
“To be upright and to have an imagination: that is enough to be a very good young man.”
Conversations with History interview (1999)
III, 5
Meditations (c. 121–180 AD), Book III
“To be upright and to have an imagination: that is enough to be a very good young man.”
Conversations with History interview (1999)
“What is it that distinguishes man from animals? It is not his upright posture.”
"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.
“We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation.”
"A Far Cry from Africa" (1962)
Boston Massacre Oration (1774)
Context: Surely you never will tamely suffer this country to be a den of thieves. Remember, my friends, from whom you sprang. Let not a meanness of spirit, unknown to those whom you boast of as your fathers, excite a thought to the dishonor of your mothers I conjure you, by all that is dear, by all that is honorable, by all that is sacred, not only that ye pray, but that ye act; that, if necessary, ye fight, and even die, for the prosperity of our Jerusalem. Break in sunder, with noble disdain, the bonds with which the Philistines have bound you. Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed, by the soft arts of luxury and effeminacy, into the pit digged for your destruction. Despise the glare of wealth. That people who pay greater respect to a wealthy villain than to an honest, upright man in poverty, almost deserve to be enslaved; they plainly show that wealth, however it may be acquired, is, in their esteem, to be preferred to virtue.
Quoted in Michele Norris, "Jaco Pastorius: 20 Years Later," http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14578299&sc=nl&cc=mn-20071007 NPR: All Things Considered (2007-09-21)