Quotes about cell
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Zulfikar Ali Bhutto photo

“What gift can I give you from this cell out of which my hand cannot pass? I give you the hand of the people. What celebration can I hold for you? I give you the celebration of a celebrated memory and a celebrated name.”

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1928–1979) Fourth President and ninth Prime Minister of Pakistan

Source: Letter to his daughter (1978), p. 15.
Context: What gift can I give you from this cell out of which my hand cannot pass? I give you the hand of the people. What celebration can I hold for you? I give you the celebration of a celebrated memory and a celebrated name. You are the heir to and inheritor of the most ancient civilization. Please make your full contribution to making this ancient civilization the most progressive and the most powerful. By progressive and powerful I do not mean the most dreaded. A dreaded society is not a civilized society. The most progressive and powerful society in the civilized sense, is a society which has recognized its ethos, and come to terms with the past and the present, with religion and science, with modernism and mysticism, with materialism and spirituality; a society free of tension, a society rich in culture. Such a society cannot come with hocus-pocus formulas and with fraud. It has to flow from the depth of a divine search. In other words, a classless society has to emerge but not necessarily a Marxist society. The Marxist society has created its own class structure.

Reza Pahlavi photo
Antonie Pannekoek photo

“Once the Regime said that one living cell is a life, real living became irrelevant.”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

Flower in Ch. 37 : leaving bastion, p. 355
The Visitor (2002)

Helena Roerich photo
Alessandro Cagliostro photo

“Mark this, my child, that I have tried to have this place fit for a queen, with nothing lacking for your comfort. So calm your folly. Live here as you would do in your convent cell.”

Alessandro Cagliostro (1743–1795) Italian occultist

Balsamo the Magician (or The Memoirs of a Physician) by Alex. Dumas (1891)

Charles Stross photo
J. Howard Moore photo

“Kinship is universal. The orders, families, species, and races of the animal kingdom are the branches of a gigantic arbour. Every individual is a cell, every species is a tissue, and every order is an organ in the great surging, suffering, palpitating process. Man is simply one portion of the immense enterprise. He is as veritably an animal as the insect that drinks its little fill from his veins, the ox he goads, or the wild-fox that flees before his bellowings. Man is not a god, nor in any imminent danger of becoming one. He is not a celestial star-babe dropped down among mundane matters for a time and endowed with wing possibilities and the anatomy of a deity. He is a mammal of the order of primates, not so lamentable when we think of the hyena and the serpent, but an exceedingly discouraging vertebrate compared with what he ought to be. He has come up from the worm and the quadruped. His relatives dwell on the prairies and in the fields, forests, and waves. He shares the honours and partakes of the infirmities of all his kindred. He walks on his hind-limbs like the ape; he eats herbage and suckles his young like the ox; he slays his fellows and fills himself with their blood like the crocodile and the tiger; he grows old and dies, and turns to banqueting worms, like all that come from the elemental loins. He cannot exceed the winds like the hound, nor dissolve his image in the mid-day blue like the eagle. He has not the courage of the gorilla, the magnificence of the steed, nor the plaintive innocence of the ring-dove. Poor, pitiful, glory-hunting hideful! Born into a universe which he creates when he comes into it, and clinging, like all his kindred, to a clod that knows him not, he drives on in the preposterous storm of the atoms, as helpless to fashion his fate as the sleet that pelts him, and lost absolutely in the somnambulism of his own being.”

J. Howard Moore (1862–1916)

"Conclusion", p. 101
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Physical Kinship

J. Howard Moore photo
Emil M. Cioran photo
Carl Sagan photo

“A mutation in a DNA molecule within a chromosome of a skin cell in my index finger has no influence on heredity. Fingers are not involved, at least directly, in the propagation of the species.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Source: The Dragons of Eden (1977), Chapter 2, “Genes and Brains” (p. 27)

Jair Bolsonaro photo

“I was informed by the Federal Police and the Justice Ministry that my cell phones were invaded by the gang arrested on Tuesday, 23. A serious attempt against Brazil and its institutions. May they be harshly punished! Brazil is no longer land without law.”

Jair Bolsonaro (1955) Brazilian president elect

On Twitter on 25 July 2019. Brazil: Bolsonaro says his phones were hacked amid fallout over leaked chats https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/25/brazil-bolsonaro-phone-hack-report. The Guardian (25 July 2019).

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez photo
Margaret Sanger photo
Klaus Barbie photo
Russell Brand photo
Chuck Palahniuk photo
Richard Dawkins photo

“Our ethics and our politics assume, largely without question or serious discussion, that the division between human and 'animal' is absolute. 'Pro-life', to take just one example, is a potent political badge, associated with a gamut of ethical issues such as opposition to abortion and euthanasia.
What it really means is pro-human-life. Abortion clinic bombers are not known for their veganism, nor do Roman Catholics show any particular reluctance to have their suffering pets 'put to sleep'. In the minds of many confused people, a single-celled human zygote, which has no nerves and cannot suffer, is infinitely sacred, simply because it is 'human.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

No other cells enjoy this exalted status.
But such 'essentialism' is deeply un-evolutionary. If there were a heaven in which all the animals who ever lived could frolic, we would find an interbreeding continuum between every species and every other. For example I could interbreed with a female who could interbreed with a male who could ... fill in a few gaps, probably not very many in this case ... who could interbreed with a chimpanzee.
We could construct longer, but still unbroken chains of interbreeding individuals to connect a human with a warthog, a kangaroo, a catfish. This is not a matter of speculative conjecture; it necessarily follows from the fact of evolution.
A successful hybridisation between a human and a chimpanzee. Even if the hybrid were infertile like a mule, the shock waves that would be sent through society would be salutary. This is why a distinguished biologist described this possibility as the most immoral scientific experiment he could imagine: it would change everything! It cannot be ruled out as impossible, but it would be surprising.
Richard Dawkins Chimpanzee Hybrid? The Guardian, Jan 2009 https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2009/jan/02/richard-dawkins-chimpanzee-hybrid?commentpage=2

James D. Watson photo

“The brain is the last and grandest biological frontier, the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe. It contains hundreds of billions of cells interlinked through trillions of connections. The brain boggles the mind.”

James D. Watson (1928) American molecular biologist, geneticist, and zoologist.

1990s
Source: Foreword for Discovering the Brain (1992) by Sandra Ackerman, p. iii; often paraphrased: "The brain is the most complex thing we have yet discovered in our universe."

Marilyn Ferguson photo
Larry Niven photo
David Pearce (philosopher) photo
John le Carré photo

“What the hell do you think spies are? Model philosophers measuring everything they do against the word of God or Karl Marx? They’re not. They’re just a bunch of seedy, squalid bastards like me, little men, drunkards, queers, henpecked husbands, civil servants, playing cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten little lives. Do you think they sit like monks in a cell, balancing right against wrong?”

John le Carré (1931) British novelist and spy

from a clip from the film adaptation of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, starring Richard Burton as Alec Leamas, an alcoholic cynical British spy
The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1963)
Source: Quoted in “The United States of America Has Gone Mad”: John le Carré on Iraq War, Israel & U.S. Militarism, Democracy Now! https://www.democracynow.org/2020/12/25/the_united_states_of_america_has (25 December 2020)

Alice A. Bailey photo
Ralph Waldo Emerson photo
Nicolás Gómez Dávila photo

“The supreme aristocrat is not the feudal lord in his castle but the contemplative monk in his cell.”

Nicolás Gómez Dávila (1913–1994) Colombian writer and philosopher

Escolios a un Texto Implicito (1977), Volume One

John Steinbeck photo
Mwanandeke Kindembo photo
Barry Schwartz photo
Napoleon Hill photo

“Changing animals by putting human genes or cells into their structure is one way of making them more resemble the bit of the human condition you're interested in studying.”

Martin Bobrow (1938) geneticist

Source: As quoted in Medical research warning over human cells in animals https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/jul/22/medical-research-humans-animals-regulation by Alok Jha, 22 July 2011, The Guardian.

Charles Manson photo
Bertolt Brecht photo

“Age-related sensory changes can be traced to degeneration in some of the cells and cell products that compose the sense organ itself.”

Leonard Hayflick (1928) American anatomist

[How and why we age, 1994, Ballantine Books, 177, https://books.google.com/books?id=E2pHAAAAMAAJ&focus=searchwithinvolume&q=loss]

Teal Swan photo