Ishmael Quotes

Kush Garg

Matthew Soucy

H-English/AP-World History

September 26, 2015

Ishmael: Change is Impossible

After reading the book Ishmael, my mind has been expanding on the main topic of the book which is why we can’t change society because whenever we try to advance change just adds onto the destruction we are causing to our world. While I was reading this book, I began to learn more about how we are destroying our world even more. When humans lived in a simple manner, believing that they lived in the “hands of the gods,” evolution was destined to happen because humans had to adapt to their environment. This evolution sparked the problems that would come later in history, like deforestation, social inequality and pollution.

What is leading to us destroying the world is our human nature. We humans have greed running through our blood. “We’ve poured our poisons into the world as if it were a bottomless pit-and we go on pouring our poisons into the world. We’ve gobbled up irreplaceable resources as though they could never run out-and we go on gobbling them up.” (Quinn 80) This quote is a representation of what greed is doing to the world, it is making us consume our resources very quickly to fulfil our selfish needs. We always want more because we are never satisfied with what we have. Ishmael says,

In the book, Quinn makes a reference to aerodynamics and how the scientists made machines they thought could fly and jumped off a cliff thinking they were flying but were really crashing to their doom. Ishmael “The harder and more efficient they pedal, the worse the conditions become.” (Quinn, 109) He relates this idea to the inventions that are supposedly ‘helping’ society but in reality they are causing more problems for us. Even though some of these technologies have helped us solve problems, it has equally developed more problems by removing the environment from its natural