John Clark > John's Quotes

“My mitochondria comprise a very large proportion of me. I cannot do the calculation, but I suppose there is almost as much of them in sheer dry bulk as there is the rest of me. Looked at in this way, I could be taken for a very large, motile colony of respiring bacteria, operating a complex system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and running, at the moment, a typewriter.”
― Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

“Nature abhors a long silence.”
― Lewis Thomas, The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

“[I]n Africa I was a member of a family—of a sort of family that the people of your culture haven't known for thousands of years. If gorillas were capable of such an expression, they would tell you that their family is like a hand, of which they are the fingers. They are fully aware of being a family but are very little aware of being individuals. Here in the zoo there were other gorillas—but there was no family. Five severed fingers do not make a hand.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“You're captives of a civilizational system that more or less compels you to go on destroying the world in order to live. … You are captives—and you have made a captive of the world itself. That's what's at stake, isn't it?—your captivity and the captivity of the world.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“If you alone found out what the lie was, then you're probably right—it would make no great difference. But if you ALL found out what the lie was, it might conceivably make a very great difference indeed.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“If the world was made for us, then it BELONGS to us and we can do what we damn well please with it.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“[N]ow we have a clearer idea what this story is all about: The world was made for man, and man was made to rule it.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“The mythology of your culture hums in your ears so constantly that no one pays the slightest bit of attention to it. Of course man is conquering space and the atom and the deserts and the oceans and the elements. According to your mythology, this is what he was BORN to do.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“[T]he price you've paid is not the price of becoming human. It's not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. It's the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“There's nothing fundamentally wrong with people. Given a story to enact that puts them in accord with the world, they will live in accord with the world. But given a story to enact that puts them at odds with the world, as yours does, they will live at odds with the world. Given a story to enact in which they are the lords of the world, they will ACT like lords of the world. And, given a story to enact in which the world is a foe to be conquered, they will conquer it like a foe, and one day, inevitably, their foe will lie bleeding to death at their feet, as the world is now.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“This law … defines the limits of competition in the community of life. You may compete to the full extent of your capabilities, but you may not hunt down your competitors or destroy their food or deny them access to food. In other words, you may compete but you may not wage war.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself. A community of a hundred million species can survive anything short of total global catastrophe. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature drop of twenty degrees—which would be a lot more devastating than it sounds. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature rise of twenty degrees. But a community of a hundred species or a thousand species has almost no survival value at all.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“This is considered almost holy work by farmers and ranchers. Kill off everything you can't eat. Kill off anything that eats what you eat. Kill off anything that doesn't feed what you eat."

"It IS holy work, in Taker culture. The more competitors you destroy, the more humans you can bring into the world, and that makes it just about the holiest work there is. Once you exempt yourself from the law of limited competition, everything in the world except your food and the food of your food becomes an enemy to be exterminated.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“[A]ny species that exempts itself from the rules of competition ends up destroying the community in order to support its own expansion.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“This is precisely how someone speaks who imagines that he is the world's divinely appointed ruler: 'I will not LET them starve. I will not LET the drought come. I will not LET the river flood.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“No one species shall make the life of the world its own.' … That's one expression of the law. Here's another: 'The world was not made for any one species.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“[Y]our agricultural revolution is not an event like the Trojan War, isolated in the distant past and without relevance to your lives today. The work begun by those neolithic farmers in the Near East has been carried forward from one generation to the next without a single break, right into the present moment. It's the foundation of your vast civilization today in exactly the same way that it was the foundation of the very first farming village.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“The premise of the Taker story is 'the world belongs to man'. … The premise of the Leaver story is 'man belongs to the world'.”
― Daniel Quinn, Ishmael: An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit

“Resist much, obey little.”
― Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

“The whole organization seemed to be in free fall, indulging in a collective fantasy in which experienced colleagues refused to admit that their every movement, every decision that was made and implemented, only led them one step closer to the abyss.”
― Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

“This is so much money that it scares the shit out of me. I don't know how to handle it. I don't know the purpose of the company besides making more money. What's all the money going to be used for?”
― Stieg Larsson, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest

“Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production. That package comprised three cereals, as the main carbohydrate sources; four pulses, with 20—25 percent protein, and four domestic animals, as the main protein sources, supplemented by the generous protein content of wheat; and flax as a source of fiber and oil (termed linseed oil: flax seeds are about 40 percent oil). Eventually, thousands of years after the beginnings of animal domestication and food production, the animals also began to be used for milk, wool, plowing, and transport. Thus, the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent's first farmers came to meet humanity's basic economic needs: carbohydrate, protein, fat, clothing, traction, and transport.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“Not until the beginning of the 20th century did Europe's urban populations finally become self-sustaining: before then, constant immigration of healthy peasants from the countryside was necessary to make up for the constant deaths of city dwellers from crowd diseases.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“In short, Europe’s colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography—in particular, to the continents’ different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“Twelve thousand years ago, everybody on earth was a hunter-gatherer; now almost all of us are farmers or else are fed by farmers. The spread of farming from those few sites of origin usually did not occur as a result of the hunter-gatherers' elsewhere adopting farming; hunter-gatherers tend to be conservative.... Instead, farming spread mainly through farmers' outbreeding hunters, developing more potent technology, and then killing the hunters or driving them off of all lands suitable for agriculture.”
― Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies

“It had flaws, but what does that matter when it comes to matters of the heart? We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That's as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“I decided to dub the room with the good chairs my lutery. Or perhaps my performatory. I would need a while to come up with something suitably pretentious.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“Books are a poor substitute for female companionship, but they are easier to find.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear

“Barbarian that I am, I had eaten all of it. It had tasted quite nice too. Still, I took note of this fact and resigned myself to throw away half of a perfectly good cheese if it was set in front of me. Such is the price of civilization.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man's Fear