Species Quotes - Page 7

• I care far more how humanity lives than how long. Progress, for me, means increasing goodness and happiness of individual lives. For the species, as for each man, mere longevity seems to me a contemptible ideal.

  C. S. Lewis

  Happiness, Mean, Men

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• Progress means movement in a desired direction, and we do not all desire the same things for our species.

  C. S. Lewis

  Mean, Independence, Progress

  C. S. Lewis (2014). “God in the Dock”, p.346, Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing

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• The last sort I shall mention are verbal critics - mere word-catchers, fellows that pick out a word in a sentence and a sentence in a volume, and tell you it is wrong. The title of Ultra-Crepidarian critics has been given to a variety of this species.

  William Hazlitt

  Titles, Lasts, Catchers

  William Hazlitt (1822). “Table-talk: Or, Original Essays”, p.143

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• By the time we see that climate change is really bad, your ability to fix it is extremely limited... The carbon gets up there, but the heating effect is delayed. And then the effect of that heat on the species and ecosystem is delayed. That means that even when you turn virtuous, things are actually going to get worse for quite a while.

  Bill Gates

  Mean, Ecosystems, Climate

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• Established species are evolving so slowly that major transitions between genera and higher taxa must be occurring within small rapidly evolving populations that leave NO LEGIBLE FOSSIL RECORD.

  Steven M. Stanley

  Transition, Population, Records

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• As the romance of manned space exploration has waned, the drive today is to find our living, thinking counterparts in the universe. For all the excitement, however, the search betrays a profound melancholy - a lonely species in a merciless universe anxiously awaits an answering voice amid utter silence.

  Charles Krauthammer

  Lonely, Thinking, Space

  "Are We Alone in the Universe?". jewishworldreview.com. December 30, 2011.

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• For the first time in history, the human species as a whole has gone into politics. Everyone is in the act, and there is no telling what may come of it.

  Saul Bellow

  Gone, May, Firsts

  Saul Bellow (2016). “To Jerusalem and Back”, p.33, Odyssey Editions

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• Communism... is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as the solution.

  Karl Marx

  Men, Self, Essence

  Karl Marx, Lawrence H. Simon (1994). “Marx: Selected Writings”, p.71, Hackett Publishing

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• Theologians and philosophers, who make God the creator of Nature and the architect of the Universe, reveal Him to us as an illogical and unbalanced Being. They declare He is benevolent because they are afraid of Him, but they are forced to admit the truth that His ways are vicious and beyond understanding. They attribute a malignity to Him seldom to be found in any human being. And that is how they get human beings to worship Him. For our miserable species would never lavish worship on a just and benevolent God from whom they had nothing to fear.

  Anatole France

  Understanding, Way, Philosopher

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• Aristocracy has a tendency to degenerate the human species.

  Thomas Paine

  Aristocracy, Degenerates, Tendencies

  Thomas Paine (2003). “Common Sense, The Rights of Man and Other Essential Writings of ThomasPaine”, p.196, Penguin

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• Girls and boys respond to stress differently - not just in our species, but in every mammal scientists have studied. Stress enhances learning in males. The same stress impairs learning in females.

  Leonard Sax

  Girl, Stress, Boys

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• Children are a kind of indicator species. If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people.

  Enrique Penalosa

  Children, Successful, Cities

  "Cities debate: teenagers talk London, New York, Johannesburg and Rio" by Carlene Thomas-Bailey, www.theguardian.com. January 29, 2014.

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• Humans need to be a multiplanet species.

  Elon Musk

  Needs, Humans

  "To Mars" by Phil Plait, www.slate.com. April 16, 2015.

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• We are not, however, a species that can choose the baggage with which we must travel. In spite of our best intentions, we always find that we have brought along a suitcase or two of darkness and despair.

  Dean Koontz

  Two, Darkness, Despair

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• The saddest thing in the world was that human beings, for all their ardent striving and desire, could never achieve physical, emotional, or intellectual perfection. The species was doomed to imperfection; it thrashed forever in despair or denial of that fact.

  Dean Koontz

  Emotional, Perfection, Forever

  Dean Koontz (2007). “Dark Rivers of the Heart: A Novel”, p.194, Bantam

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• Every true poet, I thought, must be original and originality a condition of poetic genius; so that each poet is like a species in nature (not an individuum genericum or specificum ) and can never recur. That nothing shd. be old or borrowed however cannot be.

  Gerard Manley Hopkins

  Genius, Originality, Poetic

  Gerard Manley Hopkins (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Illustrated)”, p.251, Delphi Classics

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• Man is perhaps half mind and half matter in the same way as the polyp is half plant and half animal. The strangest creatures are always found on the border lines of species.

  Georg C. Lichtenberg

  Men, Animal, Mind

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• The classical argument for why a supposedly decent and moral creature like Homo sapiens can mistreat and even extirpate other species rests upon an extreme position in a continuum. The Cartesian tradition, formulated explicitly in the seventeenth century, but developed in "folk" and other versions throughout human history no doubt, holds that other animals are little more than unfeeling machines, with only humans enjoying "consciousness," however defined.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Animal, Doubt, Machines

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• Contingency is rich and fascinating; it embodies an exquisite tension between the power of individuals to modify history and the intelligible limits set by laws of nature. The details of individual and species's lives are not mere frills, without power to shape the large-scale course of events, but particulars that can alter entire futures, profoundly and forever.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Law, Forever, Shapes

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “Eight Little Piggies: Reflections in Natural History”, p.77, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Each of the major sciences has contributed an essential ingredient in our long retreat from an initial belief in our own cosmic importance. Astronomy defined our home as a small planet tucked away in one corner of an average galaxy among millions; biology took away our status as paragons created in the image of God; geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Home, Average, Taught Us

  Stephen Jay Gould (1992). “Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History”, p.147, W. W. Norton & Company

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• People use the word "natural" ... What is natural to me is these botanical species which interact directly with the nervous system. What I consider artificial is 4 years at Harvard, and the Bible, and Saint Patrick's cathedral, and the Sunday school teachings.

  Timothy Leary

  Teaching, School, Sunday

  "LSD: Methods of Control". 1966.

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• In times of war, as everyone knows, who has lived through one, or talked to soldiers when they are allowing themselves to remember the truth, and not the sentimentalities with which we all shield ourselves from the horrors of which we are capable ... in times of war we revert, as a species, to the past, and are permitted to be brutal and cruel. It is for this reason, and of course others, that a great many people enjoy war. But this is one of the facts about war that is not often talked about.

  Doris Lessing

  War, Past, People

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• Perhaps it is a fault of the species who thrive in peace, mutual help, aspirations for more of the same -- to forget that outside these borders dwell very different types of mind, feeding on different fuel.

  Doris Lessing

  Mutual Help, Mind, Different

  Doris Lessing (2012). “Shikasta (Canopus in Argos: Archives Series, Book 1)”, p.40, HarperCollins UK

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• Avisitor from Mars contemplating a man in a frock coat and top hat and a woman in a crinoline might well have supposed that they belonged to different species.

  James Laver

  Men, Different, Mars

  1969 The Concise History of Costume and Fashion, ch.8.

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• We are all proprietary toward cities we love. 'Ah, you should have seen her when I loved her!' we say, reciting glories since faded or defiled, trusting her to no one else; that others should know and love her in her present fallen state (for she must fall without our vigilant love) is a species of betrayal.

  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

  Betrayal, Fall, Love Is

  Barbara Grizzuti Harrison (1989). “Italian Days”, p.201, Atlantic Monthly Press

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