The Human Species Quotes

#1. Laughter is one of the very privileges of reason, being confined to the human species.

Thomas Carlyle

#2. I love the idea of species fluidity, I guess, the sense of the maiden inherent in the swan or seal, the youth inherent in the bear or deer. After all, human beings are animals.

Delia Sherman

#3. The vulgarity of inanimate things requires time to get accustomed to; but living, breathing, bustling, plotting, planning, human vulgarity is a species of moral ipecacuanha, enough to destroy any comfort.

Thomas Carlyle

#4. One of the most interesting things for me in playing another species is that you want to make them different enough to be alien but have enough human qualities to be relatable. This really forces you to look at what it is to be human from a totally new perspective!

Jaime Murray

#5. Greed has been with human beings forever. We have a number of things in our species that you would call 'the dark side,' and greed is one of them. If you don't put certain structures in place or restrictions on those parts of our being that come from that dark place, then it gets out of control.

Michael Moore

#6. Because men, compared to male chimps, have such relatively small testicles (large testicles indicate a species where many males mate, one after the other, with the same female), we might guess that promiscuous societies were uncommon in the immediate human past.

Carl Sagan

#7. Just as we reject racism, sexism, ageism, and heterosexism, we reject speciesism. The species of a sentient being is no more reason to deny the protection of this basic right than race, sex, age, or sexual orientation is a reason to deny membership in the human moral community to other humans.

Gary L. Francione

#8. The idea is that human culture as broadly defined
art, politics, technology, religion, and so on
evolves in much the way biological species evolve: new cultural traits arise and may flourish or perish, and as a result whole institutions can belief systems form and change.

Robert Wright

#9. I want to challenge all of you as people of deep conscience, people who are environment stewards of the earth and oceans ... By changing what you eat, you will change the entire contract between the human species and the natural world.

James Cameron

#10. We wonder, how do you instruct seven billion people as to the relationship to the Earth? Because unless they understand that, and relate the way they should be, the future is pretty dim for the human species.

Oren Lyons

#11. I absolutely don't think a sentient artificial intelligence is going to wage war against the human species.

Daniel H. Wilson

#12. The Englishman wants to be recognized as a gentleman, or as some other suitable species of human being, the American wants to be considered a good guy.

Louis Kronenberger

#13. Only one kind of species of animals bites the hand that feeds them - mankind.

Fakeer Ishavardas

#14. The roast meat the animal had snatched was only a semblance. It was more than food, it was a meal not for human witness, a tangle of viscera, a species of human sacrifice - as if Emerence were feeding the actual person to the dog, along with all her fond memories and feelings.

Magda Szabo

#15. The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend.

Charles Lamb

#16. I am not very proud of being an human being; in fact, I distinctly dislike the species in many ways. I can readily conceive of beings vastly superior in every respect.

H.P. Lovecraft

#17. But the characteristic that is truly special about our species ... [is] our ability to model our world and understand both it and where we fit into its overall scheme ...

Arthur C. Clarke

#18. The construction of the nuclear doomsday machine - and its continued maintenance and development since the mid-twentieth century - is surely one of the most astounding acts of collective insanity in the history of the human species.

Richard L. Currier

#19. Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

Richard Dawkins

#20. We deny the right of any portion of the species to decide for another portion what is and what is not their 'proper sphere.' The proper sphere for all human beings is the largest and highest which they are able to attain to.

Harriet Taylor Mill

#21. There is something in meanness which excites a species of resentment that never subsides, and something in cruelty which stirs up the heart to the highest agony of human hatred.

Thomas Paine

#22. The history of human use of plants, mushrooms, and animals for their psychedelic effects is far older than written history, and probably predates the appearance of the modern human species.

Rick Strassman

#23. Clean air and water, a diversity of animal and plant species, soil and mineral resources, and predictable weather are annuities that will pay dividends for as long as the human race survives - and may even extend our stay on Earth.

Alex Steffen

#24. The problems that stand in the way are not of economical or technological nature. The deepest sources of the global crisis lie inside the human personality and reflect the level of consciousness evolution of our species.

Stanislav Grof

#25. Art exists for the human species. I think that all of the people who love art, those who teach art, and all of you should burn with the obligation to save the world.

Shinichi Suzuki

#26. The human species is forever in a state of change, forever becoming.

Simone De Beauvoir

#27. If these modern peoples could inflict the most barbaric treatment and persecution on another group of human beings, then there was something very, very deplorable with our species. No amount of education or technological progress was going to make any difference in altering human savagery.

Mitchell Diamond

#28. 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

#29. Admittedly they had a lot to take in, between the whole Jack-is-a-psychopath-who-wanted-me-to-destroy-a-species thing, and also the turns-out-I'm-less-human-than-we-thought thing.

Kiersten White

#30. The British ballads became a new kind of form in their hand. And out of them came the blues, a new kind of song of commentary and satire, a song form which, after all, has become the main musical form of the whole human species.

Alan Lomax

#31. He [man] abuses equally other animals and his own species, the rest of whom live in famine, languish in misery, and work only to satisfy the immoderate appetite and the still more insatiable vanity of this human being who, destroying others by want, destroys himself by excess.

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte De Buffon

#32. Periods are normal and natural, and the human species would not be here if periods did not exist.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#33. By looking through my human eyes, I hope you can see the humanity in all of it, beyond the topics of my words. Because life is an expression and our species should be a united one, not a just another bunch of tribal morons.

Steve Merrick

#34. Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.

Aldous Huxley

#35. In brief, our genetic heritage is at odds with our genetic future. For the first time in human history, the qualities it takes to survive as a species are compatible with the qualities it takes to love.

Warren Farrell

#36. We are at a point in human evolution when human solidarity on a global scale is absolutely vital for the survival of the human species. That means understanding that ... we are all co-inhabitants of this planet.

Petra Kelly

#37. And there was shame in being human: the shame of knowing that twenty of the roughly thirty-five classified species of sea horse worldwide are threatened with extinction because they are killed "unintentionally" in seafood production.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#38. Even in the latter case nature exhibits a kind of intelligence, and there is no reason to rule out the possibility that machines will do so too. If nature in the form of the human species could bring forth intelligent machines, the process of evolution would continue among the machines.

John N. Gray

#39. Babies and young children are like the research and development division of the human species, and we grown-ups are production and marketing.

Alison Gopnik

#40. It is a pleasant thing to reflect upon, and furnishes a complete answer to those who contend for the gradual degeneration of the human species, that every baby born into the world is a finer one than the last.

Charles Dickens

#41. The population of the planet is increasing at an alarming rate, and yet each day human beings manage to destroy ten species.

Frederick Lenz

#42. It's really incumbent upon us as life's agents to extend life to another planet. I think that being a multi-planet species will significantly increase the richness and scope of the human experience.

Elon Musk

#43. I don't like the human race in general. We are the only species who hunt for sport, who kill due to emotional need.

Peter Steele

#44. For what is history, but ... huge libel on human nature, to which we industriously add page after page, volume after volume, as if we were holding up a monument to the honor, rather than the infamy of our species.

Washington Irving

#45. A human being would certainly not grow to be seventy or eighty years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life's morning.

Carl Jung

#46. What's humorous to me about using "bitch" as an insult is that it clearly illustrates just how marginalized women really are; for this singular insult stands to throw us out of the human species altogether, and quite literally, to the dogs.

Brandon Kelly

#47. The human response it calls for is truly heroic, requiring nothing short of rewiring the entire planet with a new generation of clean-energy technologies - and doing that very soon ... Are we, as a species, capable of that kind of deliberate global response?

Eban Goodstein

#48. The human species was not born into a market economy. Bees won't sell you honey if you offer them an electronic funds transfer. The human species imagined money into existence, and it exists - for us, not mice or wasps - because we go on believing in it.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

#49. There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it's clear that the density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they have begun to poison themselves. And the world in which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like.

Claude Levi-Strauss

#50. Two million years ago, genetic mutations resulted in the appearance of a new human species called Homo erectus.

Yuval Noah Harari

#51. The human species really could have faced global thermonuclear war. During seventy years of Cold War we grew used to it.

Larry Niven

#52. You know what we need to heal are the thought forms and the feelings that cause us to create war and mass destruction on this kind of a level, because ultimately if we are to survive as a species, we have to become a human race for whom the thought of war is unthinkable.

Marianne Williamson

#53. It is not in human nature for all men to tread the same path of development, as animals do of a single species.

Maria Montessori

#54. 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

#55. There will come a time when there are no human beings remaining to remember that anyone ever existed or that our species ever did anything.

Mark Lawrence

#56. Global transformation can occur only when each individual has the courage to awaken from this amnesia to our true self and then make conscious choices true to our spirit. The human race is the only species on earth evolved enough to be capable of this privilege.

Patsie Smith

#57. It struck me what we should be trying to do was pluck the egg from the ovary and fertilise it in the laboratory. We could do this in animals increasingly ... this was the way to go in the human species.

Robert Edwards

#58. For the first time in human history the psychology that is a prerequisite for intimacy has become the psychology that is a prerequisite for species survival.

Warren Farrell

#59. Human activity is having a major impact on the planet. We consume or have diverted a large proportion of the productivity of the land and oceans. Our hunger for land crowds out fellow species. Our waste products pollute the waters, warm the atmosphere and acidify the oceans.

Ian Goldin

#60. Before we sent kids to computer camps and told them they were having a good time, there was imagination among the human species.

Erma Bombeck

#61. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

David Mitchell

#62. I think cities are the primordial forests of our time. We evolve faster as a species in cities. Cities are chaotic, liminal places where the many aspects of human potential, good and/or bad, are most readily magnified.

Chris Abani

#63. For the human race is, more than any other species, at once social by nature and quarrelsome by perversion.

Augustine Of Hippo

#64. The Earth itself is stepping in to aid in the agenda of cultural transformation. There are too many doorways in nature that lead to heaven, there are too many paths to the mystery for any institution or social policy to be able to thwart the intent of the human species to evolve.

Terence McKenna

#65. This is so fucking Human of you. Lie back and let the galaxy do whatever it wants, because you're too guilty about how badly you fucked up your own species to ever take initiative.

Becky Chambers

#66. For the human species to evolve, the conversation must deepen.

Margaret Mead

#67. While religious faith is the one species of human ignorance that will not admit of even the possibility of correction, it is still sheltered from criticism in every corner of our culture.

Sam Harris

#68. Although we have, in theory, abolished human slavery, recognized women's rights, and stopped child labor, we continue to enslave other species who, if we simply pay attention, show quite clearly that they experience parental love, pain, and the desire for freedom, just as we do.

Ingrid Newkirk

#69. The juke joint, the honky tonk, and the ballroom also represent one more thing, anthropologically speaking: a ceremonial context for the male-with-female-duet dance flirtation and embrace, upon which the zoological survival of the human species has always been predicated.

Albert Murray

#70. One thing that unites us all, one thing is universal among the human species; the anatomy. Big, small, fat, thin, colour or creed are irrelevant. Under the skin, under the flesh, we are one and the same. We desire the same things; love, money, power. All the things we can not have, not without cost.

Rob Shepherd

#71. He who pretends to look on death without fear lies. All men are afraid of dying, this is the great law of sentient beings, without which the entire human species would soon be destroyed.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 - 1778)
French philosopher and writer.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#72. A human life is defined by its relationship with others: by its duty to its species. In the face of this duty, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are meaningless. What you call individual rights are merely the cultural fantasy of a failed civilization.

Matthew Woodring Stover

#73. People ache to believe that we human beings are vastly different from all other species - and they are right! We are different. We are the only species that has an extra medium of design preservation and design communication: culture.

Daniel Dennett

#74. What an odd thing it is to see an entire species
billions of people
playing with, listening to meaningless tonal patterns, occupied and preoccupied for much of their time by what they call 'music.' (
The Overlords, from Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End)

Oliver Sacks

#75. Indeed, the whole human species is endangered, by nuclear weapons or by other means of wholesale destruction which further advances in science are likely to produce.

Joseph Rotblat

#76. The love between man and woman is a voluntary pact in which the one who falls short is only guilty of perfidy, but when a woman has become a mother her duty is greater because nature has entrusted the human species to her. If she fails then she is a coward, unworthy and infamous.

Guy De Maupassant

#77. Species are being wiped out every day. Do we want to live with this or don't we? That is really our choice. And I think that human beings, by nature, want to preserve themselves. But right now, we're so preoccupied by other stuff, and we're not addressing the issues, which are our priorities.

Horst Rechelbacher

#78. By ignoring our health and consuming unhealthy products, we are unknowingly contributing to the genetic mutation of the human species.

Joseph P. Kauffman

#79. Many say exploration is part of our destiny, but it's actually our duty to future generations and their quest to ensure the survival of the human species.

Buzz Aldrin

#80. The law of nature instructs most animals to cherish and educate their infant progeny. The law of reason inculcates to the human species the returns of filial piety.

Edward Gibbon

#81. There are two possibilities: Either the kiss is a human universal, one of the constellation of innate traits, including language and laughter, that unites us as a species, or it is an invention, like fire or wearing clothes, an idea so good that it was bound to metastasize across the globe.

Joshua Foer

#82. Our species is on the verge of changes that will fundamentally alter what it means to be human ... and we are the people driving that change.

Daniel Keys Moran

#83. Dictatorships, wars, and cruelty drive whole countries to madness. My theory is that the human species was crazy from the very first and that civilization and culture are only enhancing man's insanity.
A Tale of Two Sisters

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#84. The remnant of the human species must understand that faith was the narcotic that fueled the insanity of religion.
Conclusion: Invisible love is wasted. Invisible evidence is worthless. Invisible God is non-existent.

C.J. Anderson

#85. human beings are actually more closely related to the two species of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes, the familiar chimp, and Pan paniscus, the rare, smaller pygmy chimp or bonobo) than those chimpanzees are to the other apes.

Daniel C. Dennett

#86. Ayahuasca is a symbiotic ally of the human species.

Dennis McKenna

#87. The agony of being unable to answer the question of why are we the way we are, divisively instead of cooperatively behaved, has been the particular burden of life. It has been our species' particular affliction or condition - our human condition.

Jeremy Griffith

#88. Biological evolution is too slow for the human species. Over the next few decades, it's going to be left in the dust.

Ray Kurzweil

#89. One has children in the expectation of dying before them. In fact, you want to make damn sure you die before them, just as you plant a tree or build a house knowing, hoping that it will outlive you. That's how the human species has done as well as it has.

Christopher Hitchens

#90. Human-like species will not exist elsewhere in the universe, unless they live exactly in an earth-like environment.

Joey Lawsin

#91. I had nixed the idea of having children when I was myself a child, having learned in the 1960s that human overpopulation was literally crowding other species off the planet. Why create another mouth to gnaw at the overburdened earth?

Sy Montgomery

#92. Let's not be too quick to blame the human race for everything. A great many species of animals became extinct before man ever appeared on earth.

Will Cuppy

#93. I suppose that, after the passion of love, water rights have caused more trouble than anything else to the human species.

Alice Steinbach

#94. Whatever misanthropists may say, ingrates and the perverse are exceptions in the human species.

Napoleon Bonaparte

#95. I'm very pessimistic about the future of the human species. We have been so indifferent to life on the whole that it will take its toll. It's not just the polar bears that are having a hard time; what we're doing is gradually impoverishing and poisoning the whole of the rest of life.

W.S. Merwin

#96. By no stretch of charity could he be called an ornament to the human species.

Samuel Hopkins Adams

#97. Arousal is nature's stimulus for the propagation of the human race. The unaroused male of the species is as useless for that purpose as a worm. Arousal can happen sooner or later, but it must happen.

Sol Stein

#98. No species ... possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by genetic history ... The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction, and reason is just one of its various techniques.

E. O. Wilson

#99. Vengeance, is good. You give it, you get it. It's all part of what makes us human. So thank god for vengeance. Otherwise, the human race might as well just roll over and let another species for a while. I think it will be the cats. Watch 'em. They're cooking up something.

Christopher Titus

#100. Every mystery ever solved had been a puzzle from the dawn of the human species right up until someone solved it.

Eliezer Yudkowsky