“We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation.”

— Lily Tomlin

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Lily Tomlin 58

American actress, comedian, writer, and producer 1939

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“Chorus of Furies: We claim to be just and upright. No wrath from us will come stealthily to the one who holds out clean hands, and he will go through life unharmed; but whoever sins, as this man has, and hides his blood-stained hands, as avengers of bloodshed we appear against him to the end, presenting ourselves as upright witnesses for the dead.”

Aeschylus Eumenides

Source: Oresteia (458 BC), Eumenides, lines 312–320 (tr. Herbert Weir Smyth)

“Are we surprised if a sick man cannot walk, or keep awake, or stand upright? Would it not be more surprising if he was the same man as when he was well? If we have a headache, or have slept badly, we are excused for telling incapable of work, and yet no one suspects us of always being lazy. Shall we deny a dying man the privilege we grant a man with a headache? And dare we assert that the man who lacks courage in his last agony never possessed virtue when he was well.”

Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues (1715–1747) French writer, a moralist

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“What is it that distinguishes man from animals? It is not his upright posture.”

Erich Fromm (1900–1980) German social psychologist and psychoanalyst

"Affluence and Ennui in Our Society" in For the Love of Life (1986) translated by Robert and Rita Kimber
Context: What is it that distinguishes man from animals? It is not his upright posture. That was present in the apes long before the brain began to develop. Nor is it the use of tools. It is something altogether new, a previously unknown quality: self-awareness. Animals, too, have awareness. They are aware of objects; they know this is one thing and that another. But when the human being as such was born he had a new and different consciousness, a consciousness of himself; he knew that he existed and that he was something different, something apart from nature, apart from other people, too. He experienced himself. He was aware that he thought and felt. As far as we know, there is nothing analogous to this anywhere in the animal kingdom. That is the specific quality that makes human beings human.

“I neither deny nor affirm the immortality of man. I see no reason for believing in it, but, on the other hand, I have no means of disproving it.”

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895) English biologist and comparative anatomist

1860s, Reply to Charles Kingsley (1860)

“A man should be upright, not kept upright.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

III, 5
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book III

“The death of a fighter is not a reason to mourn, if we believe, as we have always believed, as our people have believed and as revolutionaries of every era have believed, that no true man, no true revolutionary dies in vain.”

Fidel Castro (1926–2016) former First Secretary of the Communist Party and President of Cuba

Speech (12 January 1968) http://www.cuba.cu/gobierno/discursos/1968/esp/f120168e.html

“I think that yesterday was a crisis in my life. I finished the first part of Renouvier's second Essais and see no reason why his definition of free will—"the sustaining of a thought because I choose to when I might have other thoughts"—need be the definition of an illusion. At any rate, I will assume for the present—until next year—that it is no illusion. My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Diary entry (April 30, 1870) as quoted in Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, vol. 1, p. 323; Letters of William James, vol. I, p. 147.
1870s