Top 100 Quotes About Species
#1. I am convinced that the act of thinking logically cannot possibly be natural to the human mind. If it were, then mathematics would be everybody's easiest course at school and our species would not have taken several millennia to figure out the scientific method.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#2. The rules that govern competition between species are (and must be) very different from the rules that govern competition within species.
Daniel Quinn
#3. The Great Work - the work of ensuring a just, healthy, beautiful, and sustainably life-giving world for future generations of all species.
Thomas Berry
#4. I feel only gratitude. We are doing something as necessary to our well-being as food or air or water. We are steeping ourselves, reassuring ourselves, renewing ourselves, three creatures of two species, finding comfort in the simple exchange of body warmth.
Abigail Thomas
#5. Speaking of palms, your right hand shares just a sixth of its microbial species with your left hand.19
Ed Yong
#6. It is a characteristic conceit of our species to put human face on random cosmic violence.
Carl Sagan
#7. Of the many species that have existed on earth
estimates run as high as fifty billion
more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error.
more than a rounding error.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#8. Christians who like to write might do as a description of the genus. But the actual species shared more precise characteristics, including intellectual vivacity, love of death, conservative politics, memories of war, and a passion for beef, beer, and verbal battle.
Philip Zaleski
#9. Human beings are remarkably resilient. When you think about it, our species has been teetering upon the edge of the existential cliff since Hiroshima. In short, we endure.
Rick Yancey
#10. Man's most human characteristic is not his ability to learn, which he shares with many other species, but his ability to teach and store what others have developed and taught him.
Margaret Mead
#11. If we just wanted positive emotions, our species would have died out a long time ago.
Martin Seligman
#12. We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.
Douglas Adams
#13. I would say that for the sake of human progress, the best thing we could possibly do would be to diminish, to the point of eliminating, religious faiths. But certainly not eliminating the natural yearnings of our species or the asking of these great questions.
E. O. Wilson
#14. That the female of the species was as cruel as, and more implacable than, the male, O had never doubted for a minute.
Pauline Reage
#15. Management of anything as complicated as a woods requires more humility than comes easily to our species, at least in its American incarnation.
Bill McKibben
#16. We've discovered that the earth isn't flat; that we won't fall off its edges, and our experience as a species has changed as a result. Maybe we'll soon find out that the self isn't "flat" either, and that death is as real and yet as deceptive as the horizon; that we don't fall out of life either.
Seth
#17. Never in my life had I been more frustrated. Go figure it wouldn't be with a human but a freaking alien. At least I now knew that the male species were asses no matter what planet they hailed from.
Jennifer L. Armentrout
#18. Love is only a feeling of curiousity more or less intense, grafted upon the inclination placed in us by nature that the species may be preserved.
Giacomo Casanova
#19. The act of assassination - the targeting of visible individuals, is the result of mental inclinations honed for the pre-literate societies in which our species evolved,
Julian Assange
#21. For a long time, science has gone in the direction of sort of putting people in their place. We learned that the sun doesn't revolve around the Earth, the Earth revolves around the sun; we learned that we're just another species, evolved, like all other species, so we're just another animal, really.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#22. Many social practices essential to the welfare of the species involve the control of one person by another, and no one can suppress them who has any concern for human achievements
B.F. Skinner
#23. Humans - far from being a dominant species, were regarded as one of the most unstable and untrustworthy, being at the mercy of what most of the Unity's people regarded as a dangerously prevalent sex drive.
Marion Zimmer Bradley
#24. We are killing off species at the rate of about one per day. It is estimated that humans are driving species to extinction at least a thousand times faster than the otherwise natural rate.
Bill Nye
#25. Of all the varieties of violence of which our sorry species is capable, genocide stands apart, not only as the most heinous but as the hardest to comprehend.
Steven Pinker
#26. By 2010, we as a species were creating more data per day than we did from the beginning of time until 2003. By 2015, 76 exabytes of data will travel across the Internet every year.
Bruce Schneier
#27. Travelling through the breeding places of our species is far from being as interesting to me as it is to inspect the breeding places of the feathery tribes of our country.
John James Audubon
#28. It occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made of this question (the origin of the species) by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it
Charles Darwin
#29. He saw that they were all working together at the first step of the species' break from the home world, and he understood that if the first step were taken successfully, with balance, they could run from star to star all across the night.
Kim Stanley Robinson
#30. Those who have arrived at any very eminent degree of excellence in the practice of an art or profession have commonly been actuated by a species of enthusiasm in their pursuit of it. They have kept one object in view amidst all the vicissitudes of time and torture.
John Knox
#31. Fate succombs many a species. One alone jeopardizes itself.
W. H. Auden
#32. There is nothing biologically unusual about a homosexual act of pseudocopulation. Many species indulge in this, under a variety of circumstances.
Desmond Morris
#33. 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
#34. If God wanted man to become a spacefaring species, he would have given man a moon.
Krafft Arnold Ehricke
#35. Viewing ecology through the lens of individual life histories or the life cycles of species makes it easy to grasp the Hindu conception of life as drama. Every creature and plant has a separate path of sustenance and survival on the way to their final dance with Shiva.
Richard J. Borden
#36. The power of this experience [fatherhood] can never be explained. It is one of those joyful codings that rumbles in the species far below understanding. When it is experienced it makes you one with all men in a way that fills you with warmth and harmony.
Kent Nerburn
#37. Her unusual upbringing had made her worldly enough to understand that every female, no matter her genus and species, had the ability to physically coerce a male into full cooperation.
And yes, she knew just the male to coerce.
Delilah Marvelle
#38. As a species we're pathetic in that way: imperfectly monogamous. If we could only pair-bond for life, like gibbons, or else opt for total guilt-free promiscuity, there'd be no more sexual torment.
Margaret Atwood
#39. He is a state of matter, a form of life, a sort of animal, and a species of the Order Primates, akin nearly or remotely to all of life and indeed to all that is material.
George Gaylord Simpson
#40. Empty heads, cognitive science has taught us, learn nothing. The powerful cultural and personal flexibility of our species is owed at least in part to our starting off so well-informed; we are good learners because we know what to pay attention to and what questions are the right ones to ask.
Paul Bloom
#41. Apart from the social insects, no other species has been clever enough to invent war It is an institution optimally configured to benefit the alphas
Carl Sagan
#42. Advanced weaponry, victories in battle and space travel do not an advanced species or civilization make.
Christina Engela
#43. For more than a thousand years the Bible, collectively taken, has gone hand in hand with civilization science, law; in short, with the moral and intellectual cultivation of the species, always supporting and often leading he way.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#44. We must marry, have children, reproduce the species.
Paulo Coelho
#45. Love is a very ancient force, which served its purpose in its day but no longer is essential for the survival of the species.
Frank Herbert
#46. Man desires concord; but nature know better what is good for his species; she desires discord.
Immanuel Kant
#47. Scientists have always thought that because mammoths roamed such a huge territory - from Western Europe to Central North America - that North American woolly mammoths were a sideshow of no particular significance to the evolution of the species.
Hendrik Poinar
#48. Coming to know the hidden and forgotten Mother and the marvelous wisdom of the sacred feminine as revealed from every side and angle by the different mystical traditions is not luxury; it is, I believe, a necessity for our survival as a species.
Andrew Harvey
#49. When the labourer co-operates systematically with others, he strips off the fetters of his individuality, and develops the capabilities of his species.
Karl Marx
#50. The purpose of farming is to deprive other species of the land and sequester it for our own use. But by perfecting the art of monoculture, it has become too easy for us to exterminate everything else, leaving no wild plants, no food for insects, and a barren land for birds.
Tristram Stuart
#51. I'd tell you to ask my last assistant about my low tolerance, but his soul is busy being tortured and buttfucked in the Inner Sanctum." He laughed. "Buttfucked in the Sanctum. Get it?"
Apparently, the males of all species remained children no matter how old they got.
Larissa Ione
#52. The worship of words is more pernicious than the worship of images. Grammatolatry is the worst species of idolatry.
Robert Dale Owen
#53. Concord, solidarity, and mutual help are the most important means of enabling animal species to survive.
Christian Lous Lange
#54. Biological diversity is the key to the maintenance of the world as we know it ... Eliminate one species, and another increases to take its place. Eliminate a great many species, and the local ecosystem starts to decay.
E. O. Wilson
#55. 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
#56. The evolution of animal behavior does constitute a learning process, but it is learning by the species, not by the individual, and the fruits of this learning process are encoded in DNA.
Ray Kurzweil
#57. Nobody is here without a reason ... I always had a different sensibility. I like a huge range of comedy - from broad and farcical, the most sensitive, the most understated - but I always
wanted my comedy to be more embracing of the species rather than debasing of it.
Lily Tomlin
#58. just one more species, which would grow and expand and then, finding the plateau phase all non-suicidal species eventually arrived at, settle down.
Iain M. Banks
#59. Loneliness is my curse---our species' curse---it's the gun that shoots the bullets that make us dance on a saloon floor and humiliate ourselves in front of strangers.
Douglas Coupland
#60. The human species' foremost task and unshakable duty is survival.
Carlos J. Cortes
#61. We have intelligent species on our planet that we are not even trying to communicate with.
Paul Watson
#62. Going to Mars would evolve humankind into a two-planet species.
Buzz Aldrin
#63. Species went extinct and new ones evolved from protozoa while he sat in his car in the dark and waited to see how badly he'd fucked this up.
Amy Jo Cousins
#64. Dogs and humans are symbiotic species. We need each other.
Cynthia Heimel
#65. Yup! I'll live stupid! Because I know what I do, and what we as a species do will one day come together and make a difference. We matter!
Charles Lee
#66. Peace is something that we can bring about if we can actually learn to wake up a bit more as individuals and a lot more as a species; if we can learn to be fully what we actually already are; to reside in the inherent potential of what is possible for us, being human.
Jon Kabat-Zinn
#67. One of the glories of society is to have created woman where Nature had made only a female; to have created a continuity of desire where Nature thought only of perpetuating the species; and, in fine, to have invented love.
Honore De Balzac
#68. Recent estimates suggest there are at least two million tropical insect species and perhaps as many as seven million.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#69. My response is being written with ink and paper in the glorious tradition of our ancestors and then transcribed by Ms. Vliegenthart into a series of 1s and 0s to travel through the insipid web which has lately ensnared our species, so I apologize for any errors or omissions that may result. "'Given
John Green
#70. I firmly believe that contemporary spiritual use of entheogenic drugs is one of humankind's brightest hopes for overcoming the ecological crisis from which we threaten the biosphere and jeopardize our own survival, for Homo sapiens is close to the head of the list of endangered species.
Jonathan Ott
#71. By nature, we are a plant-based intelligence - not just our exhale, which plants inhale, but they are my food chain. They are my medicine. I cannot live without plants. They are part of my life support. And this is why plant species need to be preserved.
Horst Rechelbacher
#72. It was quite conceivable that Miss Tenzer had aroused in some man, possibly Richard Valdon, the kind of reaction that is an important factor in the propagation of the species; in fact, in more men than one.
Rex Stout
#73. Unfortunately, we are a species with schizoid tendencies, and like an old lady who has to share her house with a growing and destructive group of teenagers, Gaia grows angry, and if they do not mend their ways she will evict them.
James E. Lovelock
#74. I don't believe war ever does. It's a madness that's in our nature. Sometimes it recurs; sometimes it subsides." "Sounds like a disease." "The herpes simplex of the species?
James S.A. Corey
#75. [Footnote:] The female of any species is generally regarded as a relatively anabolic organism, more passive than the male, who is relatively katabolic and active. The fact remains that one frequently runs across a rather katabolic female.
Will Cuppy
#76. Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.
Gordon W. Allport
#77. Think about it for a brief moment. Suspend disbelief. Wind the clock forward 100 years. Do you think, as a species, we will still be struggling with the things that vex us today? Will we still be arguing about the same stuff? We will still be eating Cocoa Puffs? We are at the end of the beginning.
Brad Feld
#78. Selam is our most complete skeleton of a three-year-old girl who lived and died 3.3 million years ago. She belongs to the species known as Australopithecus afarensis.
Zeresenay Alemseged
#79. There are not many things finer in our murderous species than this noble curiosity, this restless and reckless passion to understand.
Will Durant
#80. Consider the magnitude of this... Taxonomists have described almost a million species of arthropods, and all fit into four major groups; one quarry in British Columbia, representing the first explosion of multicellular life, reveals more than twenty additional arthropod designs!
Stephen Jay Gould
#81. Struggle was the explanation behind all the most troubling biological mysteries: species differentiation, species extinction, and species transmutation. Struggle explained everything
Elizabeth Gilbert
#82. Our probable ancestors, Homo erectus and Homo habilis -now extinct- are classified as of the same genus (Homo) but of different species, although no one (at least lately) has attempted the appropriate experiments to see if crosses of them with us would produce fertile offspring.
Carl Sagan
#83. Heads are a good deal, and I think they would be a common feature. It's hard to think of species that don't have heads, although there are some. It's good to have a head because it puts some of the sensory organs - eyes, ears, whiskers or whatever - next to the CPU, the brain.
Seth Shostak
#84. Do not worry too much about your lawn. You will soon find if you haven't already that almost every adult American devotes tremendous time and money to the maintenance of an invasive plant species called turf grass that we can't eat. I encourage you to choose better obsessions.
John Green
#85. These are the sports, the offthrows, of the universe instead of the species; these are the weird children of the lust of the spheres.
Charles G. Finney
#87. There are many ways for organisms to probe the external world. Some smell it, others listen to it, many see it. Each species, therefore, lives in its own unique sensory world of which other species may be partially or totally unaware.
Richard Axel
#88. As soon as a handful of scientists come up with an intervention shown to influence aging in other species, they begin selling it as an intervention for humans, even though there may not be evidence it works.
S. Jay Olshansky
#89. Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.
E. O. Wilson
#90. The female of all species are most dangerous when they appear to retreat.
Don Marquis
#91. Then what do we call you?" another of the heat forms asked.
"We are Rutan."
"Our species need something a little more particular," the first heat form of the Time Lord said. "I think we'll call you Fred, for ease of reference.
David A. McIntee
#92. Animals remind us that all beings who walk, stand, swim, crawl, or fly are radiant, mysterious, and unique expressions of the Source. Every species, every culture, has it's own genius.
Linda Bender
#93. Makeup is for women. It's the law of nature for them to doll themselves up to get a man."
"On the contrary. [ ... ] In the natural world, it is the male of the species who is adorned with colors to attract, impress and keep his potential mate.
Dawn Flemington
#94. Some unspoken human communication is taking place on a hidden channel. I did not realize they communicated this much without words. I note that we machines are not the only species who share information silently, wreathed in codes.
Daniel H. Wilson
#95. We keep making the same mistakes as a species, and you can usually draw it back to the fact that we are all terrified of dying. We also all think that we are going to escape it until we get to 65!
Cate Blanchett
#96. For the person and for the species love is the form of behavior having the highest survival value.
Ashley Montagu
#97. In June as many as a dozen species may burst their buds on a single day. No man can heed all of these anniversaries; no man can ignore all of them.
Aldo Leopold
#98. Evolution usually occurs in response to a crisis situation, and we now are faced with such a crisis situation. This is why there is indeed an enormous acceleration in the awakening process of our species.
Eckhart Tolle
#99. It's not about fucking," she asserted as we clucked nervously over her diagram. "It's about our species. We need to breed.
Andrew Miller
#100. I affect no contempt for the high eminence he [Senator Stephen Douglas] has reached. So reached, that the oppressed of my species,might have shared with me in the elevation, I would rather stand on that eminence, than wear the richest crown that ever pressed a monarch's brow.
Abraham Lincoln
