Human Species Quotes - Page 3

• 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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• 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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• 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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• The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend.

  Charles Lamb

  Men, Race, Two

  'Essays of Elia' (1823) 'The Two Races of Men'

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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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• 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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• 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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• They sensed that what had happened around them and in their presence, and in them, was irrevocable. Never again could it be cleansed; it would prove that man, the human species - we, in short - had the potential to construct an enormity of pain, and that pain is the only force created from nothing, without cost and without effort. It is enough not to see, not to listen, not to act.

  Primo Levi

  Pain, Men, Effort

  Primo Levi (2017). “The Drowned and the Saved”, p.72, Simon and Schuster

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• With the eventual acceptance of Darwin's theory we reach a modern understanding of nature, one which has since then changed in detail rather than in fundamentals. Only those who prefer religious faith to beliefs based on reasoning and evidence can still maintain that the human species is the special darling of the entire universe, or that other animals were created to provide us with food, or that we have divine authority over them, and divine permission to kill them.

  Peter Singer

  Religious, Acceptance, Animal

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• We the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency-a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential...the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising...Indeed, without realizing it, we have begun to wage war on earth itself.

  Al Gore

  War, Civilization, Survival

  Al Gore's Nobel Lecture in Oslo, Norway, www.nobelprize.org. December 10, 2007.

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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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• 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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• 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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• I am principled against this kind of traffic in the human species . . . and to disperse the families I have an aversion.

  George Washington

  Slavery, Aversion, Kind

  Jay A. Parry, Andrew M. Allison, George Washington (1991). “The real George Washington”, Natl Center for Constitutional

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• I am provoked at the contempt which most historians show for humanity in general; one would think by them, that the whole human species consisted but of about a hundred and fifty people, called and dignified (commonly very undeservedly too) by the titles of Emperors, Kings, Popes, Generals, and Ministers.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Kings, Thinking, People

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• The existing order is breaking down at a very rapid rate, and the main uncertainty is whether mankind can exert a positive role in shaping a new world order or is doomed to await collapse in a passive posture. We believe a new orderwill be born no later than early in the next century and that the death throes of the old and the birth pangs of the new will be a testing time for the human species.

  Richard A. Falk

  Believe, Order, Nwo

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• I'm very pessimistic about the future of the human species. We have been so indifferent to life on the whole that it will take its toll. It's not just the polar bears that are having a hard time; what we're doing is gradually impoverishing and poisoning the whole of the rest of life.

  W. S. Merwin

  Hard Times, Rest Of Life, Tolls

  "An Interview with W. S. Merwin, Poet Laureate". Interview with Ed Rampell, www.sharedhost.progressive.org. October 25, 2010.

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• That is certainly the point: when the human species was born, on the African savanna, life was pretty good; we could live in harmony with the rest of nature, and that's what I've been calling Eden. The only technologies that humans devised for some 2 million years were fire and the hand ax. That's all. Eden didn't need anything more

  Kirkpatrick Sale

  Technology, Fire, Hands

  Source: www.counterpunch.org

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• Ayahuasca is a symbiotic ally of the human species.

  Dennis McKenna

  Ayahuasca, Allies, Humans

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• The Earth itself is stepping in to aid in the agenda of cultural transformation. There are too many doorways in nature that lead to heaven, there are too many paths to the mystery for any institution or social policy to be able to thwart the intent of the human species to evolve.

  Terence McKenna

  Heaven, Agendas, Earth

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• Now, through the catalytic interaction with technology, the human species is getting set to redefine itself.

  Terence McKenna

  Technology, Interaction, Humans

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• As kings are begotten and born like other men, it is to be presumed that they are of the human species; and perhaps, had they thesame education, they might prove like other men. But, flattered from their cradles, their hearts are corrupted, and their heads are turned, so that they seem to be a species by themselves.... Flattery cannot be too strong for them; drunk with it from their infancy, like old drinkers, they require dreams.

  Lord Chesterfield

  Dream, Strong, Kings

  Lord Philip Dormer Stanhope Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope Earl of Chesterfield (1855). “The Works of Lord Chesterfield: Including His Letters to His Son, Etc : to which is Prefixed, an Original Life of the Author”, p.621

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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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