Daniel Quinn Quote

No number has ever done it for us. Not a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand. Even millions don't do it, and so every single year we pay our legislators to come up with more. But no matter how many prohibitions we come up with, they never do the trick, because no prohibited behavior has ever been eliminated by passing a law against it. Every time someone is sent to prison or executed, this is said to be sending a message to miscreants, but for some strange reason the message never arrives, year after year, generation after generation, century after century. Naturally, we consider this to be a very advanced system.

Daniel Quinn

No number has ever done it for us. Not a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand. Even millions don't do it, and so every single year we pay our legislators to come up with more. But no matter how many prohibitions we come up with, they never do the trick, because no prohibited behavior has ever been eliminated by passing a law against it. Every time someone is sent to prison or executed, this is said to be sending a message to miscreants, but for some strange reason the message never arrives, year after year, generation after generation, century after century. Naturally, we consider this to be a very advanced system.

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About Daniel Quinn

Daniel Clarence Quinn (October 11, 1935 – February 17, 2018) was an American author (primarily, novelist and fabulist), cultural critic, and publisher of educational texts, best known for his novel Ishmael, which won the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship Award in 1991 and was published the following year. Quinn's ideas are popularly associated with environmentalism, though he criticized this term for portraying the environment as separate from human life, thus creating a false dichotomy. Instead, Quinn referred to his philosophy as "new tribalism".