Quotes about species (1069 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

“Man is the most insane species. He worships an invisible God and destroys a visible Nature. Unaware that this Nature he’s destroying is this God he’s worshiping.”

Hubert Reeves (1932) Canadian astrophysicist and popularizer of science

God , Nature

“Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?”

Jane Goodall (1934) British primatologist, ethologist, and anthropologist

“Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 8, Supplemental image at randi.org http://www.randi.org/images/122801-BlueDot.jpg

Love , Life , World , Religion

“Humankind does not submit passively to the power of nature. It takes control over this power. This process is not an internal or subjective one. It takes place objectively in practice, once women cease to be viewed as mere sexual beings, once we look beyond their biological functions and become conscious of their weight as an active social force. What's more, woman's consciousness of herself is not only a product of her sexuality. It reflects her position as determined by the economic structure of society, which in turn expresses the level reached by humankind in technological development and the relations between classes.

The importance of dialectical materialism lies in going beyond the inherent limits of biology, rejecting simplistic theories about our being slaves to the nature of our species, and, instead, placing facts in their social and economic context.”

Thomas Sankara (1949–1987) President of Upper Volta

Source: Women's Liberation and the African Freedom Struggle

Women , Nature

“As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones.

There is one obvious reason why this should be so. The migration itself, like the pilgrimage, is the hard journey: a 'leveller' on which the 'fit' survive and stragglers fall by the wayside.

The journey thus pre-empts the need for hierarchies and shows of dominance. The 'dictators' of the animal kingdom are those who live in an ambience of plenty. The anarchists, as always, are the 'gentlemen of the road'.”

Bruce Chatwin book The Songlines

Source: The Songlines

Animals

“A member of the human race who is completely incapable of understanding the higher productivity of labor performed under a division of labor based on private property is not properly speaking a person… but falls instead into the same moral category as an animal – of either the harmless sort (to be domesticated and employed as a producer or consumer good, or to be enjoyed as a “free good”) or the wild and dangerous one (to be fought as a pest). On the other hand, there are members of the human species who are capable of understanding the [value of the division of labor] but…who knowingly act wrongly… [B]esides having to be tamed or even physically defeated [they] must also be punished… to make them understand the nature of their wrongdoings and hopefully teach them a lesson for the future.”

Hans-Hermann Hoppe book Democracy: The God That Failed

Source: Democracy: The God That Failed (2001), P.173

Understanding , Nature , Future , Animals

“The living world is not the harsh domain of classical Darwinism, where each struggle against all, with every species, every organism and every gene competing for advantage against every other. Organisms are not skin-enclosed selfish entities, and competition is never unfettered. Life evolves, as does the universe itself, in a 'sacred dance' with an underlying field. This makes living beings into elements in a vast network of intimate relations that embraces the entire biosphere itself an interconnected element within the wider connections that reach into the cosmos.”

Alexis Karpouzos (1967)

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/14108295.alexis_karpouzos?page=2

Selfishness , Universe , Relation ships , Dance

“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 (1807–1858) British philosopher

Harriet Taylor Mill, The Enfranchisement of Women (1851)

“Every one of us is going to die eventually, but we as a species will stick around for a while. That’s why I think accumulating money, fame or power is irrelevant. Serving humanity is the only thing that really matters in the long run.”

Pavel Durov (1984) Russian entrepreneur

" Why WhatsApp Will Never Be Secure https://telegra.ph/Why-WhatsApp-Will-Never-Be-Secure-05-15" 2019-05-15
In reference to his expatriation from Russia after refusing to breach the privacy of VK users for the government

Money , Thinking

“A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.”

Elizabeth Kolbert (1961) journalist and author

Source: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History

Quotes , Business

“Natural selection eliminates and maybe maintains, but it doesn't create… Neo-Darwinists say that new species emerge when mutations occur and modify an organism. I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change [which] led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

Nature , Change

“As a species we're fundamentally insane. Put more than two of us in a room, we pick sides and start dreaming up reasons to kill one another. Why do you think we invented politics and religion?”

Stephen King (1947) American author

Religion , Dreams , Thinking

“Apparently, women need to feel loved to have sex, and men need to have sex to feel loved, so the basic act of continuing the species requires a lie from one of you.”

Billy Connolly (1942) British comedian

An Audience With Billy - 1985

Love , Women , Men , Lie

“The reproduction of mankind is a great marvel and mystery. Had God consulted me in the matter, I should have advised him to continue the generation of the species by fashioning them of clay, in the way Adam was fashioned.”

Martin Luther book Table Talk

752 http://books.google.com/books?id=ZUAuAAAAYAAJ&q=%22The+reproduction+of+mankind+is+a+great+marvel+and+mystery+Had+God+consulted+me+in+the+matter+I+should+have+advised+him+to+continue+the+generation+of+the+species+by+fashioning+them+of+clay+in+the+way+Adam+was+fashioned%22&pg=PA307#v=onepage
Table Talk (1569)

God , Way , Fashion

“Communism… is the genuine resolution of the antagonism between man and nature and between man and man; it is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necessity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as the solution.”

Karl Marx book Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844

Private Property and Communism, p. 43.
Paris Manuscripts (1844)

History , Communication , Nature , Freedom

“The whole business of swearing, especially English swearing, is mysterious. Of its very nature swearing is as irrational as magic-- indeed, it is a species of magic. But there is also a paradox about it, namely this: Our intention in swearing is to shock and wound, which we do by mentioning something that should be kept secret--usually something to do with the sexual functions. But the strange thing is that when a word is well established as a swear word, it seems to lose its original meaning; that is, it loses the thing that made it into a swear word. A word becomes an oath because it means a certain thing, and, because it has become an oath, it ceases to mean that thing.”

George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 32

Secret , Business , Nature

“The Gospel that we preach is the power of God unto salvation; and the first principle of that Gospel is, as I have already said, faith in God, and faith in Jesus Christ His Son our Savior. We must believe that he is the character he is represented to be in the holy Scriptures. Believe that he told the truth when he said to his disciples, "Go ye forth and preach the Gospel to every creature; he that believeth and is baptized shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned." We must believe that this same Jesus was crucified for the sins of the world, that is for the original sin, not the actual individual transgressions of the people; not but that the blood of Christ will cleanse from all sin, all who are disposed to act their part by repentance, and faith in his name. But the original sin was atoned for by the death of Christ, although its effects we still see in the diseases, tempers and every species of wickedness with which the human family is afflicted.”

Brigham Young (1801–1877) Latter Day Saint movement leader

Journal of Discourses 13:143 (July 11, 1869)
1860s

Death , God , People , Truth

“I am not part of the human race. Humanity has rejected me. The females of the human species have never wanted to mate with me, so how could I possibly consider myself part of humanity? Humanity has never accepted me among them, and now I know why. I am more than human. I am superior to them all. I am Elliot Rodger… Magnificent, glorious, supreme, eminent… Divine! I am the closest thing there is to a living god. Humanity is a disgusting, depraved, and evil species. It is my purpose to punish them all. I will purify the world of everything that is wrong with it. On the Day of Retribution, I will truly be a powerful god, punishing everyone I deem to be impure and depraved.”

Elliot Rodger (1991–2014) American spree killer

My Twisted World (2014), Final Days

God , World , Evil , Parting

“Only two suppositions seem to be open to us — Either each species of crocodile has been specially created, or it has arisen out of some pre-existing form by the operation of natural causes.
Choose your hypothesis; I have chosen mine. I can find no warranty for believing in the distinct creation of a score of successive species of crocodiles in the course of countless ages of time.”

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

1860s, On a Piece of Chalk (1868)

Age , Nature , Time , Success

“Homosexuality is a crime against Nature. All Nature declares the purpose of the instinct for sexual union is reproduction and thus, preservations of the specie. The overpowering male sex drive must be channeled toward possession of females, as well as elements such as territory and power, which are necessary to keep them.”

David Lane (white nationalist) book 88 Precepts

page ?
88 Precepts

Sex , Nature

“I think, whether we’re talking about gender inequality or racism or queer rights or indigenous rights or animal rights, we’re talking about the fight against injustice. We’re talking about the fight against the belief that one nation, one people, one race, one gender, one species, has the right to dominate, use and control another with impunity. I think we’ve become very disconnected from the natural world. Many of us are guilty of an egocentric world view, and we believe that we’re the centre of the universe. We go into the natural world and we plunder it for its resources. We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakeable. Then we take her milk that’s intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal. We fear the idea of personal change, because we think we need to sacrifice something; to give something up. But human beings at our best are so creative and inventive, and we can create, develop and implement systems of change that are beneficial to all sentient beings and the environment.”

Joaquin Phoenix (1974) American actor, music video director, producer, musician, and social activist

"Joaquin Phoenix's Oscars speech in full: 'We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and steal her baby'" https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/feb/10/joaquin-phoenixs-oscars-speech-in-full, The Guardian (February 10, 2020).

Baby , Personality , People , Nature

“We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.”

Douglas Adams book Last Chance to See

Source: Last Chance to See

“New mutations don't create new species; they create offspring that are impaired.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

“It is substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule, indeed, extends with more or less force to every species of free government.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

1790s, Farewell Address (1796)

Spring

“Never trust a species that grins all the time. It’s up to something.”

Terry Pratchett book Pyramids

Source: Pyramids

Time

“Paper money has had the effect in your state that it will ever have, to ruin commerce, oppress the honest, and open the door to every species of fraud and injustice.”

George Washington (1732–1799) first President of the United States

Letter to Jabez Bowen https://founders.archives.gov/GEWN-04-04-02-0428 (9 January 1787)
1780s

Money , Fraud

“Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.”

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

Source: The Gay Science

Life , Death , Dead

“99.99 percent of all species that have ever lived are no longer with us.”

Bill Bryson book A Short History of Nearly Everything

Source: A Short History of Nearly Everything

“While the rest of the species is descended from apes, redheads are descended from cats.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

Cats

“You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don't you?”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Source: Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

“No other species anywhere in the world had invented boredom. Perhaps it was boredom, not intelligence, that had propelled them up to the evolutionary ladder.”

Terry Pratchett book Thief of Time

Source: Thief of Time

World , Intelligence

“You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

LSD - Terence Mckenna - The Purpose Of Psychedelics http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=27759640
Context: My notion of what the psychedelic experience is, for us, that we each must become like fishermen, and go out on to the dark ocean of mind, and let our nets down into that sea. And what you're after is not some behemoth, that will tear through your nets, follow them and drag you in your little boat, you know, into the abyss, nor are what we're looking for a bunch of sardines that can slip through your net and disappear. Ideas like, "Have you ever noticed that your little finger exactly fits your nostril?", and stuff like that. What we are looking for are middle-size ideas, that are not so small that they are trivial, and not so large that they're incomprehensible. Middle-size ideas we can wrestle into our boat and take back to the folks on shore, and have fish dinner. And every one of us when we go into the psychedelic state, this is what we should be looking for. It's not for your elucidation, it's not part of your self-directed psychotherapy. You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is in danger by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness. And so to whatever degree any one of us can bring back a small piece of the picture and contribute it to the building of the new paradigm, then we participate in the redemption of the human spirit, and that after all is what it's really all about.

World , Idea

“The Auditors fluttered anxiously. And, as always happens in their species when something goes radically wrong and needs fixing instantly, they settled down to try to work how who was to blame.”

Terry Pratchett book Hogfather

Source: Hogfather

“There are some few people I respect and admire, but I don't think much of the species.”

Mark Twain (1835–1910) American author and humorist

People , Thinking

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change.”

Charles Darwin (1809–1882) British naturalist, author of "On the origin of species, by means of natural selection"

The earliest known appearance of this basic statement is a paraphrase of Darwin in the writings of Leon C. Megginson, a management sociologist at Louisiana State University. [[Megginson, Leon C., Lessons from Europe for American Business, Southwestern Social Science Quarterly, 1963, 44(1), 3-13, p. 4]] Megginson's paraphrase (with slight variations) was later turned into a quotation. See the summary of Nicholas Matzke's findings in "One thing Darwin didn't say: the source for a misquotation" http://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/one-thing-darwin-didnt-say at the Darwin Correspondence Project. The statement is incorrectly attributed, without any source, to Clarence Darrow in Improving the Quality of Life for the Black Elderly: Challenges and Opportunities : Hearing before the Select Committee on Aging, House of Representatives, One Hundredth Congress, first session, September 25, 1987 (1988).
Misattributed

Intelligence , Change

“Moderation in temper, is always a virtue; but moderation in principle, is a species of vice.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

1790s, Letter to the Addressers (1792)
Context: A thing, moderately good, is not so good as it ought to be. Moderation in temper, is always a virtue; but moderation in principle, is a species of vice.

“Since everything that lives is obliged to expend and receive life, there is an exchange of modifications between the living creature and its environment.
And yet, once that vital necessity is satisfied, our species—a positively strange species—thinks it must create for itself other needs and tasks besides that of preserving life. … Whatever may be the origin or cause of this curious deviation, the human species is engaged in an immense adventure, an adventure whose objective and end it does not know. …
The same senses, the same muscles, the same limbs—more, the same types of signs, the same instruments of exchange, the same languages, the same modes of logic—enter into the most indispensable acts of our lives, as they figure into the most gratuitous. …
In short, man has not two sets of tools, he has only one, and this one set must serve him for the preservation of his life and his physiological rhythm, and expend itself at other times on illusions and on the labours of our great adventure. …
The same muscles and nerves produce walking as well as dancing, exactly as our linguistic faculty enables us to express our needs and ideas, while the same words and forms can be combined to produce works of poetry. A single mechanism is employed in both cases for two entirely different purposes.”

Paul Valéry (1871–1945) French poet, essayist, and philosopher

Source: Regards sur le monde actuel [Reflections on the World Today] (1931), pp. 158-159

Life , Idea , Thinking , Sense

“Part of our evolutionary heritage is the ability to adapt -- species that survive, adapt. Humans adapt by altering their priorities to match evolving values.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Father and Child Reunion (2001), p. 242.

Parting

“For nearly five years the present Ministers have harassed every trade, worried every profession, and assailed or menaced every class, institution, and species of property in the country. Occasionally they have varied this state of civil warfare by perpetrating some job which outraged public opinion, or by stumbling into mistakes which have been always discreditable, and sometimes ruinous. All this they call a policy, and seem quite proud of it; but the country has, I think, made up its mind to close this career of plundering and blundering.”

Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881) British Conservative politician, writer, aristocrat and Prime Minister

Source: Letter to Lord Grey de Wilton (3 October 1873), cited in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, Vol. 5 (1920), p. 262.

Thinking , Country

“The very fact that religions are not content to stand on their own feet, but insist on crippling or warping the flexible minds of children in their favour, forms a sufficient proof that there is no truth in them. If there were any truth in religion, it would be even more acceptable to a mature mind than to an infant mind—yet no mature mind ever accepts religion unless it has been crippled in infancy. … The whole basis of religion is a symbolic emotionalism which modern knowledge has rendered meaningless & even unhealthy. Today we know that the cosmos is simply a flux of purposeless rearrangement amidst which man is a wholly negligible incident or accident. There is no reason why it should be otherwise, or why we should wish it otherwise. All the florid romancing about man's "dignity", "immortality", &c. &c. is simply egotistical delusions plus primitive ignorance. So, too, are the infantile concepts of "sin" or cosmic "right" & "wrong". Actually, organic life on our planet is simply a momentary spark of no importance or meaning whatsoever. Man matters to nobody except himself. Nor are his "noble" imaginative concepts any proof of the objective reality of the things they visualise. Psychologists understand how these concepts are built up out of fragments of experience, instinct, & misapprehension. Man is essentially a machine of a very complex sort, as La Mettrie recognised nearly 2 centuries ago. He arises through certain typical chemical & physical reactions, & his members gradually break down into their constituent parts & vanish from existence. The idea of personal "immortality" is merely the dream of a child or savage. However, there is nothing anti-ethical or anti-social in such a realistic view of things. Although meaning nothing in the cosmos as a whole, mankind obviously means a good deal to itself. Therefore it must be regulated by customs which shall ensure, for its own benefit, the full development of its various accidental potentialities. It has a fortuitous jumble of reactions, some of which it instinctively seeks to heighten & prolong, & some of which it instinctively seeks to shorten or lessen. Also, we see that certain courses of action tend to increase its radius of comprehension & degree of specialised organisation (things usually promoting the wished-for reactions, & in general removing the species from a clod-like, unorganised state), while other courses of action tend to exert an opposite effect. Now since man means nothing to the cosmos, it is plan that his only logical goal (a goal whose sole reference is to himself) is simply the achievement of a reasonable equilibrium which shall enhance his likelihood of experiencing the sort of reactions he wishes, & which shall help along his natural impulse to increase his differentiation from unorganised force & matter. This goal can be reached only through teaching individual men how best to keep out of each other's way, & how best to reconcile the various conflicting instincts which a haphazard cosmic drift has placed within the breast of the same person. Here, then, is a practical & imperative system of ethics, resting on the firmest possible foundation & being essentially that taught by Epicurus & Lucretius. It has no need of supernatualism, & indeed has nothing to do with it.”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Natalie H. Wooley (2 May 1936), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 240-241
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life , Men , Children , Truth

“We have intelligent species on our planet that we are not even trying to communicate with.”

Paul Watson (1950) Canadian environmental activist

Worldfest video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnhqmF-RBu4

Intelligence , Communication

“It is the preservation of the species, not of individuals, which appears to be the design of Deity throughout the whole of nature.”

Mary Wollstonecraft book Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

Letter 22
Letters Written in Sweden (1796)

Nature , Appearance

“It seems to me that men of coarse and clumsy habits and of small knowledge do not deserve such fine instruments nor so great a variety of natural mechanism as men of speculation and of great knowledge; but merely a sack in which their food may be stowed and whence it may issue, since they cannot be judged to be any thing else than vehicles for food; for it seems to me they have nothing about them of the human species but the voice and the figure, and for all the rest are much below beasts.”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.

Men , Food , Nature , Knowledge

“Transcendence remains because that light, all in everything, transcends the universe and the species it inhabits at this stage.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

2010s, 2013, Interview in La Repubblica

Light , Universe

“The homogenizing of European man … requires a justification: it lies in serving a higher sovereign species that stands upon the former which can raise itself to its task only by doing this. Not merely a master race whose sole task is to rule, but a race with its own sphere of life, with an excess of strength … strong enough to have no need of the tyranny of the virtue-imperative.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book The Will to Power

Sec. 898 (Notebook W II 1. Fall 1887, KGW VIII, 2.88-90, KSA 12.424-6)
The Will to Power (1888)

Life , Strong

“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 (1915–2005) Canadian-born American writer

To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (1976), p. 38
General sources

History , Time

“We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts, and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and undefinable for us.”

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

On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense (1873)

Nature

“Independent of biological need fulfillment and the reproductive needs of the species, cultures] satisfy not bodily needs, but values. Values define cultural man's need for rationality, meaningfulness in emotional experience, richness of imagination, and depth of faith. All cultures respond to such supra-biological values. But in what form they do so depends on the specific kind of values people happen to have.”

Ervin László (1932) Hungarian musician and philosopher

Source: The systems view of the world (1996), p. 76.

People , Faith , Imagination , Dependency

“We imagine that the Creator at the actual time of creation made only one single species for each natural order of plants, this species being different in habit and fructification from all the rest. That he made these mutually fertile, whence out of their progeny, fructification having been somewhat changed, Genera of natural classes have arisen as many in number as the different parents, and since this is not carried further, we regard this also as having been done by His Omnipotent hand directly in the beginning; thus all Genera were primeval and constituted a single Species. That as many Genera having arisen as there were individuals in the beginning, these plants in course of time became fertilised by others of different sort and thus arose Species until so many were produced as now exist… these Species were sometimes fertilised out of congeners, that is other Species of the same Genus, whence have arisen Varieties.”

Carl Linnaeus (1707–1778) Swedish botanist, physician, and zoologist

Fundamenta fructificationis (1742). As quoted in John S. Wilkins (2009), "Species: A History of the Idea," University of California Press. p. 72

Imagination , Nature , Parent , Change

“[A]ristocracy has a tendency to degenerate the human species.”

Thomas Paine book Rights of Man

Part 1.3 Rights of Man
1790s, Rights of Man, Part I (1791)

“I don't see how you can be saying this. Look. You want to take…you want your god to take responsibility for the huge number of collapsing stars and imploding galaxies and destroyed universes and failed solar systems that have left us in this tiny corner on the one planet in this petty solar system that can support life some of the time on some of its surface. And you want a creator who filled this earth with species, since life began 99% of which are now extinct already…and this is some design, isn't it?”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

2000s, 2007
Source: Hannity's America, May 13, 2007 interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWoHh4_rVdg http://transcripts.wikia.com/wiki/Sean_Hannity_Christopher_Hitchens_Hannity%27s_America_May13%2C_2007?venotify=created

Life , God , Star , Support

“Margaret Ll. Davies writes that Janet is dying and will I write on her for The Times – a curious thought, rather: as if it mattered who wrote, or not. But this flooded me with the idea of Janet yesterday. I think writing, my writing, is a species of mediumship. I become the person.”

Virginia Woolf (1882–1941) English writer

Entry of 11 July 1937, in A Writer's Diary (1953)

Idea , Thinking , Time , Personality

“Each individual is a species unto him/herself.”

Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) Austrian esotericist

Theosophy: An Introduction to the Spiritual Processes in Human Life and in the Cosmos (1904)

“Eugenio Scalfari: Your Holiness, in our previous meeting you told me that our species will disappear in a certain moment and that God, still out of his creative force, will create new species. You have never spoken to me about the souls who died in sin and will go to hell to suffer it for eternity. You have however spoken to me of good souls, admitted to the contemplation of God. But what about bad souls? Where are they punished?
Pope Francis: They are not punished, those who repent obtain the forgiveness of God and enter the rank of souls who contemplate him, but those who do not repent and cannot therefore be forgiven disappear. There is no hell, there is the disappearance of sinful souls.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

Interview published in La Repubblica (28 March 2018), as translated in the web log Rorate Caeli http://rorate-caeli.blogspot.com/2018/03/there-is-no-hell-new-francis-revelation.html (29 March 2018)
2010s, 2018

God , Soul , Forgiveness , Hell

“But there is another and greater distinction for which no truly natural or religious reason can be assigned, and that is, the distinction of men into KINGS and SUBJECTS. Male and female are the distinctions of nature, good and bad the distinctions of heaven; but how a race of men came into the world so exalted above the rest, and distinguished like some new species, is worth enquiring into, and whether they are the means of happiness or of misery to mankind.”

Thomas Paine (1737–1809) English and American political activist

1770s, Common Sense (1776)

Men , World , Nature , Happiness

“Whatever misanthropists may say, ingrates and the perverse are exceptions in the human species.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

“The ruling British elite are like animals--not only in their morality, but in their outlook on knowledge. They are clever animals, who are masters of the wicked nature of their own species, and recognize ferally the distinctions of the hated human species. Nonetheless, obsessively dedicated to being such animals, they can not [sic] assimilate those qualities unique to true human beings.”

Lyndon LaRouche (1922–2019) American political activist and founder of the LaRouche movement

"Secrets Known Only to the Inner Elites", in his political journal The Campaigner (May-June 1978), p. 64.

Hate , Nature , Knowledge , Animals

“The Queen must surely be proud of such heroic men as the Police and Irish soldiers as It takes eight or eleven of the biggest mud crushers in Melbourne to take one poor little half starved larrakin to a watch house. I have seen as many as eleven, big & ugly enough to lift Mount Macedon out of a crab hole more like the species of a baboon or Guerilla than a man.”

Ned Kelly (1855–1880) Australian bushranger

Jerilderie Letter (1879)

Men , Housing

“In organisms of all kinds the young are launched upon their careers endowed with a certain amount of biological capital derived from their parents. This varies enormously in amount in different species, but, in all, there has been, before the offspring is able to lead an independent existence, a certain expenditure of nutriment in addition, almost universally, to some expenditure of time or activity, which the parents are induced by their instincts to make for the advantage of their young. Let us consider the reproductive value of these offspring at the moment when this parental expenditure on their behalf has just ceased. If we consider the aggregate of an entire generation of such offspring it is clear that the total reproductive value of the males in this group is exactly equal to the total value of all the females, because each sex must supply half the ancestry of all future generations of the species. From this it follows that the sex ratio will so adjust itself, under the influence of Natural Selection, that the total parental expenditure incurred in respect of children of each sex, shall be equal; for if this were not so and the total expenditure incurred in producing males, for instance, were less than the total expenditure incurred in producing females, then since the total reproductive value of the males is equal to that of the females, it would follow that those parents, the innate tendencies of which caused them to produce males in excess, would, for the same expenditure, produce a greater amount of reproductive value; and in consequence would be the progenitors of a larger fraction of future generations than would parents having a congenital bias towards the production of females. Selection would thus raise the sex-ratio until the expenditure upon males became equal to that upon females.”

Ronald Fisher book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection

On natural selection acting on sex ratio: Fisher's principle, Ch. 6, p. 141.
The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930)

Children , Sex , Nature , Parent

“As geological time goes, it is but a moment since the human race began and only the twinkling of an eye since the arts of civilization were first invented. In spite of some alarmists, it is hardly likely that our species will completely exterminate itself. And so long as man continues to exist, we may be pretty sure that, whatever he may suffer for a time, and whatever brightness may be eclipsed, he will emerge sooner or later, perhaps strengthened and reinvigorated by a period of mental sleep. The universe is vast and men are but tiny specks on an insignificant planet. But the more we realize our minuteness and our impotence in the face of cosmic forces, the more astonishing becomes what human beings have achieved.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

"If We are to Survive this Dark Time", The New York Times Magazine (3 September 1950)
1950s

Men , Art , Sleep , Suffering

“[on the possibility of contact with an alien civilization]: I think it would be a disaster. The extraterrestrials would probably be far in advance of us. The history of advanced races meeting more primitive people on this planet is not very happy, and they were the same species. I think we should keep our heads low.”

Stephen Hawking (1942–2018) British theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author

Appearance in the National Geographic Channel program Naked Science: Alien Contact, as quoted in The New York Times (24 November 2004) http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C00E2D8173EF937A15752C1A9629C8B63&sec=&spon= and a CNN transcript of an interview with Seth Shostak from Anderson Cooper 360 (26 November 2004) http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0411/26/acd.01.html

People , History , Thinking , Happiness

“When I began the following Work, my only object was to extend and explain more fully the Memoir which I read at the public meeting of the Academy of Sciences in the month of April 1787, on the necessity of reforming and completing the Nomenclature of Chemistry. While engaged in this employment, I perceived, better than I had ever done before, the justice of the following maxims of the Abbé de Condillac, in his System of Logic, and some other of his works. "We think only through the medium of words.—Languages are true analytical methods.—Algebra, which is adapted to its purpose in every species of expression, in the most simple, most exact, and best manner possible, is at the same time a language and an analytical method.—The art of reasoning is nothing more than a language well arranged."”

Antoine Lavoisier (1743–1794) French chemist

Source: Elements of Chemistry (1790), p.xiii

Justice , Art , Thinking , Science

“All men would then be necessarily equal, if they were without needs. It is the poverty connected with our species which subordinates one man to another. It is not inequality which is the real misfortune, it is dependence.”

Voltaire (1694–1778) French writer, historian, and philosopher

Tous les hommes seraient donc nécessairement égaux, s’ils étaient sans besoins. La misère attachée à notre espèce subordonne un homme à un autre homme: ce n’est pas l’inégalité qui est un malheur réel, c’est la dépendance.
"Equality" (1764)
Citas, Dictionnaire philosophique (1764)

Men , Dependency

“The world is full of conflicts; and, overshadowing all minor conflicts, the titanic struggle between Communism and anti-Communism.
Almost everybody who is politically conscious has strong feelings about one or more of these issues; but we want you, if you can, to set aside such feelings and consider yourselves only as members of a biological species which has had a remarkable history, and whose disappearance none of us can desire.
We shall try to say no single word which should appeal to one group rather than to another. All, equally, are in peril, and, if the peril is understood, there is hope that they may collectively avert it.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1950s, The Russell-Einstein Manifesto (1955)

World , Hope , Feeling , History

“I just wonder what it would be like to be reincarnated in an animal whose species had been so reduced in numbers than it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings toward the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist… I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus.”

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (1921) member of the British Royal Family, consort to Queen Elizabeth II

Foreword to If I Were an Animal (1987) by Fleur Cowles ISBN 9780688061500
1980s

Feeling , Animals

“Some American writer has said “the snakes in this district may be divided into one species—the venomous”. The same principle applies here. Postage-Stamp-Cases may be divided into one species, the “Wonderland”. Imitations of it will soon appear, no doubt: but they cannot include the two Pictorial Surprises, which are copyright.You don't see why I call them 'Surprises'? Well, take the Case in your left hand, and regard it attentively. You see Alice nursing the Duchess's Baby? (An entirely new combination, by the way : it doesn't occur in the book.) Now, with your right thumb and forefinger, lay hold of the little book, and suddenly pull it out. The Baby has turned into a Pig I If that doesn't surprise you, why, I suppose you wouldn't be surprised if your own Mother-in-law suddenly turned into a Gyroscope!”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing (1890)

Books , Law , Way , Appearance

“That it must have been hunger alone, which first drove man to slay the animals and feed upon their flesh and blood; and that this compulsion was no mere consequence of his removal into colder climes … is proved by the patent fact that great nations with ample supplies of grain suffer nothing in strength or endurance even in colder regions through an almost exclusively vegetable diet, as is shewn by the eminent length of life of Russian peasants; while the Japanese, who know no other food than vegetables, are further renowned for their warlike valour and keenness of intellect. We may therefore call it quite an abnormality when hunger bred the thirst for blood … that thirst which history teaches us can never more be slaked, and fills its victims with a raging madness, not with courage. One can only account for it all by the human beast of prey having made itself monarch of the peaceful world, just as the ravening wild beast usurped dominion of the woods … And little as the savage animals have prospered, we see the sovereign human beast of prey decaying too. Owing to a nutriment against his nature, he falls sick with maladies that claim but him, attains no more his natural span of life or gentle death, but, plagued by pains and cares of body and soul unknown to any other species, he shuffles through an empty life to its ever fearful cutting short.”

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) German composer, conductor

Part III
Religion and Art (1880)

Life , Death , Hunger , Pain

“How are you, doctor, that is what we say when we do not wish to play the weakling, we say Fine, even though we may be dying, and this is commonly known as taking one's courage in both hands, a phenomenon that has only been observed in the human species.”

José Saramago book Blindness

Source: Blindness (1995), p. 32

Courage

“We imagine that hardness, violence, slavery, peril in the street and in the heart, concealment, Stoicism, temptation, and deviltry of every sort, everything evil, frightful, tyrannical, raptor- and snake-like in man, serves as well for the advancement of the species "man" as their opposite.”

Friedrich Nietzsche book Beyond Good and Evil

Beyond Good and Evil, translated by Marianne Cowan [Henry Regnery Company, 1955, p. 50]; Jenseits von Gut und Böse [Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart, 1988, p. 130]

Imagination , Evil , Heart

“For example, a man who had seen a great many white swans might argue, by our principle, that on the data it was probable that all swans were white, and this might be a perfectly sound argument. The argument is not disproved by the fact that some swans are black, because a thing may very well happen in spite of the fact that some data render it improbable. In the case of the swans, a man might know that colour is a very variable characteristic in many species of animals, and that, therefore, an induction as to colour is peculiarly liable to error. But this knowledge would be a fresh datum, by no means proving that the probability relatively to our previous data had been wrongly estimated. The fact, therefore, that things often fail to fulfill our expectations is no evidence that our expectations will not probably be fulfilled in a given case or a given class of cases. Thus our inductive principle is at any rate not capable of being disproved by an appeal to experience. The inductive principle, however, is equally incapable of being proved by an appeal to experience.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

"On Induction"
1910s, The Problems of Philosophy (1912)

Error , Knowledge , Animals

“New truth is often uncomfortable, especially to the holders of power; nevertheless, amid the long record of cruelty and bigotry, it is the most important achievement of our intelligent but wayward species.”

Bertrand Russell book Religion and Science

Religion and Science (1935), Ch. X: Conclusion
1930s

Truth , Intelligence

“On this occasion, despite the wind and sparkling stars, they looked just like huge chunks of stone, pathetically chiseled by desperate folk to resemble stern gods. People did bizarre things when they were afraid…as most men and women had been for nearly all the time since the species evolved.”

David Brin book Earth

Part VIII (p. 480)
Earth (1990)

Women , Men , God , People

“I hate the world and almost all the people in it. I hate the Labour Congress and the journalists who send men to be slaughtered, and the fathers who feel a smug pride when their sons are killed, and even the pacifists who keep saying human nature is essentially good, in spite of all the daily proofs to the contrary. I hate the planet and the human race – I am ashamed to belong to such a species.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

Letter to Colette, December 28, 1916
1910s

Men , Hate , People , World