Quotes about species (1069 quotes, page 2)

“The several species of government vie with each other in the absurdity of their constitutions, and the oppression which they make their subjects endure. Take them under what form you please, they are in effect but a despotism”

Edmund Burke book A Vindication of Natural Society

A Vindication of Natural Society (1756)
Context: The several species of government vie with each other in the absurdity of their constitutions, and the oppression which they make their subjects endure. Take them under what form you please, they are in effect but a despotism, and they fall, both in effect and appearance too, after a very short period, into that cruel and detestable species of tyranny; which I rather call it, because we have been educated under another form, than that this is of worse consequences to mankind. For the free governments, for the point of their space, and the moment of their duration, have felt more confusion, and committed more flagrant acts of tyranny, than the most perfect despotic governments which we have ever known. Turn your eye next to the labyrinth of the law, and the iniquity conceived in its intricate recesses. Consider the ravages committed in the bowels of all commonwealths by ambition, by avarice, envy, fraud, open injustice, and pretended friendship; vices which could draw little support from a state of nature, but which blossom and flourish in the rankness of political society. Revolve our whole discourse; add to it all those reflections which your own good understanding shall suggest, and make a strenuous effort beyond the reach of vulgar philosophy, to confess that the cause of artificial society is more defenceless even than that of artificial religion; that it is as derogatory from the honour of the Creator, as subversive of human reason, and productive of infinitely more mischief to the human race.

“The city is not built, as is the cottage or the domus, to shelter from the weather and to propagate the species — these are personal, family concerns — but in order to discuss public affairs.”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XIV: Who Rules The World?
Context: Greeks and Latins appear in history lodged, like bees in their hives, within cities, poleis. … The polis is not primarily a collection of habitable dwellings, but a meeting-place for citizens, a space set apart for public functions. The city is not built, as is the cottage or the domus, to shelter from the weather and to propagate the species — these are personal, family concerns — but in order to discuss public affairs. … The man of the fields is still a sort of vegetable. His existence, all that he feels, thinks, wishes for, preserves the listless drowsiness in which the plant lives. The great civilisations of Asia and Africa were, from this point of view, huge anthropomorphic vegetations. …Socrates, the great townsman, quintessence of the spirit of the polis, can say: "I have nothing to do with the trees of the field, I have to do only with the man of the city." What has ever been known of this by the Hindu, the Persian, the Chinese, or the Egyptian?

Family , Personality , Weather

“As to the Christian system of faith, it appears to me as a species of Atheism — a sort of religious denial of God. It professes to believe in a man rather than in God. It is a compound made up chiefly of Manism with but little Deism, and is as near to Atheism as twilight is to darkness.”

Thomas Paine book The Age of Reason

1790s, The Age of Reason, Part I (1794)
Context: As to the Christian system of faith, it appears to me as a species of Atheism — a sort of religious denial of God. It professes to believe in a man rather than in God. It is a compound made up chiefly of Manism with but little Deism, and is as near to Atheism as twilight is to darkness. It introduces between man and his Maker an opaque body, which it calls a Redeemer, as the moon introduces her opaque self between the earth and the sun, and it produces by this means a religious, or an irreligious, eclipse of light. It has put the whole orbit of reason into shade.

God , Faith , Appearance

“In the heavens, the Sun and Moon are, by interpreters of dreams, put for the persons of Kings and Queens; but in sacred Prophecy, which regards not single persons, the Sun is put for the whole species and race of Kings”

Isaac Newton (1643–1727) British physicist and mathematician and founder of modern classical physics

Vol. I, Ch. 2: Of the Prophetic Language
Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John (1733)
Context: In the heavens, the Sun and Moon are, by interpreters of dreams, put for the persons of Kings and Queens; but in sacred Prophecy, which regards not single persons, the Sun is put for the whole species and race of Kings, in the kingdom or kingdoms of the world politic, shining with regal power and glory; the Moon for the body of the common people, considered as the King's wife; the Stars for subordinate Princes and great men, or for Bishops and Rulers of the people of God, when the Sun is Christ; light for the glory, truth, and knowledge, wherewith great and good men shine and illuminate others; darkness for obscurity of condition, and for error, blindness and ignorance; darkening, smiting, or setting of the Sun, Moon, and Stars, for the ceasing of a kingdom, or for the desolation thereof, proportional to the darkness; darkening the Sun, turning the Moon into blood, and falling of the Stars, for the same; new Moons, for the return of a dispersed people into a body politic or ecclesiastic.

Dreams , Sun , Personality

“Heaven and Hell suppose two distinct species of men, the good and the bad; but the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue.”

David Hume (1711–1776) Scottish philosopher, economist, and historian

Essay on the Immortality of the Soul
Context: Heaven and Hell suppose two distinct species of men, the good and the bad; but the greatest part of mankind float betwixt vice and virtue. -- Were one to go round the world with an intention of giving a good supper to the righteous, and a sound drubbing to the wicked, he would frequently be embarrassed in his choice, and would find that the merits and the demerits of most men and women scarcely amount to the value of either.

Men , Hell , Parting

“This task gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.”

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) 16th President of the United States

1830s, The Lyceum Address (1838)
Context: We find ourselves under the government of a system of political institutions, conducing more essentially to the ends of civil and religious liberty, than any of which the history of former times tells us. We, when mounting the stage of existence, found ourselves the legal inheritors of these fundamental blessings. We toiled not in the acquirement or establishment of them; they are a legacy bequeathed us by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed, race of ancestors. Theirs was the task (and nobly they performed it) to possess themselves, and through themselves us, of this goodly land, and to uprear upon its hills and its valleys a political edifice of liberty and equal rights; 'tis ours only to transmit these — the former unprofaned by the foot of an invader, the latter undecayed by the lapse of time and untorn by usurpation — to the latest generation that fate shall permit the world to know. This task gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity, and love for our species in general, all imperatively require us faithfully to perform.

Love , Justice , Gratitude

“Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.”

Richard Dawkins book The Selfish Gene

Source: The Selfish Gene (1976, 1989), Ch. 1. Why Are People?
Context: Let us try to teach generosity and altruism, because we are born selfish. Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs, something that no other species has ever aspired to do.

Understanding , Chance , Selfishness

“The striking-regularity with which the same hybrid forms always reappeared whenever fertilisation took place between the same species induced further experiments to be undertaken”

Gregor Mendel book Experiments in plant-hybridisation

Introductory paragraph
Experiments in plant-hybridisation (1865)
Context: Experience of artificial fertilisation, such as is effected with ornamental plants in order to obtain new variations in colour, has led to the experiments which will here be discussed. The striking-regularity with which the same hybrid forms always reappeared whenever fertilisation took place between the same species induced further experiments to be undertaken, the object of which was to follow up the developments of the hybrids in their progeny.

“Survivors represent a separate species, just like an animal species.”

Imre Kertész (1929–2016) Hungarian writer

Liquidation (2003)
Context: Survivors represent a separate species, just like an animal species. We are all survivors, that is what determines our perverse and degenerate mental world. Auschwitz.

Animals

“Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Letter, June 8, 1762 [to an unnamed recipient], p. 103
Life of Samuel Johnson (1791), Vol I
Context: Hope is itself a species of happiness, and, perhaps, the chief happiness which this world affords: but, like all other pleasures immoderately enjoyed, the excesses of hope must be expiated by pain; and expectations improperly indulged must end in disappointment. If it be asked, what is the improper expectation which it is dangerous to indulge, experience will quickly answer, that it is such expectation as is dictated not by reason, but by desire; expectation raised, not by the common occurrences of life, but by the wants of the expectant; an expectation that requires the common course of things to be changed, and the general rules of action to be broken.

Hope , World , Hope , Happiness

“I am principled against this kind of traffic in the human species.”

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

Letter to Robert Lewis, 18 August 1799, published in John Clement Fitzpatrick, The writings of George Washington from the original manuscript sources, volume 37, pp. 338-9
1790s
Context: To sell the overplus I cannot, because I am principled against this kind of traffic in the human species. To hire them out, is almost as bad, because they could not be disposed of in families to any advantage, and to disperse the families I have an aversion. What then is to be done? Something must or I shall be ruined; for all the money (in addition to what I raise by Crops, and rents) that have been received for Lands, sold within the last four years, to the amount of Fifty thousand dollars, has scarcely been able to keep me a float.

“I would dare say that today this species is facing a very real and true danger of extinction, and no one can be sure, listen to this well, no one can be sure that it will survive this danger.”

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

University of Havana address (2005)
Context: I would dare say that today this species is facing a very real and true danger of extinction, and no one can be sure, listen to this well, no one can be sure that it will survive this danger.
Well, the fact that the species would not survive was discussed about 2,000 years ago. I remember that when I was a student I heard of the Apocalypse, a book of prophesy in the Bible. Apparently, 2000 years ago someone realized that this weak species could one day disappear.

“Our species will end but the light of God will not end and at that point it will invade all souls and it will all be in everyone.”

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

God , Soul , Light

“Malays abhor the state of celibacy. To remain unmarried was and is considered shameful. Everyone must be married at some time or other. The result is that whether a person is fit or unfit for marriage, he or she still marries and reproduces. An idiot or a simpleton is often married off to an old widower, ostensibly to take care of him in his old age. If this is not possible, backward relatives are paired off in marriage. These people survive, reproduce and propagate their species. The cumulative effect of this can be left to the imagination.”

Lee Kuan Yew (1923–2015) First Prime Minister of Singapore

[Barr, Michael D., Lee Kuan Yew: Race, Culture and Genes, Journal of Contemporary Asia, 1999, 29 2, 147, https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/5058/d1bc358fe18944e8aaa399e422f74d0fed75.pdf]
1980s

Time , Imagination , Marriage , Personality

“William inherited very large possessions, part of which consisted of crown debts, due to the vice-admiral for sums he had advanced for the sea-service. No moneys were at that time less secure than those owing from the king. Penn was obliged to go, more than once, and "thee" and "thou" Charles and his ministers, to recover the debt; and at last, instead of specie, the government invested him with the right and sovereignty of a province of America, to the south of Maryland. Thus was a Quaker raised to sovereign power.
He set sail for his new dominions with two ships filled with Quakers, who followed his fortune. The country was then named by them Pennsylvania, from William Penn; and he founded Philadelphia, which is now a very flourishing city. His first care was to make an alliance with his American neighbors; and this is the only treaty between those people and the Christians that was not ratified by an oath, and that was never infringed. The new sovereign also enacted several wise and wholesome laws for his colony, which have remained invariably the same to this day. The chief is, to ill-treat no person on account of religion, and to consider as brethren all those who believe in one God. He had no sooner settled his government than several American merchants came and peopled this colony. The natives of the country, instead of flying into the woods, cultivated by degrees a friendship with the peaceable Quakers. They loved these new strangers as much as they disliked the other Christians, who had conquered and ravaged America. In a little time these savages, as they are called, delighted with their new neighbors, flocked in crowds to Penn, to offer themselves as his vassals. It was an uncommon thing to behold a sovereign "thee'd" and "thou'd" by his subjects, and addressed by them with their hats on; and no less singular for a government to be without one priest in it; a people without arms, either for offence or preservation; a body of citizens without any distinctions but those of public employments; and for neighbors to live together free from envy or jealousy. In a word, William Penn might, with reason, boast of having brought down upon earth the Golden Age, which in all probability, never had any real existence but in his dominions.”

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

Variants:
No oaths, no seals, no official mummeries were used; the treaty was ratified on both sides with a yea, yea — the only one, says Voltaire, that the world has known, never sworn to and never broken.
As quoted in William Penn : An Historical Biography (1851) by William Hepworth Dixon
William Penn began by making a league with the Americans, his neighbors. It is the only one between those natives and the Christians which was never sworn to, and the only one that was never broken.
As quoted in American Pioneers (1905), by William Augustus Mowry and Blanche Swett Mowry, p. 80
It was the only treaty made by the settlers with the Indians that was never sworn to, and the only one that was never broken.
As quoted in A History of the American Peace Movement (2008) by Charles F. Howlett, and ‎Robbie Lieberman, p. 33
The History of the Quakers (1762)

Money , God , Sea , Religion

“Nature's laws deny inter-species compassion and declare it to be racial suicide.”

David Lane (white nationalist) (1938–2007) American white supremacist, convicted felon

Revolution by Number

Law , Nature , Suicide

“We are all lone souls. It pays to know humility, lest the delusion of control, of mastery, overwhelms. And, indeed, we seem a species prone to that delusion, again and ever again."
~Fiddler, pg. 558”

Steven Erikson book Deadhouse Gates

Source: Deadhouse Gates

Soul

“Man is the only living species that has the power to act as his own destroyer—and that is the way he has acted through most of his history.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

The Virtue of Selfishness (1964)
Source: The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism

Way , History

“Kneeling before him, Regin murmured, "Don't let that Fegley worm get to you." Still staring ahead, the kid slowed his banging. "There's a good… male of indeterminate species.”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Dreams of a Dark Warrior

“To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall.”

Thomas Hardy Under the Greenwood Tree

Source: Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), ch. 1

Tree

“Survival," I said softly. "It's selfish, and it's dark, and we've always been a species willing to do anything to satisfy our needs. Individuals have morals. Mobs have appetites.”

Rachel Caine (1962) American writer

Source: Total Eclipse

Selfishness

“For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.”

Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist

The Female of the Species, Stanza 1 (1911).
Other works
Variant: The glory of the garden lies in more than meets the eye.

“The modern world is devoted to vanishing species, vanishing weather and vanishing capacity for wonder.”

Douglas Coupland The Gum Thief

Source: The Gum Thief

World , Weather

“I'm getting the impression that women, in any form, scare you."
He shrugged. "They're the more violent species. And unpredictable. I'd rather take on a wild boar. You can't shoot women.”

Maya Banks (1964) Author

Source: Hidden Away

Women

“To give preference to the life of a being simply because that being is a member of our species would put us in the same position as racists who give preference to those who are members of their race.”

Peter Singer book Practical Ethics

Peter Singer - The Genius of Darwin: The Uncut Interviews - Richard Dawkins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYYNY2oKVWU, 2009.
Source: Practical Ethics
Context: Speciesism is an attitude of prejudice towards beings because they're not members of our species, so just as racism means that you're prejudiced against beings who are not members of your race and sexism means you're prejudiced against people of the other sex. So we humans tend to be speciesist in we think that any being that is a member of the species homo sapien just automatically has a higher moral status and is more important than any being that is a member of any other species, irrespective of the actual characteristics of those beings.

Life

“The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.”

Wilkie Collins (1824–1889) British writer

Source: My Miscellanies

People , Time , Reading

“I declare that The Beatles are mutants. Prototypes of evolutionary agents sent by God, endowed with a mysterious power to create a new human species, a young race of laughing freemen.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

As quoted in Shout! (1981) by Philip Norman, p. 365; and in An Encyclopedia of Quotations about Music (1981) by Nat Shapiro, p. 303

God

“It is not only species of animal that die out, but whole species of feeling. And if you are wise you will never pity the past for what it did not know, but pity yourself for what it did.”

John Fowles book The Magus

Source: The Magus

Feeling , Past , Animals

“The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd expect to be made by a species that's about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.”

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

Christopher Hitchens vs. Barry Brummett, 04/06/2011 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjSMmRFHaJM&t=13m50s
2010s, 2011

God

“Life is a ﬁght, but not everyone’s a ﬁghter. Otherwise, bullies would be an endangered species.”

Andrew Vachss (1942) American writer and lawyer

Source: Terminal

Life

“Seeds have the power to preserve species, to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity, to counter economic monopoly and to check the advance of conformity on all its many fronts.”

Michael Pollan (1955) American author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism

Source: Second Nature: A Gardener's Education

“As far as we know, we are the only species on the planet who have been given the gift-or curse, perhaps-of awareness about our own mortality. Everything here eventually dies; we're just the lucky ones who get to think about this fact every day.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Thinking

“Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices.”

Jared Diamond (1937) American scientist and author

Source: Why Is Sex Fun? The Evolution of Human Sexuality

Animals

“no more pep talks about believing in toads," Liza said.
"Don't they turn into princeses when you kiss them?" Bonnie said.
"Thats frogs," Liza Said. "Entirely different species.”

Jennifer Crusie book Bet Me

Source: Bet Me

Kiss

“Our world is fast succumbing to the activities of men and women who would stake the future of our species on beliefs that should not survive an elementary school education.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Source: The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason

Women , Men , World , Education

“Why would an all-powerful creator decide to plant his carefully crafted species on islands and continents in exactly the appropriate pattern to suggest, irresistibly, that they had evolved and dispersed from the site of their evolution?”

Richard Dawkins book The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

Source: The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

“Art, as I see it, is any human activity which doesn’t grow out of either of our species’ two basic instincts: survival and reproduction.”

Scott McCloud (1960) American cartoonist

Source: Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

Art

“Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species”

Edward O. Wilson book The Ants

Source: The Ants

“Apparently textbooks were an endangered species here in Bixby, Oklahoma.”

Scott Westerfeld book The Secret Hour

Source: The Secret Hour

“Becoming vegan is the most important and direct change we can immediately make to save the planet and its species.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

Change

“Life is neither static nor unchanging. With no individuality, there can be no change, no adaptation and, in an inherently changing world, any species unable to adapt is also doomed.”

Jean M. Auel (1936) Novelist

Life , World , Change

“Deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and all truth is a species of revelation”

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) English poet, literary critic and philosopher

Truth , Feeling , Thinking

“He'll love and hate equally under cover, and esteem it a species of impertinence to loved or hated again.”

Emily Brontë book Wuthering Heights

Source: Wuthering Heights

Love , Hate

“All living things contain a measure of madness that moves them in strange, sometimes inexplicable ways. This madness can be saving; it is part and parcel of the ability to adapt. Without it, no species would survive.”

Yann Martel book Life of Pi

Source: Life of Pi

Way , Parting , Madness

“Nature can't evolve a species that hasn't the will to survive. Individuals might be bred to sacrifice themselves, but the race as a whole can never cease to exist.”

Orson Scott Card book Ender's Game

Source: Ender's Game

Nature

“I think it's a shame that something as creative and vital to the nature of the human species as story-telling is largely controlled by the soulless cretins known as publishers.”

Piers Anthony (1934) English-American writer in the science fiction and fantasy genres

Nature , Thinking

“… An average of seventy-four species become extinct every day, which was one good reason but not the only one to hold someone's hand…”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love

“Intelligence is based on how efficient a species became at doing the things they need to survive.”

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

Intelligence

“The difference between raman and varelse is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging. When we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have.”

Orson Scott Card book Speaker for the Dead

Source: Speaker for the Dead

“Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species -- man -- acquired significant power to alter the nature of the world.”

Rachel Carson book Silent Spring

Source: Silent Spring

World , Nature , Time

“This boy thinks I am not of his species, that I am some other kind of creature, one that can be crushed under the weight of a phone book.

The pain is not great, but the symbolism is disagreeable.”

Dave Eggers book What Is the What

Source: What Is the What

Pain , Books , Boy , Thinking

“A soldier is a "Yahoo" hired to kill in cold blood as many of his own Species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can.”

Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet

“We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species.”

Desmond Morris (1928) English zoologist, ethologist and surrealist painter

Question

“It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60).”

Joseph Campbell (1904–1987) American mythologist, writer and lecturer

Source: Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

God , Way , Understanding , Thinking

“The Human Species could have been great but instead we became satisfied with lights on our tennis shoes.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Shoe , Light

“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Source: A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays

Pain , Pleasure , Imagination

“Kat laughed. 'Who wants to live forever?'
Kish put his hand up. 'For the record, I do.'
Sin scowled at him. 'Then why do you irritate me so often?'
Suicidal tendencies are inherent in my species?”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Devil May Cry

Suicide

“A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.”

George Jean Nathan (1882–1958) American drama critic and magazine editor

Love , Feeling

“Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.”

Aldous Huxley book Point Counter Point

Source: Point Counter Point

Life , Nature

“First Emma. Now Thad. Regin was sick and tired of non-evil vampiric creatures messing with her millennium's worth of scathing animosity for their species…”

Kresley Cole American writer

Source: Dreams of a Dark Warrior

Evil

“There was a species of middle pretty who smiled at everything: happy smile, disappointed smile, you're-in-trouble smile.”

Scott Westerfeld (1963) American science fiction writer

Smile , Disappointment , Happiness

“Cosmology is among the oldest subjects to captivate our species. And it’s no wonder. We’re storytellers, and what could be more grand than the story of creation?”

Brian Greene (1963) American physicist

Source: The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality

“She was an alien, really - a sort of eating, pooping, tantrum machine - and he didn't understand anything about her species.”

Christopher Moore (1957) American writer of comic fantasy

Understanding

“In our reasonings concerning matter of fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance, from the highest certainty to the lowest species of moral evidence..”

David Hume book An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Source: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding

Imagination

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence, so that never again will Americans be free in their own country from the noise, the exhausts, the stinks of human and automotive waste. And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. … We need wilderness preserved — as much of it as is still left, and as many kinds — because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed. The reminder and the reassurance that it is still there is good for our spiritual health even if we never once in ten years set foot in it.”

Wallace Stegner (1909–1993) American historian, writer, and environmentalist

Wilderness Letter http://wilderness.org/bios/former-council-members/wallace-stegner (1960)
Source: The Sound of Mountain Water

People , Health , Books , World

“Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.”

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

World , Understanding

“ONE THING I AM NEVER GOING TO DO WHEN I GROW UP
Is fall in love, drop out of college, learn to subsist on water and air, have a species named after me, and ruin my life.”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love

Love , Life , Learning , Water

“The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.”

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

Source: god is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

Personality

“Time moves in one direction, memory another. We are that strange species that constructs artifacts intended to counter the natural flow of forgetting.”

William Gibson book Distrust That Particular Flavor

"Dead Man Sings," published in Forbes ASAP, November 30, 1998.
Source: Distrust That Particular Flavor

Forgetting , Time , Nature , Memory

“I recommend you stick to your own species, Shy Babe." p. 155”

James Patterson (1947) American author

Source: The Final Warning

“If it’s true that our species is alone in the universe, then I’d have to say the universe aimed rather low and settled for very little.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Source: Napalm & Silly Putty

Universe

“our future depends on our actions as a species.”

Sakyong Mipham (1962) tibetan lama

The Shambhala Principle: Discovering Humanity's Hidden Treasure

Future , Dependency

“the description of lust was simple: two people learn they're compatible, attraction grows, and the ancient instinct to preserve the species kicks in.”

Nicholas Sparks book True Believer

Source: True Believer

People , Learning

“A hallucination is a species of reality, as capable of teaching you as a videotape about Kilimanjaro or anything else that falls through your life.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

Life , Reality

“The single simplest reason why human space flight is necessary is this, stated as plainly as possible: keeping all your breeding pairs in one place is a retarded way to run a species.”

Warren Ellis (1968) English comics and fiction writer

Way

“We are consuming the past, present, and future of this biosphere, our only home, in an unthinking rush for profits and GDP that we call 'progress', belying our species name homo sapiens.”

Pavan Sukhdev (1960) Indian environmental economist

Foreword to Bankrupting Nature: Denying Our Planetary Boundaries https://books.google.it/books?id=CxHuA5AZ92AC&pg=PR0 by Anders Wijkman and Johan Rockström (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012), p. xi.

Home , Past , Future

“He [the naturalist] looks upon every species of animal and plant now living as the individual letters which go to make up one of the volumes of our earth's history; and, as a few lost letters may make a sentence unintelligible, so the extinction of the numerous forms of life which the progress of cultivation invariably entails will necessarily render obscure this invaluable record of the past.”

Alfred Russel Wallace (1823–1913) British naturalist, explorer, geographer, anthropologist and biologist

(1863) "On the physical geography of the Malay Archipelago." The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London 33:217-234.

Life , History , Past , Animals

“Just as the Bible teaches the Golden Rule — “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” — the Mahabharata (5.39.57), predating the Bible, teaches a similar truth, and in almost the exact same wording. Yogis and spiritual adepts in India extend the teaching to its logical limits, showing kindness to all species of life — and this, of course, means vegetarianism. It is hard to be kind to animals if you are eating them. In other words, if you don't want someone eating your entrails, don't eat the entrails of others.”

Steven J. Rosen (1955) American editor, author on Vaishnavism

“The New Carnivores”, in The Agni and the Ecstasy (London: Arktos, 2012), p. 100 https://books.google.it/books?id=fYjX7W6SCLMC&pg=PA100.

Life , Truth , Animals

“I stand by my assertions that although you can know what happens to any individual species that you modify, you cannot be certain what will happen to the ecosystem. Also, we have a strange situation where we have malnourished fat people. It’s not that we need more food. It’s that we need to manage our food system better. So when corporations seek government funding for genetic modification of food sources, I stroke my chin.”

Bill Nye (1955) American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, writer, scientist and former mechanical engineer

[NOTE: This position was retracted by Bill Nye less than four months later, per The Washington Post source March 3, 2015, below.]
Bill Nye Explains Why he is a GMO Skeptic, Discover Magazine, October 15, 2015, November 6, 2014, Keith, Kloor http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/collideascape/2014/11/06/bill-nye-explains-gmo-skeptic,

People , Food

“Socialists have all too often failed to take ecological issues seriously enough. However, this is not a fault of socialists alone, as the fault applies even more to the liberal tradition taken as a whole. But whatever we choose to say about socialism in the twentieth century, it has to be emphasized that no one can be truly socialist and indeed Marxist in the twenty-first century and fail to acknowledge the full severity of the planetary ecological crisis. We are either at the forefront of the struggle to protect the earth as a place of human habitation (and as a home for innumerable species) or we are on the side of the system’s creative exterminism of the Earth system as we know it.”

John Bellamy Foster (1953) Sociology professor and Marxist writer

Interview with Left Voice (2017)

Home

“Demanding that wolf populations be allowed to continue to increase is not only a false conservation goal, but also a counterproductive tactic that is bound for short-term failure. It is strategically preferable to promote wolf range expansion and to accept reduction of unacceptable levels of conflict through scientifically planned and managed culling rather than through uncontrolled poaching. Full protection of wolf populations living near, or interspersed with, human settlements leads sooner or later to surplus wolves being killed, legally or illegally. Opposing wolf killing altogether implies accepting that all wolves will eventually be removed from these areas, whereas accepting some wolf control will allow wolves over much larger ranges. This vision requires a fundamental shift in the way wolves are perceived by folks who consider every wolf a symbol of the conservation battle or an animal with special rights among all other species. In the end, this approach probably will yield many more wolves than we could afford to keep in a few fully protected areas, no matter how large.”

L. David Mech (1937) American Biologist , Ecologist

Wolves: Behavior, Ecology and Conservation (2003)

Way , Failure , Wolf , Animals

“Other countries may boast of this and that, but nobody can touch the United States for poisonous snakes. We have about twenty species, most of them deadly, and Europe has only five or six, none of them much good. We have fifteen kinds of Rattlesnakes alone and nobody else has even one. [Footnote: There is a species in Central and South America, but it probably came from here. ]”

Will Cuppy (1884–1949) American writer

The Rattlesnake
How to Become Extinct (1941)

Country

“The guts of honey bee workers contain a distinctive community of bacterial species. They are microaerophilic or anaerobic, and were not clearly deliniated by earlier studies relying on laboratory culture of isolates under atmospheric oxygen levels. Recently, a more complete picture of the potential metabolism and functions of these bacteria have been possible, using genomic approaches based on metagenomic samples, as well as cultured isolates. Of these, most are host-restricted and are generally absent outside adult guts.”

Nancy A. Moran (1954) American biologist

[Current Opinion in Insect Science, 10, August 2015, 22–28, Genomics of the honey bee microbiome, 10.1016/j.cois.2015.04.003]

Communication , Study , Bee

“In so far as we are individuals, each of us is a fragment of a species, a part of this universe, a single dot in the immense network of forces and influences, cosmic, ethnic, historic, whose laws we obey. We are subject to the determination of the physical world. But each man is also a person, he is not subject to the stars and atoms; for he subsists entirely with the very subsistence of his spiritual soul, and the latter is in him a principle of creative unity, of independence and of freedom.”

Jacques Maritain (1882–1973) French philosopher

Scholasticism and Politics (1940)

World , Law , Soul , Star

“If someone were to discover, for instance, that under hitherto unobserved circumstances stones were able to speak, it would take only a few pages to describe and explain so earth-shattering a phenomenon. On the other hand, one can always write yet another book about positive thinking, and this is far from being of only academic interest, since it involves a method that makes it impossible ever to arrive at a clear resolution of life's most important questions. Human activities might be graded by the quantity of words required: the more words, the worse their character. All the knowledge that has led our species from wearing animal skins to people flying, complete with proofs, would fill a handful of reference books, but a bookcase the size of the earth would not suffice to hold all the rest, quite apart from the vast discussions that are conducted not with the pen but with the sword and chains. The thought suggests itself that we carry on our human business in a most irrational manner when we do not use those methods by which the exact sciences have forged ahead in such exemplary fashion.”

Robert Musil book The Man Without Qualities

The Man Without Qualities (1930–1942)

Life , People , Books , Fashion

“My feeling is that Darwinism is only at best a partial solution, and an extremely dangerous partial solution. I would say, based on the little I know, Darwinism explains microevolution within species quite well. As to its broader consequence and implications, I don't think it explains individual species evolution at all well.”

Ben Stein (1944) actor, writer, commentator, lawyer, teacher, humorist

Science and Society: March 2008, ABC Science and Society: Ben Stein Holds Court, 31 March 2008, 2008-04-18 http://blogs.abcnews.com/scienceandsociety/2008/03/index.html,

Feeling , Thinking

“I’m acquainted with a, uh, gentleman who claims that the extent to which a society focuses on the needs of its lowest common denominator is the extent to which that society’ll be mired in mediocrity. Whereas, if we would aim the bulk of our support at the brightest, most talented, most virtuous instead, then they would have the wherewithal to solve a lot of our problems, to uplift the whole culture, enlighten it or something, so that eventually there wouldn’t be so many losers and weaklings impeding evolution and dragging the whole species down. He claims that martyrs like you just perpetuate human misery by catering to it. He believes individuals have to take responsibility for their own lives and accept the consequences of their choices.”

Tom Robbins Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas

Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas (1994)

Support , Problem

“I believe every creature is born with the inalienable right of freedom. Freedom to live in its natural environment, with its own kind, making its own decisions. I believe the law should prohibit the enslavement of all non human species for any purpose whatever.”

Jim Morris (bodybuilder) (1935–2016) American bodybuilder

"Black Male Vegan: 77-Year-Old Bodybuilder Jim Morris Proves Vegans Can Be Muscular & Healthy" http://frugivoremag.com/2012/10/black-male-vegan-77-year-old-bodybuilder-jim-morris-proves-vegans-can-be-muscular-healthy/, interview with Frugivore magazine (October 2, 2012).

Law , Nature , Decision , Freedom

“The neanderthal experiment was simultaneously the high and low point of the genetic revolution. Successful in that a long-dead cousin of Homo sapien was brought back from extinction, yet a failure in that the scientists, so happy to gaze upon their experiments from their ever lofty ivory towers, had not seen so far as to consider the social implications that a new species of man might command in a world unvisited by their like for over 30 millennia. It was little surprise that so many neanderthals felt confused and unprepared for the pressures of modern life. It was Homo sapien at his least sapient.”

Jasper Fforde (1961) British novelist

Lost In A Good Book (2002), ch. 4a, p. 67

Life , World , Failure , Success

“The smaller the mammal, the more it is confined to smaller geographic areas. A small mammal is also more susceptible to subtle changes in climate and environment. …On average, the absence or presence of smaller species provides more precise clues to past conditions in an area than does the information gained from study of the bone assemblages of the larger animals.”

Jeffrey H. Schwartz (1948) American anthropologist

What the Bones Tell Us (1997)

Study , Change , Past , Animals

“The original thinking force of the universe progresses and develops itself in all possible determinations of which it is capable, just as the other original natural forces progress and assume all possible configurations. I am a particular determination of the formative force, like the plant; a particular determination of the peculiar motive force, like the animal; and in addition to this a determination of the thinking force: and the union of these three basic forces into one force, into one harmonious development, is the distinguishing characteristic of my species.”

Johann Gottlieb Fichte book The Vocation of Man

Source: The Vocation of Man (1800), P. Preuss, trans. (1987), p. 12

Motivation , Nature , Thinking , Universe

“Lamarck, after having first studied botany with success, had then turned his attention to conchology, and soon became aware that in the newer (or tertiary) strata of the earth's crust there were a multitude of fossil species of shells… He also observed that other shells were so nearly allied to living forms, that it was difficult not to suspect that they had been connected by a common bond of descent. He therefore proposed that the element of time should enter into the definition of a species, and that it should run thus: 'A species consists of individuals all resembling each other, and reproducing their like by generation, so long as the surrounding conditions do not undergo changes sufficient to cause their habits, characters, and forms to vary. He came at last to the conclusion, that none of the animals and plants now existing were primordial creations, but were all derived from pre-existing forms, which, after they may have gone on for indefinite ages reproducing their like, had, at length, by the influence of alterations in climate and in the animate world, been made to vary gradually, and adapt themselves to new circumstances, some of them deviating, in the course of ages, so far from their original type as to have claims to be regarded as new species.”

Charles Lyell (1797–1875) British lawyer and geologist

Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.20, p. 389-390

Age , World , Study , Change

“As poetry is a species of art, its essential principle must be a specific development of the principle essential to all art; and it will merely remain for us to determine what the specific addition is, which the peculiar conditions of the poet's art make to the principle of art in general.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Art-Principle as Represented in Poetry, p.182

Art