“The ability to make love frivolously is the chief characteristic which distinguishes human beings from the beasts.”

— Heywood Broun

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Heywood Broun 5

American sportswriter 1888–1939

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“The chief blessings of human nature are the three following:—TRUTH—VIRTUE—and LIBERTY.—These are, therefore, the blessings in the possession of which the interest of our country lies, and to the attainment of which our love of it ought to direct our endeavours. By the diffusion of KNOWLEDGE it must be distinguished from a country of Barbarians: by the practice of religious VIRTUE, it must be distinguished from a country of gamblers, Atheists, and libertines: and by the possession of LIBERTY, it must be distinguished from a country of slaves.”

Richard Price (1721–1791) Welsh nonconformist preacher and radical

Source: A Discourse on the Love of Our Country (1789), p. 11

“However it may be confounded or covered up or counterfeited, this elemental capacity to fight against injustice remains the distinguishing characteristic of human beings.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Power and Innocence (1972), Ch. 11 : The Humanity of the Rebel

“The ability to do, to make, to generate and contribute is the essence of a human being.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

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“[T]he first characteristic of the human species is man's ability, as a rational being, to establish character for himself, as well as for the society into which nature has placed him. This ability, however, presupposes an already favorable natural predisposition and an inclination to the good in man, because the evil is really without character”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

since it is at odds with itself, and since it does not tolerate any lasting principle within itself

Kant, Immanuel (1996), page 246
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“Because reason… is the only thing that makes us men, and distinguishes us from the beasts, I would prefer to believe that it exists, in its entirety, in each of us…”

René Descartes (1596–1650) French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist

“Humankind is commanded to ascend from savagery. This is God's mandate, which cries out from the epicenter of our being: the imperative to mount from the base to the noble, from the savage to the civil, from beast to human.”

Steven Pressfield book Last of the Amazons

Theseus p. 119
Last of the Amazons (2002)

“If you were to insist I was a robot, you might not consider me capable of love in some mystic human sense, but you would not be able to distinguish my reactions from that which you would call love — so what difference would it make?”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Source: The Foundation series (1951–1993), Foundation’s Edge (1982), Chapter 20 “Conclusion” section 4, p. 420

“The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another; it is never the given that confers superiorities: "virtue", as the ancients called it, is defined at the level of "that which depends on us."”

Simone de Beauvoir book The Second Sex

In both sexes is played out the same drama of the flesh and the spirit, of finitude and transcendence; both are gnawed away by time and laid in wait for by death, they have the same essential need for one another; and they can gain from their liberty the same glory. If they were to taste it, they would no longer be tempted to dispute fallacious privileges, and fraternity between them could then come into existence.
The Second Sex (1949)

“Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)
Context: Everything which distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly marked boundaries — a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world.

“As a formal analytical point of reference, primacy of orientation to the attainment of a specific goal is used as the defining characteristic of an organization which distinguishes it from other types of social systems.”

Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) American sociologist

Talcott Parsons (1956: 64); Partly cited in: Chiara Demartini (2013). Performance Management Systems: Design, Diagnosis and Use. p. 17

“The ability to make love frivolously is the chief characteristic which distinguishes human beings from the beasts.”

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Heywood Broun 5

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