Daniel Quinn

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.

No story is devoid of meaning, if you know how to look for it. This is as true of nursery rhymes and daydreams as it is of novels and epic poems.

Of course, there is no one right way for people to live, any more than there is one right way for birds to build nests or for spiders to spin webs.

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.

Of course it’s not enough. But if you begin anywhere else, there’s no hope at all.

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

“One thing I know people will say to me is ‘Are you suggesting we go back to being hunter-gatherers?’”

“That of course is an inane idea,” Ishmael said. “The Leaver life-style isn’t about hunting and gathering, it’s about letting the rest of the community live—and agriculturalists can do that as well as hunter-gatherers.”

Mankind was not needed to bring order to the world.

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.

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.

Programs are initiated in order to counter or defeat vision.

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