Species Quotes - Page 16

• The changes in the Catholic Church since Vatican II can certainly be scanned in terms of this long retreat from the sacred which has followed the inception of consciousness into the human species.

  Julian Jaynes

  Long, Catholic, Church

  "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind" by Julian Jaynes, (Book III, Chapter 6, p. 439), 1976.

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• There are millions of different species of animals and plants on earth--possibly as many as forty million. But somewhere between five and fifty BILLION species have existed at one time or another. Thus, only about one in a thousand species is still alive--a truly lousy survival record: 99.9 percent failure!

  David M. Raup

  Animal, Survival, Earth

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• In the beginning, there were bacteria.... [A] nearly universal assumption is that all subsequent life descended from the original life form through a continuous chain of ancestor-descendant pairs. This assumption looks good because all living organisms share biochemical traits. It is conceivable, of course, that life originated more than once on the early earth but that all except one life form died out early, leaving a single lineage as the ancestor of life as we know it. If this did happen, it was the first important species extinction.

  David M. Raup

  Leaving, Important, Earth

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• Night after night the nightingale came to beg for divine love, but though the rose trembled at the sound of his voice, her petals remained closed to him...Flower and bird, two species never meant to mate. Yet at length the rose overcame her fear and from that single, forbidden union was born the red rose that Allah never intended the world to know.

  Susan Kay

  Flower, Night, Two

  "Phantom". Book by Susan Kay, 1990.

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• The ruling British elite are like animals--not only in their morality, but in their outlook on knowledge. They are clever animals, who are masters of the wicked nature of their own species, and recognize ferally the distinctions of the hated human species. Nonetheless, obsessively dedicated to being such animals, they can not [sic] assimilate those qualities unique to true human beings.

  Lyndon LaRouche

  Clever, Animal, Unique

  Lyndon LaRouche (2016). “The Secrets Known Only To The Inner Elites”, p.169, Executive Intelligence Review

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• We ourselves are part of a guild of species that lie within and without our bodies. Aboriginal peoples and the Ayurvedic practitioners of ancient India have names for such guilds, or beings made up (as we are) of two or more species forming one organism. Most of nature is composed of groups of species working interdependently.

  Bill Mollison

  Lying, Names, Two

  "Permaculture: A Designers' Manual". Book by Bill Mollison, 1988.

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• Too often, the pastoralist blames the weeds and seeks a chemical rather than a management solution; too seldom do we find an approach combining the sensible utilisation of grasshoppers and grubs as a valuable dried-protein supplement for fish or food pellets, and a combination of soil conditioning, slashing, and de-stocking or re-seeding to restore species balance.

  Bill Mollison

  Weed, Past, Balance

  "Permaculture: A Designers' Manual". Book by Bill Mollison, 1988.

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• By exploring other worlds we safeguard this one. By itself, I think this fact more than justifies the money our species has spent in sending ships to other worlds. It is our fate to live during one of the most perilous and, at the same time, one of the most hopeful chapters in human history.

  Carl Sagan

  Fate, Thinking, Other Worlds

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

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• Are the different species defined by paleontologists - Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis and ourselves, Homo sapiens - all part of the same gene pool or not?

  Bryan Sykes

  Different, Pool, Genes

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• The Ocean Health Index is like the thermometer of the ocean. It will allow us to take the temperature to know what is going on at the global level, trying to integrate different impacts, including overfishing, invasive species, coastal development, and climate change.

  Enric Sala

  Ocean, Impact, Trying

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• The effect of the corporation, under the prevailing policy of the free, go-as-you-please method of organization and management, has been to drive the bulk of our people, other than farmers, out of property ownership; and, if allowed to go on as present, it will keep them out... The paramount problem is not how to stop the growth of property, and the building up of wealth, but how to manage it so that every species of property, like a healthy growing tree will spread its roots deeply and widely in the soil of a popular proprietorship.

  Peter S. Grosscup

  Building Up, Organization, Roots

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• It is astonishing to realise that the human species survived hundreds of thousands of years, more than 99 percent of its time on this planet, with a life expectancy of only eighteen years.

  Leonard Hayflick

  Years, Evolution, Planets

  Leonard Hayflick (1994). “How and why we age”

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• The usual sniggering examples of animal behaviour were brought in to explain cheating. Funny how the behaviour of shrews and gibbons is never used to explain table manners or road safety or gardening, only sex. Anyway, it was bad Darwinism. Taking the example of a monkey and applying it to yourself misses the point that animal behaviour is made for the benefit of the species, not as an excuse for the individual. Being incapable of sustaining a stable pair and supporting children is really not in the interests of our species. Neither is it really in the best interests of the philanderer.

  A. A. Gill

  Cheating, Sex, Children

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• It is almost impossible to convince people who are under the influence of ideological bigotry that whose whom they regard as belonging to the enemy species are human.

  Louis J. Halle

  People, Enemy, Atheism

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• Yes, the natural sciences are telling us a great deal about human origins, the origins of our species the origins of our minds; we're on our way to explaining a large part of it. I'll accept an answer provided only by such means as obtaining and exploring, analyzing and arguing over the evidence - not because of a scribe's myopic view of the subject written 500 years before the birth of Christ!

  E. O. Wilson

  Mean, Views, Years

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• The rushed existence into which industrialized, commercialized man has precipitated himself is actually a good example of an inexpedient development caused entirely by competition between members of the same species. Human beings of today are attacked by so-called manager diseases, high blood pressure, renal atrophy, gastric ulcers, and torturing neuroses: they succumb to barbarism because they have no more time for cultural interests.

  Konrad Lorenz

  Business, Men, Blood

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• For more than a century, people have often thought that the conclusion to draw from Darwin's vision is that Homo sapiens, our species - and we're just animals too, we're just mammals - that there is nothing morally special about us. I myself don't think this follows at all from Darwin's vision, but it is certainly the received view in many quarters.

  Daniel Dennett

  Animal, Thinking, Views

  "Big Thinkers on Evolution". NOVA Interview, www.pbs.org. October 6, 2009.

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• I think that what one can see from a Darwinian account is how the addition of culture in our species turns us into a very special sort of animal, an animal that can be a moral agent in a way that no other animal can be.

  Daniel Dennett

  Thinking, Animal, Special

  "Big Thinkers on Evolution". NOVA Interview, www.pbs.org. October 6, 2009.

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• The war between authors and publishers has been a conflict of ages. On the one side, the publisher has been looked upon as a species of Wantley dragon, whose daily food was the brain and blood of hapless writers. ... On the other side, the author has been considered, like Shelley, 'an eternal child,' in all that relates to practical matters, and a terrible child at that, - incapable of comprehending details, and unreasoanably dissatisfied with results.

  Mary Abigail Dodge

  Children, War, Dragons

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• I believe that art is the highest expression of the human spirit. I believe that we yearn to transcend the merely finite and ephemeral; to participate in something mysterious and communal called 'culture' - and that this yearning is as strong in our species as the yearning to reproduce the species.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  Strong, Art, Believe

  Joyce Carol Oates (2009). “The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art”, p.1, Zondervan

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• There is a brotherliness about a drinking person, which is coldly lacking in the straight and narrow enemies of drink; the difference between the two is more marked than nationality or belief: it is an opposite species altogether. It is against the unwritten laws of congeniality for them to mix. For me, a man who does not drink is distinctly indecent.

  Caitlin Thomas

  Drinking, Men, Law

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• I believe the deeply rooted semantic confusion between 'man' as a male and 'man' as a species has been fed back into and vitiated a great deal of the speculation that goes on about the origins, development, and nature of the human race.

  Elaine Morgan

  Believe, Men, Race

  Elaine Morgan (1973). “The descent of woman”

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• deception and 'con games' are a way of life in all species and throughout nature. Organisms that do not improve their ability to deceive - and to detect deception - are less apt to survive.

  Harriet Lerner

  Games, Deception, Way

  Harriet Lerner (2009). “The Dance of Deception: Pretending and Truth-Telling in Women's”, p.19, Harper Collins

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• We're smart enough to know we need to live in groups to survive, but we're still animals and we needs lots of room. In the case of the male of the species we also probably need that-guy-over-there's space. And his wife and cow, too.

  Julia Phillips

  Smart, Men, Animal

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• I don't think we have learnt to keep within the limits. They are quite elastic but there is a point beyond which they will break and then you will get a complete and massive change in the climate in which the survival of human species might not be compatible.

  Michael Meacher

  Thinking, Survival, Climate

  "Michael Meacher MP: humans only have 200-300 years left on earth". Interview with Tom Levitt, www.theecologist.org. July 22, 2010.

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