Quotes About The Species

#1. Survival - of the species of the culture of the faith - has a biological dimension. What would have befallen our Hominid ancestors had they implemented gender parity in their hunter-gatherer societies - sometimes the women hunt while the men forage and mind the kids, and vice versa?

Ilana Mercer

#2. Natural selection does not give any preference at all to anything that, in the long run, could be advantageous for the species but blindly rewards everything that, momentarily, affords greater procreative success.

Konrad Lorenz

#3. Gaston was not only a fierce lover, with endless wisdom and imagination, but he was also, perhaps, the first man in the history of the species who had made an emergency landing and had come close to killing himself and his sweetheart simply to make love in a field of violets.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

#4. Humans live in a pit of cheating, exploiting, hurting, incarcerating. Every time, the species wastes some part of what it could be. This waste is poisonous.

David Mitchell

#5. Natural selection is all about the differential success of rival DNA in getting itself transmitted vertically in the species archives.

Richard Dawkins

#6. Everything comes from experience; yet not from actual experience, reiterated by each individual with each generation, but instead from experience accumulated by the entire ancestry of the species in the course of its evolution.

Jacques Monod

#7. The facts of microevolution [change within the species] do not suffice for an understanding of macroevolution [theorized change from one species to another].

Richard Goldschmidt

#8. Love is only a dirty trick played on us to achieve continuation of the species.

W. Somerset Maugham

#9. We're all born storytellers. It's part of the species. But, more specifically, I suppose a particular combination of sensitivity and trauma made me a writer: an essential disquiet with reality, which required exploration through portrayal.

Nic Pizzolatto

#10. Donald Trump comes closer than anyone else to being the archetype of the species; crossing genres, he exemplifies all the ways an asshole can capture our attention. (164-65)

Geoffrey Nunberg

#11. Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct.

Gaylord Nelson

#12. The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness.

Thomas Henry Huxley

#13. No matter the species, the deadliest gender is always the female. Men will fight until they die. Women will take it to the grave and then find a way back.

Sherrilyn Kenyon

#14. Men are much softer than women, more sentimental. They cry at the movies and pretend not to. The male of the species is weak. He doesn't tolerate pain well.

Will Christopher Baer

#15. Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can't bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive the universe. This is the natural language of the species.

Don DeLillo

#16. Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.

Lewis Thomas

#17. Has Westhaven taken to gossiping?"
"He has not, but like most men, you assume the only communications of significance pass between the males of the species.

Grace Burrowes

#18. Nobody, I believe, will deny, that we are to form our judgment of the true nature of the human mind, not from sloth and stupidity of the most degenerate and vilest of men, but from the sentiments and fervent desires of the best and wisest of the species.

Robert B. Leighton

#19. Whatever happens ... men, women and children have to be prepared to put other people first and thereby create the miracle of the species which is people living together in harmony and putting other people first, before themselves.

Bob Maguire

#20. Love could not induce us to take on the burden of propagating the species without promising us the greatest happiness we could imagine.

Alain De Botton

#21. Jesus H. Christ. I have new respect for the female of the species suddenly.

Nalini Singh

#22. I find it extraordinary that a straightforward if inelegant device for ensuring the survival of the species should involve human beings in such emotional turmoil. Does sex have to be taken so seriously?

P.D. James

#23. The inner climate stamps each individual with its character. Every life-form has its own individual anomaly point of health, which makes the orderly reproduction of the species possible. This also explains why the world of parasites increases with fever.

Viktor Schauberger

#24. When you get a little older, you'll see how easy it is to become lured by the female of the species.

Adam West

#25. The species or nature with which we make our choices is fallen, sinful, selfish, and stupid; and we cannot by our own power attain the deepest and final end of our desires, union with God, eternal happiness. Thus,

Peter Kreeft

#26. An asteroid can literally destroy 80 or 90 percent of the species that are alive on Earth. These are big events. I mean, this is called extinction.

Rusty Schweickart

#27. Civilisation is partly about restraining the male of the species from engaging in the violence of the hunter-gatherer period. But it doesn't take an awful lot to unleash it.

Niall Ferguson

#28. Whenever one reads of the determination of the species, or opens a book on natural science and history, in whatever language, one inevitably comes across the name of Linne.

Johannes Vilhelm Jensen

#29. The email of the species is deadlier than the mail.

Stephen Fry

#30. Concise mode of expressing the same meaning is, that inseparable accidents are properties which are universal to the species, but not necessary to it. Thus, blackness is an attribute of a crow,

John Stuart Mill

#31. It is the preservation of the species, not of individuals, which appears to be the design of Deity throughout the whole of nature.

Mary Wollstonecraft

#32. The species and the genus are always the work of nature [i.e. specially created]; the variety mostly that of circumstance; the class and the order are the work of nature and art.

Carl Linnaeus

#33. I don't want us to be the species that ruins it for the rest. What we do not consume we poison. Sometimes we do both. Perhaps that is how we shall end, by consuming the poisons we have created.

James Rozoff

#34. The adolescent phase is rarely attractive, whatever the species.

Ransom Riggs

#35. [T]he Christians abolished the distinction between soul and person, species and individual, and therefore placed immediately in self what belongs only to the totality of the species.

Ludwig Feuerbach

#36. I think good things are happening to me and will continue. I am not optimistic about the rest of the species, but I'm so blessed, it's almost scary. I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I have a wildly sunny disposition. I love to laugh.

Daniel Gilbert

#37. We do a lot of bird-watching up in the country, but we almost never have a chance to people-watch. There simply aren't enough human beings up here: there is nowhere you can park yourself with a cup of coffee and observe the species on parade.

Susan Orlean

#38. Of all the species of literary composition, perhaps biography is the most delightful. The attention concentrated on one individual gives a unity to the materials of which it is composed, which is wanting in general history.

Robert Hall

#39. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth.

Carl Sagan

#40. I am a big believer of what Darwin discovered in the Galapagos, proving that the species most responsive to change will survive over apparently stronger or more intelligent competitors.

John Elkann

#41. Our way is upward, from the species across to the super-species. But the degenerate mind which says 'All for me' is a horror to us.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#42. The selective voluntary blindness of human beings allows them to ignore the moral consequences of their choices. It has been one of the species' most valuable traits, in terms of the survival of any particular human community.

Orson Scott Card

#43. We need to preserve these sacred locations for ourselves, for the species of plants and animals that coexist in harmony there, and for the future generations of humankind that will need to be refreshed, renewed and healed by them.

Frederick Lenz

#44. It was Ivan's morning duty to open each box, identify the species, vigor, mood, and fang-count of the writhing things inside, and sort them by genuine urgency.

Lois McMaster Bujold

#45. Man with the great M is only an ideal, the species only something thought of.

Max Stirner

#46. A satirist, often in danger himself, has the bravery of knowing that to withhold wit's conjecture is to endanger the species.

Penelope Gilliatt

#47. The most significant change wrought by adolescence is the taming of the ideals by which a person measures himself ... Love of oneself becomes love of the species. Conscience is pointed to the future, whispering permission to reach beyond the safety net of our ordinary and finite human existence.

Louise J. Kaplan

#48. Comforting to know that we're the species that feels the most pain.

Craig Johnson

#49. The unwedded and ascetic life is the direct way to the heavenly, immortal life, for heaven is nothing else than life liberated from the conditions of the species, supernatural, sexless, absolutely subjective life.

Ludwig Feuerbach

#50. Fun has no limits. It is like the human race and face; there is a family likeness among all the species, but they all differ.

Thomas Chandler Haliburton

#51. The students were staring at her in the manner of those who have heard of the species 'female' but have never expected to get this close to one.

Terry Pratchett

#52. High culture can never be obliterated as long as the species continues to produce individuals with the inclination and fortitude to pursue their interests and talents against the grain of the mass culture surrounding them.

Susan Jacoby

#53. Holmes had no sisters, and a man who grows up without sisters has few defences against those wiles, those innocent wiles of body, speech and motion, with which nature has provided young females in its blind desire to propagate the species.

Michael Kurland

#54. Molecules A and B meet, marry, and beget the species. This takes place in one-millionth of a billionth of a second. This is a fundamental process in nature, and the world was looking for a way to be able to see the process. But many brilliant people said it couldn't be done.

Ahmed Zewail

#55. I find it difficult to believe that I belong to such an idiotic, rotten species - the species that actually boasts of its freedom of will, heroism on command, senseless violence, and all of the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism.

Albert Einstein

#56. I read five books on the Constitution. My favorite was 'Plain, Honest Men' by Richard Beeman. I went on a science jag in the same way. I kept getting in arguments about evolution and being bested. So I read Charles Darwin's 'On the Origin of the Species,' a fantastic book that is not that difficult.

Denis O'Hare

#57. We, as licensed protectors of the species and members in good standing of the master-class of the race, by the power invested in us by those who wish to survive and reproduce, vow to enforce the fiction that life is worth having and worth living come hell or irreparable brain damage.

Thomas Ligotti

#58. We may smile and the dog may wag the tail, but in essence, we have a set program and those programs are similar across individuals in the species.

Antonio Damasio

#59. We develop our beautiful planet in such a way that we brush aside the species ... we risk creating a wasteland, where our aspirations will ultimately wither and die

Queen Noor Of Jordan

#60. If there is one thing predictable about the male of the species, it's their sex drive and their fascination with fire ... Most advances in technology occur because they're either trying to impress women or blow things up. [Tenzin]

Elizabeth Hunter

#61. The hierarchy of relations, from the molecular structure of carbon to the equilibrium of the species and ecological whole, will perhaps be the leading idea of the future.

Joseph Needham

#62. Welcome to the end of the species," I say. "At least we have ringside seats.

Marko Kloos

#63. It's almost impossible to overpay the truly extraordinary CEO ... but the species is rare.

Warren Buffett

#64. Law of the Minimum: "The worst potential competition for any organism can come from its own kind. The species consumes necessities. Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount. The least favourable condition controls the rate of growth."

Frank Herbert

#65. Adolescents are the bearers of cultural renewal, those cycles of generation and regeneration that link our limited individual destinies with the destiny of the species.

Louise J. Kaplan

#66. For the person and for the species love is the form of behavior having the highest survival value.

Ashley Montagu

#67. 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

#68. 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

#69. Man is a moral animal abandoned in an amoral universe and condemned to a finite existence with no other prupose than to perpetuate the natural cycle of the species.

Carlos Ruiz Zafon

#70. If venereal delight and the power of propagating the species were permitted only to the virtuous, it would make the world very good.

James Boswell

#71. Connections between people were temporary. Selfish. Opportunistic. Designed to perpetuate the species. "Love"
romantic love, anyway
was a fantasy people indulged in because otherwise, life was just too boring to tolerate.

Wendy Wunder

#72. Sex may be the antidote to death but it offers life everlasting only to the species, not the individual.

David Mitchell

#73. 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

#74. Each person is an idiom unto himself, an apparent violation of the syntax of the species.

Gordon W. Allport

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

#81. 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

#82. We must marry, have children, reproduce the species.

Paulo Coelho

#83. 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

#84. 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

#85. 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

#86. 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

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. 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

#90. When, as an undergraduate, I began experiments on these slime molds in 1940, only one other person, Kenneth Raper, was working on them at that time. In fact, he discovered the model species Dictyostelium discoideum, which is the species used in the majority of the experimental work today.

John Tyler Bonner

#91. Marriage is not as necessary for survival of the species as it used to be, and it has suffered somewhat from the change.

Patricia Briggs

#92. In the beginning," Scripture taught, "there was the Word," and Danny would come to believe that the two great gifts his God had given to the species He loved were time, which divides experience, and language, which binds the past to the future.

Mary Doria Russell

#93. We have stopped natural selection from purifying the species because deep in our heart of hearts, we are all terrified that we won't make the cut.

Moxie Mezcal

#94. The most serious outbreak on the planet earth is that of the species Homo sapiens.

David Quammen

#95. It has adopted the geometry most advantageous to the species or, in other words, the most convenient.

Henri Poincare

#96. The historical mission of our times is to re-invent the human - at the species level, with critical reflection, within the community of life-systems, in a time-developmental context, by means of story and shared dream experience.

Thomas Berry

#97. In the process of natural selection, then, any device that can insert a higher proportion of certain genes into subsequent generations will come to characterize the species.

E. O. Wilson

#98. Biologists will teach us that the survival of the species depends on cooperation, not competition.

Robert Holden

#99. For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice.

Erwin Schrodinger

#100. Girls always think, "I'm going to be the exception," Caroline thought; it's a weakness of the species, like a collie's tiny brain.

Rona Jaffe