Top 100 Sapiens Quotes
#1. Ah, but is it not the mind that is the real grace of Homo sapiens? All the things to think about! All the things to read and appreciate! All the arts! All the things of the spirit!
Carol Emshwiller
#2. Mutants, super beings, gods, aliens, a guy who sticks to walls at one extreme, a creature who eats planets at the other; Each one that comes into being, they feel, diminishes the rest of humanity, ordinary homo sapiens, that little bit more.
Jim Lee
#3. Neanderthals usually hunted alone or in small groups. Sapiens, on the other hand, developed techniques that relied on cooperation between many dozens of individuals, and perhaps even between different bands.
Yuval Noah Harari
#4. Beauty, like ecstasy, has always been hostile to the commonplace. And the commonplace, under its popular label of the normal,has been the supreme authority for Homo sapiens since the days when he was probably arboreal.
Ellen Glasgow
#5. It's the most charming thing about humans. You are all so sure that the lesser animals are bleeding with envy because they didn't have the good fortune to be born Homo sapiens.
Orson Scott Card
#6. We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction.
Stephen Jay Gould
#7. The tragedy of my species xxx is that it does not live in its own time. Homo sapiens is locked on history's rearview mirror, never the road ahead, bent on catching some presumed lost paradise xxx
xxx
The human race is destroying itself with nostalgia ...
James K. Morrow
#8. What is our praise or pride but to imagine excellence and try to make it? What does it say over the door of heaven; but, homo (sapiens) fecit?
Richard Wilbur
#9. We, Homo sapiens, destroyed the majority of the large mammalian species in North America and Australasia just over 10,000 years ago. We, Homo sapiens, now are destroying the other species that presently exist on this planet at a rate of about 15,000 to 20,000 per year.
Michael Smith
#10. You simply need to know where to look for the questions. An easy mathematical formula applied to Homo sapiens. And behold! Science reigns over nature once more. No emotions needed.
Kerri Maniscalco
#11. The heated debates about Homo sapiens' 'natural way of life' miss the main point. Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn't been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities.
Yuval Noah Harari
#12. Two hallmarks of Homo Sapiens are decoration and self-identification.
Carl Zimmer
#13. A question for Christians who accept evolution: When did we gain a "soul"? Did Homo habilis have a soul? Homo ergaster? Did God only spontaneously add a soul when we evolved into Homo sapiens?
David G. McAfee
#14. The disastrous history of our species indicates the futility of all attempts at a diagnosis which do not take into account the possibility that homo sapiens is a victim of one of evolution's countless mistakes.
Arthur Koestler
#15. Ever since the Second World War, television signals (as well as FM radio and radar) have served as Homo sapiens' emissaries into deep space. High-frequency, high-power broadcasts have filled an Earth-centered bubble more than 60 light-years in radius with signals.
Seth Shostak
#16. It seemed stupid to be pursued on foot like Homo sapiens sapiens of a hundred thousand years before.
Gregory Benford
#17. Alone among all creatures, the species that styles itself wise, Homo sapiens, has an abiding interest in its distant origins, knows that its allotted time is short, worries about the future and wonders about the past.
John Noble Wilford
#18. There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes. One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked ape self-named Homo sapiens. The zoologist now has to start making comparisons. Where else is nudity at a premium.
Desmond Morris
#19. No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.
Steven Pinker
#20. Spoken language clearly differentiates Homo sapiens from all other creatures. None but humankind produces a complex spoken language, a medium for communication and a medium for introspective reflection.
Richard Leakey
#21. What's unnatural is homophobia. Homo sapiens is the only species in all of nature that responds with hate to homosexuality.
Alex Sanchez
#22. Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap.
William Gibson
#23. The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.
Terry Pratchett
#24. There are two types of the male species of Homo sapiens: men, and Italian men.
Letitia Baldrige
#25. I think we're going to move from a Homo sapiens into a Homo evolutis: ... a hominid that takes direct and deliberate control over the evolution of his species, her species and other species.
Juan Enriquez
#26. What is there about the notion of a person, at law, that makes every living member of the species Homo sapiens a person, irrespective of their mental capacities, but excludes every nonhuman animal - again, irrespective of their mental capacities?
Peter Singer
#27. Humanity at the centre of the primates, Homo sapiens, in humanity, is the end-product of a gradual work of creation, the successive sketches for which still surround us on every side.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#28. more than 25 billion chickens. And they are all over the globe. The domesticated chicken is the most widespread fowl ever. Following Homo sapiens, domesticated
Yuval Noah Harari
#29. It is of man's essence to create materially and morally, to fabricate things and to fabricate himself. Homo faber is the definition I propose ... Homo faber, Homo sapiens, I pay my respects to both, for they tend to merge.
Henri Bergson
#30. Why would any sane person lower his or her standard of living just to multiply the number of copies of the Homo sapiens genome? Nobody agreed to this deal: the Agricultural Revolution was a trap.
Yuval Noah Harari
#31. I try to be realistic and pragmatic. I have a lot of hope for humanity as a species, but obviously as individuals we can be extremely flawed. We may have to go through some very terrible times in the near future, even if we ultimately survive as Homo sapiens.
Annalee Newitz
#33. The right question to ask from a Darwinian prospective is what was it about bipedalism that was so advantageous? Why did it lead to a - why did that adaptation ultimately lead to a species Homo sapiens that has come to dominate the planet today with six and a half billion people?
Donald Johanson
#34. Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa. Think
Yuval Noah Harari
#35. Animals can be driven crazy by placing too many in too small a pen. Homo sapiens is the only animal that voluntarily does this to himself.
Robert A. Heinlein
#36. We normally think that theist religions sanctified the great gods. We tend to forget that they sanctified humans, too. Hitherto Homo sapiens had been just one actor in a cast of thousands. In the new theist drama, Sapiens became the central hero around whom the entire universe revolved.
Yuval Noah Harari
#37. Are we the only members of the Galaxy that can actually understand what a galaxy is? Could Homo sapiens really be the pinnacle of Creation - the cleverest critters in the cosmos? If we learn the answer is 'no,' that would affect our philosophies forever.
Seth Shostak
#38. I listen to the audience and try and bounce with them. All audiences are different. But they are all homo sapiens.
Eric Idle
#39. Intelligent design becomes the basic principle of life? Homo sapiens is replaced by superhumans?
Yuval Noah Harari
#40. It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become Homo sapiens. It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete.
Sugata Mitra
#41. 70,000 The Cognitive Revolution. Emergence of fictive language. Beginning of history. Sapiens spread out of Africa.
Yuval Noah Harari
#42. With the exception of certain rodents, no other vertebrate except Homo sapiens habitually destroys members of his own species.
Anthony Storr
#43. In today's society, the animals known as Homo sapiens have become conditioned to elicit the same kind of fearful response whenever the bell of Islam is rung.
Abhijit Naskar
#44. Yet my study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus
Karen Armstrong
#45. Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.
Henri Bergson
#46. It seems that about 50,000 years ago, Sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans were at that borderline point. They were almost, but not quite, entirely separate species.
Yuval Noah Harari
#47. If you think about it, every single species is endangered. Homo sapiens at the front of the line, mosquitoes and lawyers at the back.
Henry Rollins
#48. 100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens.
Yuval Noah Harari
#49. Think of all the different features from Asian to African to Aboriginal to Caucasian. But we are all within the same species, Homo Sapiens.
Ray Comfort
#50. Since the rise of Homo sapiens, human beings have been the smartest minds around. But very shortly - on a historical scale, that is - we can expect technology to break the upper bound on intelligence that has held for the last few tens of thousands of years.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#51. Another possibility is that competition for resources flared up into violence and genocide. Tolerance is not a Sapiens trademark. In modern times, a small difference in skin colour, dialect or religion has been enough to prompt one group of Sapiens to set about exterminating another group. Would
Yuval Noah Harari
#52. 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
#53. Soon after man shows up in new lands, the big game starts to go missing. [ ... ] A bad smell of extinction follows Home sapiens around the world. (37)
Ronald Wright
#54. When we look for the origins of all humanity today, let's not just look at Europe, because I think Africa was the cradle, the crucible that created us as Homo sapiens.
Donald Johanson
#55. Our will to power, our science, and those v. faculties that elevated us from apes, to savages, to modern man, are the same faculties that'll snuff out Homo sapiens before this century is out!
David Mitchell
#56. If we are to rise as real Sapiens, we must work towards spreading education among the masses.
Abhijit Naskar
#57. But the truth is that Homo sapiens is a sensual species. I think all species are, to one degree or another.
Jock Sturges
#58. What if the first homo sapiens had felt that way? We'd all still be neanderthals, and when the Buggers came they would have blasted us all to bits and that would be that." "We didn't evolve from neanderthals," said Bean. "Well, it's a good thing we have that little fact squared away," said Petra.
Orson Scott Card
#59. But the basic premise of Eutropianism is that technology has made us post-human. That Homo sapiens plus technology is effectively a whole new species: immortal, omnipresent because of the Net, and headed towards omnipotence.
Neal Stephenson
#60. Homo sapiens," "homo faber" ... yes, but, first of all, "homo adorans.
Alexander Schmemann
#61. We are placed in the genus of Homo, which is Latin for man - Homo sapiens: supposedly wise men. I sometimes think - wonder - whether we really are wise men.
Donald Johanson
#62. There's no particular evidence that any of the lower mammals or any of the other animals have any interest in aesthetics at all. But Homo sapiens does, always has and always will.
Jock Sturges
#63. Capitalism, in contrast, has existed for fewer than 300 years. If the entire history of Homo sapiens was a 24-hour day, then capitalism has existed for two minutes.
Jim Stanford
#64. Americans are notoriously ill-informed about evolution. A recent Gallup poll (June 1993) discovered that 47 percent of adult Americans believe that Homo sapiens is a species created by God less than ten thousand years ago.
Daniel C. Dennett
#65. we might fiddle with Homo sapiens to such an extent that we would no longer be Homo sapiens. Bionic
Yuval Noah Harari
#66. Homo sapiens are the only mammals who intentionally hold Beard Of Bees competitions.
Dana Gould
#67. Your fundamental assumption is wrong. You think you are this vehicle. This naked ape. Homo sapiens. I tell you, you are no more human than a driver is the car he is driving. You would never go to a junkyard to look for the driver would you?
Gudjon Bergmann
#68. Surely one zoo in the world should have the courage to draw the ultimate conclusion about our ancestry? A cage with Homo Sapiens in all its varying forms, perhaps then we would understand ourselves better. The question of course is whether the other animals would approve of it.
Cees Nooteboom
#69. From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals.
John Muir
#70. The great thing about homo sapiens is that we've got a brain that can override our instincts. If we want it to.
Graeme Simsion
#71. the historical record makes Homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer. All
Yuval Noah Harari
#72. Homo sapiens didn't become the dominant species on this planet by having the sharpest claws or hardest armor - though I suppose some of that point may be lost on wizards. Still, it's beneath my dignity as a human being to be scared of anything that isn't smarter than I am.
Eliezer Yudkowsky
#73. When younger, I thought one of the particulars of being "Homo sapiens" was to communicate. I have not learned not to, though I am cautious when I try.
Nikki Giovanni
#74. For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.
John Fowles
#75. It's time we put the bud back in Buddha and the sap back in Homo sapiens, and end this age of folly - this folly-age!
S.J. Cameron
#76. For better or worse, man is the tool-using animal, and as such he has become the lord of creation. When he is lord also of himself, he will deserve his self-chosen title homo sapiens.
William Ralph Inge
#77. Homo sapiens exhibits traits consistent with a long history of polygyny or monogamy, and a relative absence of sperm competition.
Alan F. Dixson
#78. Human can surprise you sometimes. An unpredictable species, Homo sapiens
Katherine Applegate
#79. There seems to me to be absolutely no limit to the inanity and credulity of the human race. Homo Sapiens! Homo idioticus!
Arthur Conan Doyle
#80. The arts which we now call garden design and landscape design have three separate origins: sacred space, horticultural space and domestic space. Like Homo sapiens, the arts of garden and landscape design probably spread to Europe from West Asia.
Tom Turner
#81. Christians tell me that they have a higher destiny than the lower animals, because Homo Sapiens can reason. But the Bible tells me that this gift of reason, which they call god-given, may be the match that lights the fires of hell for all who dare to use it, since whatever is not of faith is sin.
Ruth Hurmence Green
#82. Pala is probably the only country in which an animal theologian would have no reason for believing in devils. For animals everywhere else, Satan, quite obviously, is Homo sapiens." They
Aldous Huxley
#83. Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
Joyce Carol Oates
#84. In 1700 the world was home to some 700 million humans. In 1800 there were 950 million of us. By 1900 we almost doubled our numbers to 1.6 billion. And by 2000 that quadrupled to 6 billion. Today there are just shy of 7 billion Sapiens. Modern
Yuval Noah Harari
#85. he suffered from an incurable malady which, it seemed, attacked only homo sapiens among all the intelligent races of the universe. That disease was religious mania. Throughout
Arthur C. Clarke
#86. in the first recorded encounter between Sapiens and Neanderthals, the Neanderthals won. About 100,000 years ago, some Sapiens groups migrated north to the Levant, which was Neanderthal territory, but failed to secure a firm footing.
Yuval Noah Harari
#87. My family, in a way, gives me a reference as to who I am as an individual, and my work gives me a reference as to who I am as a Homo sapiens. I think that's a very perfect match, in my view.
Zeresenay Alemseged
#88. Each of the sapiens brains generates its own perception of God in uniquely different ways. Ergo, it imposes different qualities of meaning and value on God. You see God the way your brain wants you to see it. There is no right and wrong, or fact and fiction on this matter. It is all personal.
Abhijit Naskar
#89. The dinosaur, with its small brain, had survived for a couple of million years; it had done better than Homo sapiens.
P.D. James
#90. We are all in flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo Sapiens.
John Fowles
#91. We are misery-making machines! Homo sapiens has perfected the art of causing suffering. Pain is humankind's collective GDP.
Henry Rollins
#92. I'm just capable of entertaining the fantastic idea that, in certain circumstances, Homo sapiens might actually be capable of thinking. It must be worth a go, since we've tried everything else.
Terry Pratchett
#93. The language of art is powerful to those who understand it, and puzzling to those who do not. What we do know is that here was the modern human mind at work, spinning symbolism and abstraction in a way that only Homo sapiens is capable of doing.
Richard Leakey
#94. Sapiens adjuvabit opus astrorum quemadmodum agricola terrae naturam": A wise man assisteth the work of the stars as the husbandman helpeth the nature of the soil.
Henry David Thoreau
#95. Prophets of doom warn that sooner or later Homo sapiens will exhaust the raw materials and energy of planet Earth. And what will happen then?
Yuval Noah Harari
#96. we can congratulate ourselves on the unprecedented accomplishments of modern Sapiens only if we completely ignore the fate of all other animals.
Yuval Noah Harari
#97. Homo sapiens [are] a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree.
Stephen Jay Gould
#98. From the Cognitive Revolution onwards, historical narratives replace biological theories as our primary means of explaining the development of Homo sapiens.
Yuval Noah Harari
#99. We don't know who we are or how to function, much less how to bloom. Blind nature. Homo sapiens. Who's kidding whom?
Jeanette Winterson
#100. Homo Sapiens Loses Control Can humans go on running the world and giving it meaning? How do biotechnology and artificial intelligence threaten humanism? Who might inherit humankind, and what new religion might replace humanism?
Yuval Noah Harari
