.”
― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

“During the Great Forgetting, it came to be understood among the people of our culture that life in “the wild” was governed by a single, cruel law known as the Law of the Jungle, or kill or be killed. In recent decades, by the process of looking (instead of merely assuming), ethologists have discovered this “kill or be killed” law is a fiction. In fact, a system of laws-universally observed- preserves the tranquility of the jungle, protects species and even individuals and promotes the well being of the community as a whole. The system has been called, the peacekeeping law, the law of limited competition, and animal ethics. Briefly, the law of limited competition is this: You may compete to the fullest extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors, or destroy their food source, or deny them access to food. In other words, you can compete but you may not wage war on your competitors.”
― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

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

“MI 16 or the CIA.”
― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“a lifestyle for creatures capable of poetry, philosophy, music, dance, mythology, art, and invention on a wide technological front.”
― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“reversing millions of years of human development by devouring all cultures on this planet and turning them into a single culture, our own.”
― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“The fire burned on, and the next doubling of our population would take only 200 years from 1700-1900. There would be one and a half billion humans at the end of it, all but half a percent belonging to our culture, East and West. It would be a period in which, for the first time, religious prophets would attract followers simply by predicting the imminent end of the world: in which Australis, New Guinea, India…would be claimed or carved up by the major powers of Europe; in which indigenous people all around the world would be wiped out in the millions by diseases brought to them by Europeans.”
― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

“The theories that are advanced to explain the increase of aberrant and addictive unhealthy behaviors are for the most part commonplace generalities, truisms, and platitudes. They are the received wisdom of the ages. You hear that the human race is fatally and irremediably flawed. You hear the human race is a planetary disease Gaia will shake off. You hear that insatiable capitalist greed is to blame or that technology is to blame. Most of these have been deduced from the remedies that are proposed to correct them. All we have to do is ….something. I am proposing a new theory to explain what’s gone wrong, not just a minor variation.”
― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B

“The contract and the vision was “the world was made for Man and Man was made to conquer and rule it.” This is what we’d been about from the beginning, conquering and ruling, taking the world as if it has been fashioned for our exclusive use…this was not wicked work, this was holy work! This was what God created us to do! And it was not something we learned from Genesis, where God told Adam to fill the earth and subdue it. This is something we knew before Jerusalem, before Babylon…this isn’t something the authors of Genesis taught us, it is something, we, our culture, taught them. This was not the human vision, not the vision that born in us when we became Homo habilis or when Homo habilis became Homo erectus, etc. This is the vision when our culture was born, ten thousand years ago. This was the manifesto of our revolution, to be carried to every corner of the earth.”
― Daniel Quinn, The Story of B