Human Species Quotes

• Every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.

  Charles Dickens

  Baby, Fortune Cookie, World

  Nicholas Nickleby Ch. 36

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• In the human species at all events there is a great diversity of pleasures. The same things delight some men and annoy others, and things painful and disgusting to some are pleasant and attractive to others.

  Aristotle

  Men, Diversity, Events

  Aristotle (1934). “The Nicomachean ethics”

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• Aggressiveness is not the main trouble with the human species, but rather an excess capacity for fanatical devotion.

  Arthur Koestler

  Excess, Trouble, Devotion

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• One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That's how the human species has done as well as it has.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Children, Knowing, Expectations

  "British writer Christopher Hitchens dies". "PM", www.abc.net.au. December 16, 2011.

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• A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.

  Carl Sagan

  Lonely, War, Ocean

  "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage". Documentary (1990 Update). Episode 13: "Who Speaks for Earth?", 1990.

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• Science, already oppressive with its shocking revelations, will perhaps be the ultimate exterminator of our human species - if separate species we be - for its reserve of unguessed horrors could never be borne by mortal brains if loossed upon the world.

  H. P. Lovecraft

  Brain, World, Horror

  H. P. Lovecraft (2016). “H. P. LOVECRAFT äóñ The Ultimate Horror Collection: 60 Occult & Supernatural Mysteries in One Volume: The Greatest Spine-Chilling and Blood-Curdling Stories of Terror & Macabre: The Call of Cthulhu, The White Ship, The Dunwich Horror, At The Mountains Of Madness, The Whisperer in Darknessäó_”, p.123, e-artnow

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• Whereas modern cynicism brought despair about the ability of the human species to realize laudable ideals, postmodern cynicism doesn't — not because it's optimistic, but because it can't take ideals seriously in the first place. The prevailing attitude is Absurdism. A postmodern magazine may be irreverent, but not bitterly irreverent, for it's not purposefully irreverent; its aim is indiscriminate, because everyone is equally ridiculous. And anyway, there's no moral basis for passing judgment. Just sit back and enjoy the show.

  Robert Wright

  Attitude, Optimistic, Despair

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• It is love; love, the comfort of the human species, the preserver of the universe, the soul of all sentient beings, love, tender love.

  Voltaire

  Soul, Comfort, Candide

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• It is not man who is the enemy of the human species. It is the irrational; it is the spiritual when it is divorced from the material; from the lesson in one beating heart or one bleeding vein.

  Anne Rice

  Spiritual, Heart, Men

  Anne Rice (2013). “The Complete Vampire Chronicles 12-Book Bundle”, p.1933, Ballantine Books

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• In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

  David Mitchell

  Soul, Selfishness, Extinction

  "Cloud Atlas". "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing", p. 528. Book by David Mitchell, 2004.

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• The fateful question for the human species seems to me to be whether and to what extent their cultural development will succeed in mastering the disturbance of their communal life by the human instinct of aggression and self-destruction ... One thing only do I know for certain and that is that man's judgements of value follow directly from his wihes for happiness-that, accordingly, they are an attempt to support his illusions with arguments.

  Sigmund Freud

  Men, Self, Support

  Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, Anna Freud, Carrie Lee Rothgeb (1961). “The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud”

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• The art of procreation and the members employed therein are so repulsive, that if it were not for the beauty of the faces and the adornments of the actors and the pent-up impulse, nature would lose the human species.

  Leonardo da Vinci

  Art, Sex, Actors

  Dell' Anatomia Fogli B (transl. Edward MacCurdy in The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci Vol. 1, Ch. III)

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• Crime is a fact of the human species, a fact of that species alone, but it is above all the secret aspect, impenetrable and hidden. Crime hides, and by far the most terrifying things are those which elude us.

  Georges Bataille

  Elude Us, Scary, Secret

  Georges Bataille (1991). “The Trial of Gilles de Rais”, Amok Books

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• Why fight the 'natural' (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this--one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

  David Mitchell

  Fighting, Order, Soul

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• It is a pleasant thing to reflect upon, and furnishes a complete answer to those who contend for the gradual degeneration of the human species, that every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.

  Charles Dickens

  Baby, Answers, World

  Charles Dickens (1839). “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby”, p.347

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• Nature is indifferent to the survival of the human species, including Americans.

  Adlai E. Stevenson

  Nature, Survival, Indifferent

  Radio address, September 29, 1952.

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• Looking around, I thought the human species was in fine shape and tried to think of something more beautiful than women and couldn't come up with a thing. The propagation of the species was a dance of total joy.

  Pat Conroy

  Beautiful, Thinking, Joy

  Pat Conroy (1995). “Beach Music”, Nan A. Talese

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• We say Fine, even though we may be dying, and this is commonly known as taking one's courage in both hands, a phenomenon that has only been observed in the human species.

  Jose Saramago

  Hands, Dying, May

  "Blindness". Book by Jose Saramago, October 1997.

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• The irresistible proliferation of graphomania shows me that everyone without exception bears a potential writer within him, so that the entire human species has good reason to go down into the streets and shout: we are all writers! for everyone is pained by the thought of disappearing, unheard and unseen, into an indifferent universe, and because of that everyone wants, while there is still time, to turn himself into a universe of words. one morning (and it will be soon), when everyone wakes up as a writer, the age of universal deafness and incomprehension will have arrived.

  Milan Kundera

  Morning, Age, Unseen

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• The human species was given dominion over the earth and took the opportunity to exterminate other species and warm the atmosphere and generally ruin things in its own image, but it paid this price for its privileges: that the finite and specific animal body of this species contained a brain capable of conceiving the infinite and wishing to be infinite itself.

  Jonathan Franzen

  Animal, Opportunity, Atmosphere

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• I think it's a shame that something as creative and vital to the nature of the human species as story-telling is largely controlled by the soulless cretins known as publishers.

  Piers Anthony

  Thinking, Creative, Stories

  Piers Anthony (2001). “How Precious Was That While”, p.87, Macmillan

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• I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen.

  Timothy Leary

  Race, Laughing, Mutants

  "Shout!: The True Story of the Beatles". Book by Philip Norman, p. 365, 1981.

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• It is for this reason that rationality is of supreme importance to the well-being of the human species...even more, in those less fortunate times in which it is despised and rejected as the vain dream of men who lack the virility to kill where they cannot agree.

  Bertrand Russell

  Dream, Men, Reason

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• The Human Species could have been great but instead we became satisfied with lights on our tennis shoes.

  George Carlin

  Light, Shoes, Tennis

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• My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Earth Day, World, Ruins

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