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Book: The Invisibility of Success
Quotes of Book: The Invisibility of Success
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  1. Daniel Quinn _ The Invisibility of Success

    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 living in the Renaissance 200 years later. I spoke the truth when I said that. I truly couldn't at that time say how people will be living {if there are still people here in 200 years}. I must now make only this change: Now I DO know how people will be living if there are still people here in 200 years. They will be living like the people in this book. Not all living one single way {for it remains true that there is no one right way for people to live}, but they'll all be living in ways that work. Because,
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  2. Daniel Quinn _ The Invisibility of Success

    We have a system that works fabulously well for products. But the one we have for people stinks. This is the lesson we've got to learn-or the human future on this planet is going to be a very bleak one indeed.
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  3. Daniel Quinn _ The Invisibility of Success

    Is it so easy to change a cultural vision? Ease and difficulty are not the relevant measures. Here are the relevant measures: Readiness and unreadiness. If people aren't ready for it, then no power on earth can make a new idea catch on. But if people are ready for it {and I think they are}, then a new idea will sweep the world like wildfire.
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  4. Daniel Quinn _ The Invisibility of Success

    All too often the people of our culture think they're really doing something if they're out there fighting bad things and getting laws passed. Just look at what we've accomplished by outlawing drugs and waging a trillion-dollar War on Drugs! {Nothing!}
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  5. Daniel Quinn _ The Invisibility of Success

    CONTRARY TO THE COMMON ASSUMPTION , Charles Darwin did not originate the idea of evolution. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the mere fact of evolution had been around for a long time, and most thinkers of the time were perfectly content to leave it at that. The absence of a theory to explain evolutionary change didn't trouble them, wasn't experienced as a pressure, as it was by Darwin. He knew there had to be some intelligible mechanism or dynamic that would account for it, and this is what he went looking for-with well-known results. In his Origin of Species, he wasn't announcing the fact of evolution, he was trying to make sense of that fact.
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  6. Daniel Quinn _ The Invisibility of Success

    No undesirable behavior has ever been eliminated by passing a law against it.
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  7. Daniel Quinn _ The Invisibility of Success

    We all know what the business of government is: making and enforcing regulations. Governments approach all problems as problems of making and enforcing regulations. They reduce all problems to things about which regulations can be made and enforced. This upstart citizen was trying to propose an approach to the problem that had nothing to do with regulations, and so she was ignored-and
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  8. Daniel Quinn _ The Invisibility of Success

    This is what creationists say of evolution, that it's "only" a theory, it hasn't been proved, as though this in itself is grounds for dismissal. This misrepresents the point of formulating a theory, which is to make sense of some body of evidence.
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  9. Daniel Quinn _ The Invisibility of Success

    May the forests be with you and with your children.
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  10. Daniel Quinn _ The Invisibility of Success

    HUMANS don't generate toxic wastes-but our culture certainly does. HUMANS aren't toxic to the face of the earth-but our culture certainly is. It's vitally important for our children to know that the curse that needs to be lifted from the earth is not humanity. It's important for them to know that we may be a doomed culture, but we are not a doomed species. It's important for them to understand that it's not being HUMAN that is destroying the world. It's living this way that is destroying the world. It's important for them to know that humans have lived other ways, because it's important for them to know that it's possible to live other ways. Otherwise they can only repeat the falsehood spoken by that waste disposal engineer, that the only way to stop poisoning the world is to get rid of humanity.
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