Wade Davis > Quotes

“The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being you; they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.”
― Wade Davis

“If diversity is a source of wonder, its opposite - the ubiquitous condensation to some blandly amorphous and singulary generic modern culture that takes for granted an impoverished environment - is a source of dismay. There is, indeed, a fire burning over the earth, taking with it plants and animals, cultures, languages, ancient skills and visionary wisdom. Quelling this flame, and re-inventing the poetry of diversity is perhaps the most importent challenge of our times.”
― Wade Davis, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

“Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does note destroy a culture. All societies are constantly evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo.”
― Wade Davis, Light at the Edge of the World

“Language is an old-growth forest of the mind.”
― Wade Davis

“We have this extraordinary conceit in the West that while we've been hard at work in the creation of technological wizardry and innovation, somehow the other cultures of the world have been intellectually idle. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nor is this difference due to some sort of inherent Western superiority. We now know to be true biologically what we've always dreamed to be true philosophically, and that is that we are all brothers and sisters. We are all, by definition, cut from the same genetic cloth. That means every single human society and culture, by definition, shares the same raw mental activity, the same intellectual capacity. And whether that raw genius is placed in service of technological wizardry or unraveling the complex thread of memory inherent in a myth is simply a matter of choice and cultural orientation.”
― Edmund Wade Davis

“Risk discomfort and solitude for understanding.”
― Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic

“The world in which you were born is just one model of reality. Other cultures are not failed attempts at being YOU: they are unique manifestations of the human spirit.”
― Wade Davis

“The world can only appear monochromatic to those who persist in interpreting what they experience through the lens of a single cultural paradigm, their own. For those with the eyes to see and the heart to feel, it remains a rich and complex topography of the spirit.”
― Wade Davis, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

“Culture is not trivial. It is not a decoration or artifice, the songs we sing or even the prayers we chant. It is a blanket of comfort that gives meaning to lives. It is a body of knowledge that allows the individual to make sense out of the infinite sensations of consciousness, to find meaning and order in a universe that ultimately has neither. Culture is a body of laws and traditions, a moral and ethical code that insulates a people from the barbaric heart that lies just beneath the surface of all human societies and indeed all human beings. Culture alone allows us to reach, as Abraham Lincoln said, for the better angels of our nature.”
― Wade Davis, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

“The surface of the Earth itself is an immense loom upon which the sun weaves the fabric of existence. ”
― Wade Davis

“The measure of a society is not only what it does but the quality of its aspirations.”
― Wade Davis

“These other cultures are not failed attempts to be us; they are unique manifestations of the spirit—other options, other visions of life itself.”
― Wade Davis

“In the West we cling to the past like limpets. In Haiti the present is the axis of all life. As in Africa, past and future are but distant measures of the present, and memories are as meaningless as promises.”
― Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic

“The full measure of a culture embraces both the actions of a people and the quality of their aspirations, the nature of the metaphors that propel their lives. And no description of a people can be complete without reference to the character of their homeland, the ecological and geographical matrix in which they have determined to live out their destiny. Just as a landscape defines character, culture springs from a spirit of place.”
― Wade Davis, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

“Sensitivity to nature is not an innate attribute of indigenous peoples. It is a consequence of adaptive choices that have resulted in the development of highly specialized peripheral skills. but those choices in turn spring from a comprehensive view of nature and the universe in which man and woman are perceived as but elements inextricably linked to the whole. ”
― Wade Davis, Shadows in the Sun: Travels to Landscapes of Spirit and Desire

“Only, in Haiti, I realized, is it possible to drink rum and haggle with a god.”
― Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic

“She had a hundred precocious ideas, and some were good and true, but they could never be hers until she found them alone, for ideas are but words unless they are sown in experience.”
― Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow: A Harvard Scientist's Astonishing Journey into the Secret Societies of Haitian Voodoo, Zombis, and Magic

“After several trips across the Andes, the pattern of the flora was gradually coming into focus. This to me was the great revelation of botany. When I knew nothing of plants, I experienced a forest only as a tangle of forms, shapes, and colors without meaning or depth, beautiful when taken as a whole but ultimately incomprehensible and exotic. Now the components of the mosaic had names, the names implied relationships, and the relationships resonated with significance.”
― Wade Davis

“Let him who thinks war is a glorious, golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking honour and praise and valour and love of country … Let him but look at a little pile of sodden grey rags that cover half a skull and a shin-bone and what might have been its ribs, or at this skeleton lying on its side, resting half crouching as it fell, perfect that it is headless, and with the tattered clothing still draped round it; and let him realize how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all youth and joy and life into a fetid heap of hideous putrescence! Who is there who has known and seen who can say that victory is worth the death of even one of these?”
― Wade Davis, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest

“I tend to be a real optimist because I just find that pessimism is an indulgence and despair is kind of an insult to the imagination. And you know my father always said just do what you need to do and then ask whether it was possible or permissible.”
― Wade Davis

“In my humble opinion," (Ghandi) told the court, "non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is co-operation with good.”
― Wade Davis, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest

“I want to lose all harshness of jagged nerves, to be above all gentle. I feel we have achieved victory for that almost more than anything-to be able to cultivate gentleness.
George Malory to his wife Ruth at the end of the Great War”
― Wade Davis, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest

“Death's power lies in fear, which flourishes in the imagination and the unknown.”
― Wade Davis, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest

“during his four-day vision quest, the Indian built a sweat lodge of willow and hides, fasted, cleansed himself with sage and cedar, and endured the heat of the fire until his spirit was released to soar over a field of snakes. His ordeal ended when a vision of his mother appeared and told him to go back home because he had forgotten his pipe.”
― Wade Davis, One River: Explorations and Discoveries in the Amazon Rain Forest

“A simple intuition, a single observation, can open vistas of unimagined potential. Once caught in the web of an idea, the researcher is happily doomed, for the outcome is always uncertain, and the resolution of the mystery may take years to unfold. Such was the case in my encounter with the magic toads of the Americas.”
― Wade Davis, Shadows in the Sun: Travels to Landscapes of Spirit and Desire

“What is even more astonishing is that the entire science of wayfinding is based on dead reckoning. You only know where you are by knowing precisely where you have been and how you got to where you are.”
― Wade Davis, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

“Our economic models are projections and arrows when they should be circles. To define perpetual growth on a finite planet as the sole measure of economic well-being is to engage in a form of slow collective suicide. To deny or exclude from the calculus of governance and economy the costs of violating the biological support systems of life is the logic of delusion.”
― Wade Davis, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World

“They brought their whole intellectual energy to bear on their relationships; they wanted to know not only that they loved people but how and why they loved them, to understand the mechanism of their likings, the springs that prompted thought and emotion; to come to terms with themselves and with one another; to know where they were going and why.”
― Wade Davis, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest

“Social mores, he argued, rules of protocol, concepts of rectitude and honor had no objective basis. They were only reflections of public and private fears.”
― Wade Davis, Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest

“Without doubt, images of comfort and wealth, of technological sophistication, have a magnetic allure. Any job in the city may seem better than back-breaking labour in sun-scorched fields. Entranced by the promise of the new, people throughout the world have in many instances voluntarily and in great earnest turned their backs on the old. The consequences, as we have seen in Kenya, can be profoundly disappointing. The fate of the vast majority of those who sever their ties with their traditions will not be to attain the prosperity of the West, but to join the legions of urban poor, trapped in squalor, struggling to survive. As cultures wither away, individuals remain, often shadows of their former selves, caught in time, unable to return to the past, yet denied any real possibility of securing a place in a world whose values they seek to emulate and whose wealth they long to acquire. This creates a dangerous and explosive situation, which is precisely why the plight of diverse cultures is not a simple matter of nostalgia or even of human rights alone, but a serious issue of geopolitical stability and survival.

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Outside of the major industrial nations, globalization has not brought integration and harmony, but rather a firestorm of change that has swept away languages and cultures, ancient skills and visionary wisdom.”
― Wade Davis, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World