Species Quotes - Page 28

• He who is unconscious of the ties which connect him with every individual of his species feels no obligation to make sacrifices for their welfare or happiness.

  Benjamin Robbins Curtis

  Sacrifice, Ties, Welfare

  Benjamin Robbins Curtis, George Ticknor Curtis (1879). “A Memoir of Benjamin Robbins Curtis, LL. D.: Professional and miscellaneous writings”, Boston : Little, Brown,

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• The Human is the most insane species

  Hubert Reeves

  Insane, Humans

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• I feel overawed by quantity where counting no longer makes sense. By unrepeatability within such a quantity. By creatures of nature gathered in herds, droves, species, in which each individual, while subservient to the mass, retains some distinguishing features. A crowd of people, birds, insects, or leaves is a mysterious assemblage of variants of certain prototype. A riddle of nature's abhorrence of exact repetition or inability to produce it. Just as the human hand cannot repeat its own gesture, I invoke this disturbing law, switching my own immobile herds into that rhythm.

  Magdalena Abakanowicz

  Hands, Law, People

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• Biodiversity can't be maintained by protecting a few species in a zoo, or by preserving greenbelts or national parks. To function properly, nature needs more room than that. It can maintain itself, however, without human expense, without zookeepers, park rangers, foresters or gene banks. All it needs is to be left alone.

  Donella Meadows

  Zoos, Needs, National Parks

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• We live in a world bathed in 5,000 times more energy than we consume as a species in the year, in the form of solar energy.

  Peter Diamandis

  Years, Energy, World

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• Something bad happened on both Mars with its dried-up watercourses and Venus with its runaway greenhouse effect. Could something bad happen on Earth too? Our species currently turns row upon row of environmental knobs, without much regard to long-term consequences.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Long, Environmental, Mars

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• For all we know, the aliens have already done this and unwittingly concluded that there was no intelligent life on Earth. They would now be looking elsewhere. A more humbling possibility would be if aliens had become aware of the technologically proficient species that now inhabits Earth, yet they had drawn the same conclusion.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Intelligent, Would Be, Done

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• The reason we form networks is because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. It's to our advantage as individuals and a species to assemble ourselves in this fashion.

  Nicholas A. Christakis

  Fashion, Cost, Benefits

  "TED 2010 | Nicholas Christakis: Does This Social Network Make Me Look Fat?". Interview with Kim Zetter, www.wired.com. February 12, 2010.

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• There are a lot of obstacles in the way of our understanding animal intelligence - not the least being that we can't even agree whether nonhuman species are conscious. We accept that chimps and dolphins experience awareness; we like to think dogs and cats do. But what about mice and newts? What about a fly? Is anything going on there at all?

  Jeffrey Kluger

  Inspirational, Motivational, Dog

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• The urgency to mate persists in all people as in all other mammals because of the evolutionary drive to continue the species, the inborn imperative for genes to reproduce and hormonal differences that evolved over millions of years.

  Lynn Margulis

  Years, Differences, People

  "A Woman's Worth: 1857 Letter Echoes Still; Some Basic Disputes Over Feminism Persist" by Patricia Cohen, www.nytimes.com. July 18, 1998.

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• The fewer species there are and the fewer species we know about, the fewer questions we even know to ask.

  Lynn Margulis

  Fewer, Knows, Asks

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• The world has been close to war before - but now man, who has survived all previous threats to his existence, has taken into his mortal hands the power to exterminate the entire species some seven times over.

  John F. Kennedy

  War, Taken, Men

  Address of Senator John F. Kennedy accepting the Democratic Party Nomination for the Presidency of the United States at Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, California, www.jfklibrary.org. July 15, 1960.

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• Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but at last it was complete.

  Charles Darwin

  Atheism, Lasts, Rate

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• The humanity and the humility, which are very different than the biological species homo sapiens. Humanity versus homo sapiens - very different things. We are biological creatures, we are animals, no doubt, but when you talk about "humando," you're talking about that particular kind of animals who are aware of their impending extinction, who have the capacity to be sensitive to catastrophe and disaster and calamity and profound crisis.

  Cornel West

  Humility, Animal, Talking

  Source: blogs.ssrc.org

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• The purpose of adolescence is to revise the past, not to obliterate it. . . . Adolescence entails the deployment of family passions to the passions and ideals that bind individuals to new family units, to their communities, to the species, to nature, to the cosmos. Therefore, given half a chance, the revolution at issue in adolescence becomes a revolution of transformation, not of annihilation.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Passion, Past, Issues

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• My father so appropriately put it that we are certainly the only animal that makes conscious choices that are bad for our survival as a species.

  Louise Leakey

  Father, Animal, Choices

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• At last gleams of light have come, and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable. Heaven forfend me from Lamarck nonsense of a 'tendency to progression', 'adaptations from the slow willing of animals', &c! But the conclusions I am led to are not widely different from his; though the means of change are wholly so. I think I have found out (here's presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.

  Charles Darwin

  Mean, Simple, Thinking

  Charles Darwin (1896). “Charles Darwin's Works: The life and letters of Charles Darwin... ed. by his son, Francis Darwin. 2v”

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• Once women invented farming, and began to keep and breed animals, they discovered the crucial function of the rooster and the henhouse. Fathers suddenly gained a function, and could do what only women had been able to do for all those millions of years--point at a child and say, "That is my son," "That is my daughter." Patriarchy quickly followed, beginning about five thousand years ago; a very short time in the development of our species, but covering all of recorded history.

  Frank Pittman

  Daughter, Children, Father

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• Can it then be doubted, but that God, who is infinitely fine Spirit, and withal intelligent, can make and change all species and kind of body as he pleaseth? But I dare not say, that this is the way by which God Almighty worketh, because it is past my apprehension: yet it serves very well to demonstrate, that the omnipotence of God implieth no contradiction.

  Thomas Hobbes

  God, Intelligent, Past

  Thomas Hobbes (2010). “Leviathan, Parts I and II - Revised Edition”, p.392, Broadview Press

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• I think an erotics of place may be one of the reasons why environmentalists are seen as subversive. There is a backlash now:... [ellipsis in source] take all the regulations away; weaken existing legislation; the endangered species act is too severe, too restrictive; let there be carte blanche for real-estate developers. Because if we really have to confront wildness, solitude, and serenity, both the fierceness and compassionate nature of the land, then we ultimately have to confront it in ourselves, and it's easier to be numb, to be distracted, to be disengaged.

  Terry Tempest Williams

  Nature, Real, Thinking

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• Parasites are not only incredibly diverse; they are also incredibly successful. There are parasitic stretches of DNA in your own genes, some of which are called retrotransposons. Many of the parasitic stretches were originally viruses that entered our DNA. Most of them don't do us any harm. They just copy and insert themselves in other parts of our DNA, basically replicating themselves. Sometimes they hop into other species and replicate themselves in a new host. According to one estimate, roughly one-third to one-half of all human DNA is basically parasitic.

  Carl Zimmer

  Successful, Dna, Half

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• In one way, traveling has narrowed my mind. What I have discovered is something very ordinary and unexciting, which is that humans are the same everywhere and that the degree of variation between members of our species is very slight. This is of course an encouraging finding; it helps arm you against news programs back home that show seething or abject masses of either fanatical or torpid people. In another way it is a depressing finding; the sorts of things that make people quarrel and make them stupid are the same everywhere.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Depressing, Stupid, Home

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• Not only does every animal live at the expense of some other animal or plant, but the very plants are at war.... The individuals of a species are like the crew of a foundered ship, and none but good swimmers have a chance of reaching the land.

  Thomas Huxley

  War, Animal, Land

  Thomas Henry Huxley (2011). “Collected Essays”, p.18, Cambridge University Press

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• Man is taking over the forests and polluting the oceans, the animal species are threatened. I try to contribute as much as I can. We're really messing up our environment. I try to get people more aware of what's going on so that they can, even in a local way, try to prevent pollution to their lakes and rivers and prevent nuclear dumping in the oceans - it's bad enough that they're doing it in residential areas, but putting it in the ocean! Eventually it's going to pollute our food resources and, if the ocean dies, we're gone.

  Olivia Newton-John

  Ocean, Men, Animal

  Interview with George Christy, www.interviewmagazine.com. August 10, 2011.

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• (Gray) Davis said yesterday that he is going to fight like a Bengal tiger, which I believe is also an endangered species.

  Jay Leno

  Believe, Fighting, Yesterday

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