Human Capacity Quotes - Page 2

• Over the last few millennia we've invented a series of technologies - from the alphabet to the scroll to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone - that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity.

  Joshua Foer

  Photography, Memories, Technology

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• Thought ... is still possible, and no doubt actual, wherever men live under the conditions of political freedom. Unfortunately ... no other human capacity is so vulnerable, and it is in fact far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.

  Hannah Arendt

  Thinking, Men, Political

  The Human Condition ch. 45 (1958)

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• A good motivation is what is needed: compassion without dogmatism, without complicated philosophy; just understanding that others are human brothers and sisters and respecting their human rights and dignities. That we humans can help each other is one of our unique human capacities.

  Dalai Lama

  Inspirational, Brother, Motivation

  His Holiness The Dalai Lama (2013). “Kindness, Clarity, and Insight”, p.21, Shambhala Publications

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• No longer associated simply with objects and appearances, design is increasingly understood in a much wider sense as the human capacity to plan and produce desired outcomes.

  Bruce Mau

  Design, Outcomes, Appearance

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• What distinguished man from animals was the human capacity for symbolic thought, the capacity which was inseparable from the development of language in which words were not mere signals, but signifiers of something other than themselves. Yet the first symbols were animals. What distinguished men from animals was born of their relationship with them.

  John Berger

  Animal, Men, Firsts

  John Berger (2015). “About Looking”, p.8, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• Never underestimate the human capacity for delusion.

  Roger Cohen

  Underestimate, Human Nature, Capacity

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• There is an ideal of excellence for any particular craft or occupation; similarly there must be an excellent that we can achieve as human beings. That is, we can live our lives as a whole in such a way that they can be judged not just as excellent in this respect or in that occupation, but as excellent, period. Only when we develop our truly human capacities sufficiently to achieve this human excellent will we have lives blessed with happiness.

  Aristotle

  Blessed, Excellence, Crafts

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• The human capacity for compassion is not a reflex that is triggered automatically by the presence of another living thing.

  Steven Pinker

  Compassion, Capacity, Reflexes

  Steven Pinker (2011). “The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined”, p.203, Penguin

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• If everything that is happening in the world is traceable to our inability to understand what is happening in the world.  If there is such a thing as original sin, it's the human capacity to get everything wrong, right from the beginning and all the way up to now, and that's what the old storytellers have been telling us, including the Creek Indians who told this story along with every other tribe on earth.

  Gerald Hausman

  World, Earth, Way

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• The connectedness of things is what the educator contemplates to the limit of his capacity. No human capacity is great enough to permit a vision of the world as simple, but if the educator does not aim at the vision no one else will, and the consequences are dire when no one does.

  Mark Van Doren

  Teaching, Simple, Vision

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• Bad restaurants find unique ways to be bad. Good ones are good in the same way: good food, nice staff, a pleasant room. The human capacity for finding unique ways to screw things up always amazes me.

  Jay Rayner

  Nice, Unique, Way

  Askmen Interview, uk.askmen.com.

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• I'm defending fiction as a human capacity more than as a popular or dying literary genre.

  Ben Lerner

  Literary Genre, Dying, Fiction

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• Our growing addiction to the Internet is impairing precious human capacities such as memory, concentration, pattern recognition, meaning-making, and intimacy. We are becoming more restless, more impatient, more demanding, and more insatiable, even as we become more connected and creative. We are rapidly losing the ability to think long about any- thing, even those issues we care about. We flit, moving restlessly from one link to another.

  Margaret J. Wheatley

  Memories, Moving, Thinking

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• The human capacity for grief. It just isn't capable of providing an adequate emotional response once the dead exceed a few dozen in number. And it doesn't just level off - it just gives up, resets itself to zero.

  Alastair Reynolds

  Zero, Giving Up, Grief

  Alastair Reynolds (2002). “Revelation Space”, p.278, Penguin

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• Confidence in the human capacity for problem solving, for invention, for innovation.

  George Takei

  Innovation, Problem, Invention

  Source: progressive.org

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• If we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the folly of others. It is not that certain human capacities, intellectual capacities for instance, become stunted of destroyed, but rather that the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that men are deprived of their independent judgment, and...give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves.

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer

  Religious, Giving Up, Independent

  Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2011). “Letters Papers from Prison”, p.10, Simon and Schuster

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• Never underestimate the human capacity for wishful thinking and willful blindness,' said Miles. Such as a whole society of people who became so wrapped up in avoiding death, they forgot to be alive?

  Lois McMaster Bujold

  Thinking, Avoiding Death, People

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• We are sitting on a cornucopia of knowing that we had no way to access as a democracy. We couldn't get the democratization of the human capacity before our time.

  Jean Houston

  Knowing, Intelligence, Democracy

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• He should avail himself of their resources in such ways as to advance the expression of the spirit in the life of mankind. He should use them so as to afford to every human being the greatest possible opportunity for developing and expressing his distinctively human capacity as an instrument of the spirit, as a centre of sensitive and intelligent awareness of the objective universe, as a centre of love of all lovely things, and of creative action for the spirit.

  Olaf Stapledon

  Inspirational, Life, Intelligent

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• The High Divide, a novel about a family in peril, is haunting and tense but leavened by considerable warmth and humanity. Lin Enger writes with durable grace about a man’s quest for redemption and the human capacity for forgiveness.

  Benjamin Percy

  Writing, Men, Grace

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• Human social life, I suggest, is the magma that erupts and builds up, so to speak, at the fault lines where natural human capacities meet and grind against and over natural human limitations…. This meeting of powers and limitations produces a creative, dynamic tension and energy that generates and fuels the making of human social life and social structures…. It is real human persons living through the tensions of natural existential contradictions who construct patterned social meanings, interactions, institutions, and structures.

  Christian Smith

  Real, Creative, Fuel

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• There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-

  Abraham Verghese

  Grief, Results, Capacity

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• I suspect there could be life and intelligence out there in forms that we can't conceive. And there could, of course, be forms of intelligence beyond human capacity-beyond as much as we are beyond a chimpanzee.

  Martin Rees

  Life, Science, Intelligent

  "Aliens can't hear us, says astronomer" by Robin McKie, www.theguardian.com. January 27, 2010.

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• Art is the way to the absolute and to the essence of human life. The aim of art is not the one-sided promotion of spirit, soul and senses, but the opening of all human capacities – thought, feeling, will – to the life rhythm of the world of nature. So will the voiceless voice be heard and the self be brought into harmony with it.

  Bruce Lee

  Art, Philosophical, Self

  Bruce Lee (1975). “Tao of Jeet Kune Do”, Black Belt Communications Incorporated

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• Throughout all the years and in everything we do, we have focused most of all on the development of human capacity, beginning with our own professional staff, and leveraging their expertise to enrich the Arab community. We have embraced the concept of the 'knowledge worker' and have sought to empower our people and the Arab world's people to dream, to imagine, and to create.

  Talal Abu-Ghazaleh

  Dream, Knowledge, Power

  National Seminar on Industrial Property and Technology Transfer in Arab States, Amman, Jordan, June 18, 2007.

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