Quotes about species
page 5

““I don’t understand why the sight of you should scare me so,” Joseph said. He did not sound frightened. “You don’t look that threatening. Just… very different.”
“Different is threatening to most species,” Nikanj answered. “Different is dangerous. It might kill you. That was true to your animal ancestors and your nearest animal relatives. And it’s true for you.””

Octavia E. Butler book Dawn

Part III “Nursery” chapter 12 (p. 186).
Dawn (1987)

Understanding, Animals

“Contingency is rich and fascinating; it embodies an exquisite tension between the power of individuals to modify history and the intelligible limits set by laws of nature. The details of individual and species's lives are not mere frills, without power to shape the large-scale course of events, but particulars that can alter entire futures, profoundly and forever.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Eight Little Piggies

"Eight Little Piggies", p. 77
Eight Little Piggies (1993)

Law, History, Intelligence, Nature

“The total turtle count - two hundred and thirty species - doesn't seem like an irresistible horde compared to the several thousand mammals in today's global ecosystem. However, turtles have scored quite an impressive ecological triumph in one very important role, that of freshwater predator-omnivore… All through the Temperate Zone, otters delight the naturalist and the lay public. But how many other freshwater, semi-aquatic mammal predators can you name? Mink, of course. Relatives of otters on one hand, land weasels on the other, mink do hunt in streams. How many others? If you caught the excellent BBC series "Life on Earth", you saw footage of the swimming shrew, the Desman of the Pyrenees, a molelike furball that dives for aquatic worms and other freshwater small fry. Our own New England star-nosed mole goes hunting in water, using its starburst-shaped snout tip to feel out wriggling prey. Andean streams flowing through Preu are host to the fish-spearing mouse, Ichthyomys, that impales prey on its projecting front teeth. But if we go to a tropical lake or sluggish river, is it full of otters, mink, and paddling shrews? No, it is full of turtles.”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 57
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Life, Feeling, Star, Fish

“Nature is indifferent to the survival of the human species, including Americans.”

Adlai Stevenson (1900–1965) mid-20th-century Governor of Illinois and Ambassador to the UN

Radio address (29 September 1952)

Nature, Indifference

“No known human group... simply throw[s] out its dead without any ritual or ceremony. In stark contrast, no animal practices burial of dead individuals of its own species.”

Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900–1975) geneticist and evolutionary biologist

Mourning and Funerals—For Whom (1977)

Animals, Dead

“Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities — the political, the religious, the educational authorities — who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing — forming in our minds — their view of reality. To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable open-mindedness, chaotic, confused vulnerability to inform yourself.”

Timothy Leary (1920–1996) American psychologist

How to Operate Your Brain (1994) http://yoism.org/?q=node/47, a guided meditation spoken by Timothy Leary and set to music.

Education, History, Question, Thinking

“Now when naturalists observe a close agreement in numerous small details of habits, tastes and dispositions between two or more domestic races, or between nearly-allied natural forms, they use this fact as an argument that all are descended from a common progenitor who was thus endowed; and consequently that all should be classed under the same species. The same argument may be applied with much force to the races of man.

As it is improbable that the numerous and unimportant points of resemblance between the several races of man in bodily structure and mental faculties (I do not here refer to similar customs) should all have been independently acquired, they must have been inherited from progenitors who were thus characterised.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume I, chapter VII: "On the Races of Man", page 233 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=246&itemID=F937.1&viewtype=image The Descent of Man (1871)

Nature

“unbelievers (so called) as well as of believers, there are many species, including almost every variety of moral type. But the best among them, as no one who has had opportunities of really knowing them will hesitate to affirm (believers rarely have that opportunity), are more genuinely religious, in the best sense of the word religion, than those who exclusively arrogate to themselves the title.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/45/mode/1up pp. 45–46

Religion, Sense

“Today, for the mass of humanity, science and technology embody 'miracle, mystery, and authority'. Science promises that the most ancient human fantasies will at last be realized. Sickness and ageing will be abolished; scarcity and poverty will be no more; the species will become immortal. Like Christianity in the past, the modern cult of science lives on the hope of miracles. But to think that science can transform the human lot is to believe in magic. Time retorts to the illusions of humanism with the reality: frail, deranged, undelivered humanity. Even as it enables poverty to be diminished and sickness to be alleviated, science will be used to refine tyranny and perfect the art of war.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The unsaved: The Grand Inquisitor and Flying Fish (p. 123)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

War, Age, Hope, Art

“The basic rules of classification are
- Each characteristic of division must produce at least two classes
- Only one principle of division must be used at a time, to produce mutually exclusive classes.
- The species of any genius must be completely exhaustive of their parent class.”

Brian Campbell Vickery (1918–2009) British information theorist

Source: Classification and indexing in science (1958), Chapter 1: The need for classification, p. 2.

Parent, Time

“[In response to this question by Bill Moyers: What do you see happening to the idea of dignity to human species if this population growth continues at its present rate? ] "It's going to destroy it all. I use what I call my bathroom metaphor. If two people live in an apartment, and there are two bathrooms, then both have what I call freedom of the bathroom, go to the bathroom any time you want, and stay as long as you want to for whatever you need. And this to my way is ideal. And everyone believes in the freedom of the bathroom. It should be right there in the Constitution. But if you have 20 people in the apartment and two bathrooms, no matter how much every person believes in freedom of the bathroom, there is no such thing. You have to set up, you have to set up times for each person, you have to bang at the door, aren't you through yet, and so on. And in the same way, democracy cannot survive overpopulation. Human dignity cannot survive it. Convenience and decency cannot survive it. As you put more and more people onto the world, the value of life not only declines, but it disappears. It doesn't matter if someone dies.”

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

Interview by Bill Moyers on Bill Moyers' World Of Ideas (17 October 1988); transcript http://www.pbs.org/moyers/faithandreason/print/pdfs/woi%20asimov1.pdf (page 6) - audio (20:12) http://www.pbs.org/moyers/faithandreason/media_players/asimovwoi_audio.html General sources

Life, People, World, Way

“Perfectibility is one of the most unequivocal characteristics of the human species.”

William Godwin (1756–1836) English journalist, political philosopher and novelist

Vol. 1, bk. 1, ch. 2
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Perfection

“Darwinist thinkers such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett are militant opponents of Christianity.5 Yet their atheism and humanism are versions of Christian concepts. As a defender of Darwinism, Dawkins is committed to the view that humans are like other animal species in being ‘gene machines’ ruled by the laws of natural selection. He asserts nevertheless that humans, uniquely, can defy these natural laws: ‘We, alone on earth, can rebel against the tyranny of the selfish replicators.’ In affirming human uniqueness in this way, Dawkins relies on a Christian world-view.”

John Gray book Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia

Post-Apocalypse: After Secularism (pp. 265-6)
Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007)

World, Law, Way, Nature

“There are two great uses of antiquarian studies. One of them is to enable us to conjure up as if by the magician's wand the dress, furniture, architecture, &c., of past ages, so that we can live, as it were, in many centuries almost at the same moment. This is a very great and a very pleasant species of knowledge, but it is not particularly useful in this work-a-day world; and it sometimes, like other knowledge, renders its possessor far from happy, more especially when he goes to the theatre, and sees all sorts of anachronisms and impossibilities a. The other use of antiquarian studies is to restore disused arts, and to get all the good we can out of them for our own improvement.”

William Burges (1827–1881) English architect

Source: Art applied to industry: a series of lectures, 1865, p. 13

Happiness, Age, World, Art

“Matthew's response: To me the conception of this law of Nature came intuitively as a self-evident fact, almost without an effort of concentrated thought. Mr Darwin here seems to have more merit in the discovery than I have had; to me it did not appear a discovery. He seems to have worked it out by inductive reason, slowly and with due caution to have made his way synthetically from fact to fact onwards; while with me it was by a general glance at the scheme of Nature that I estimated this select production of species as an a priori recognisable fact – an axiom requiring only to be pointed out to be admitted by unprejudiced minds of sufficient grasp.”

Patrick Matthew (1790–1874) British scientist

Gardeners' Chronicle

Law, Way, Nature, Effort

“I lay it down that there is Matter, and also there are Material Species, but unless a Final Cause for them be previously assumed, we shall be, without perceiving it, introducing the doctrine of Epicurus: since if nothing be anterior to two efficient causes, a spontaneous flux and chance must have united the two together.”

Julian (emperor) (331–363) Roman Emperor, philosopher and writer

Upon The Mother Of The Gods (c. 362-363)

Chance

“Our claim is not that pair bonding is humanity’s singular mating pattern. Our claim instead is simply that the pair bond is the most common setting for sex and reproduction in our species, that it has been for a long time, and that this has left a deep imprint on our evolved nature.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 145

Sex, Nature, Time

“Most kinds of aggressive behavior among members of the same species are responsive to crowding in the environment.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.5 Aggression

Behavior

“So far from vegetarianism springing from the anthropomorphism of predominantly urban dwellers, as has been suggested by its more superficial critics, it and its inevitable successor veganism are increasingly being recognised as a logical, even inescapable, process, essentially relevant, essentially practical, essentially compassionate to all species.”

Jon Wynne-Tyson (1924) British writer

"Dietethics: Its Influence on Future Farming Patterns", in Animal Rights: A Symposium, edited by David Paterson & Richard D. Ryder (1979), p. 141

Spring

“We have restricted humans from giving ‘free’ food to bears and dolphins because we know that such feeding would make them dependent and lead to their extinction. But when it comes to our own species, we have difficulty seeing the connection between short-term kindness and long-term cruelty; we give women money to have more children, making them more dependent with each child and discouraging them from developing the tools to fend for themselves. The real discrimination against women, then, is ‘free feeding’.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part III: Government as substitute husband, p. 346.

Women, Money, Children, Food

“And that’s another reason I don’t want contact between your species and mine. You’re all Crazy Eddies. You think every problem has a solution.”

Larry Niven book The Mote in God's Eye

Source: The Mote in God's Eye (1974), Chapter 37 “History Lesson” (p. 370; spoken by an alien to an earthman)

Problem, Thinking

“Macroevolution is properly defined as the emergence of new taxa at or above the species level. The only time creationists will use the proper definition is when they are as-yet unaware of the fact that speciation has already been directly-observed and documented dozens of times –both in the lab and in naturally-controlled conditions in the field. In fact, we’ve seen it so many times we’ve had to categorize recurrent types of macroevolution we’ve seen so often repeated. Once creationists find out about all this, their first reaction is to use the excuse that some newly evolved species of fruit fly or fish somehow still doesn’t count because it’s “still” a fly or it’s “still” a fish. Well of course it is! Evolution couldn’t permit them to be anything else. Creationists demand that the new species be so different from their parents that one can’t even tell they’re related. The irony there is that evolutionary theory never suggests that one “kind” of thing ever turned into another, fundamentally-different “kind” of anything, not unless you ignore all the intermediate stages –which of course creationists do.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"11th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dm277H3ot6Y, Youtube (June 26, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

Nature, Parent, Fish, Time

“All of the new media have enriched our perceptions of language and older media. They are to the man-made environment what species are to biology.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Counterblast (1969), p. 84

“I don’t believe in God,” said the captain. “I wouldn’t care to believe in anyone who could make such a stinking lousy species as the one you belong to.”

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

continuity (10) “Due Process”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

God

“Barriers of sea, or desert, or mountain, could never have been of the least avail, had the creative force acted independently of material laws, or had it not pleased the Author of Nature that the origin of new species should be governed by some secondary causes analogous to those which we see preside over the appearance of new varieties, which never appear except as the offspring of a parent stock very closely resembling them.”

Charles Lyell (1797–1875) British lawyer and geologist

Source: The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863), Ch.21, p. 423

Law, Mountain, Nature, Parent

“With mankind the differences between the sexes are greater than in most species of Quadrumana, but not so great as in some, for instance, the mandrill. Man on an average is considerably taller, heavier, and stronger than woman, with squarer shoulders and more plainly-pronounced muscles. … Man is more courageous, pugnacious, and energetic than woman, and has a more inventive genius. His brain is absolutely larger, but whether relatively to the larger size of his body, in comparison with that of woman, has not, I believe been fully ascertained. In woman the face is rounder; the jaws and the base of the skull smaller; the outlines of her body rounder, in parts more prominent; and her pelvis is broader than in man; but this latter character may perhaps be considered rather as a primary than a secondary sexual character. She comes to maturity at an earlier age than man.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume II, chapter XIX: "Secondary Sexual Characters of Man", pages 316-317 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=333&itemID=F937.2&viewtype=image The Descent of Man (1871)

Age, Sex, Courage, Parting

“The attainments of the parent do not descend in the blood of his children, nor is the progress of man to be considered as a physical mutation of the species.”

Adam Ferguson book An Essay on the History of Civil Society

PART I, SECTION I.
An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767)

Children, Parent

“It is not clear that people have fully taken on board the idea that humans are animals. If they had, then perhaps academic disciplines such as sociology and anthropology would be viewed as specialist branches of zoology; medical doctors would be viewed as a subtype of veterinarians (one that specializes in tending to the health needs of just one species); human rights would be viewed as a subset of animal rights; and the socialization of children would be viewed as one example of the training or domestication of animals”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

making parents and teachers a subtype of animal trainers
Source: Darwin, God and the Meaning of Life: How Evolutionary Theory Undermines Everything You Think You Know (2010), p. 155

Children, People, Health, Idea

“The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-satisfied man."”

José Ortega Y Gasset book The Revolt of the Masses

Source: The Revolt of the Masses (1929), Chapter XI: The Self-Satisfied Age

Life, Appearance

“He who does not realize to what extent shifting fortune and necessity hold in subjection every human spirit, cannot regard as fellow-creatures nor love as he loves himself those whom chance separated from him by an abyss. The variety of constraints pressing upon man give rise to the illusion of several distinct species that cannot communicate.”

Simone Weil (1909–1943) French philosopher, Christian mystic, and social activist

Celui qui ignore à quel point la fortune variable et la nécessité tiennent toute âme humaine sous leur dépendance ne peut pas regarder comme des semblables ni aimer comme soi-même ceux que le hasard a séparés de lui par un abîme. La diversité des contraintes qui pèsent sur les hommes fait naître l'illusion qu'il y a parmi eux des espèces distinctes qui ne peuvent communiquer.
Source: Simone Weil : An Anthology (1986), The Iliad or The Poem of Force (1940-1941), p. 192

Love, Communication, Chance

“Do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter downriver. Certainly not the waters, which we assume have no function except to turn turbines, float barges, and carry off sewage. Certainly not the plants, of which we exterminate whole communities without batting an eye. Certainly not the animals, of which we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful species.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "The Land Ethic", p. 204.

Love, Beauty, Home, Communication

“Great problems are now being handled, keeping every thinking man in suspense; the unity or multiplicity of human races; the creation of man 1,000 years or 1,000 centuries ago; the fixity of species, or the slow and progressive transformation of one species into another; the eternity of matter; the idea of a God unnecessary: such are some of the questions that humanity discusses nowadays.”

Louis Pasteur (1822–1895) French chemist and microbiologist

Translation from The Life of Pasteur, p. 140 https://archive.org/stream/cu31924012227595#page/n153/mode/2up Soirées scientifiques de la Sorbonne (1864)

God, Idea, Question, Problem

“The idea that certain races (or species) are ‘higher’ or ‘lower’ was not Darwin’s idea but the universal language of all prior naturalists since forever. Darwin acknowledges this, but does not contribute to it, other than to suggest that Caucasians are not the ultimate form of mankind.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"Darwin’s view of the ‘races’ of men" http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2015/01/01/darwins-view-of-the-races-of-men/, Patheos (January 1, 2015) Patheos

Idea, Universe

“I had now to select that mode of the primitive which is distinctive of your own species, a mode characterized by repressed sexuality, excessive self-regard, and an intelligence which is both rudimentary and in bondage to unruly cravings.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last Men in London

Last Men in London (1932)

Intelligence

“Speciesism—the word is not an attractive one, but I can think of no better term—is a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one's own species and against those of members of other species.”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

Source: Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals (1975), Ch. 1: All Animals Are Equal

Thinking

“Differences in reaction to toxic substances vary considerably between species so that the value of these tests remains doubtful. Although thalidomide was extensively tested on animals in several countries, its terrible properties were not discovered. Conversely, penicillin, the greatest medical discovery of the century, was not extensively tested on animals before its miraculous therapeutic qualities were demonstrated in human patients. If it had been fully tested on animals its high toxicity for guinea pigs would have almost certainly prevented its clinical use.”

Richard D. Ryder (1940) British psychologist

Experiments on Animals (1971)

Animals, Country

“Our planet, the Earth, is, as far as we know, unique in the universe. It contains life. Even in its most barren stretches, there are animals. Around the equator, where those two essentials for life, sunshine and moisture, are most abundant, great forests grow. And here plants and animals proliferate in such numbers that we still have not even named all the different species. Here, animals and plants, insects and birds, mammals and man live together in intimate and complex communities, each dependent on one another. Two thirds of the surface of this unique planet are covered by water, and it was here indeed that life began. From the oceans, it has spread even to the summits of the highest mountains as animals and plants have responded to the changing face of the Earth.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Opening narration
The Living Planet (1984)

Life, Mountain, Communication, Bird

“Musicians who have listened to birds believe [that birds derive pleasure from singing] much more than ornithologists, who are terrified of being accused of anthropomorphism… Having studied thousands of hours of birdsong from around the world, I am convinced some species possess an aesthetic sense, however limited compared to ours. It is part of human egotism to believe that only we have active minds.”

Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) Philosopher

"A hundred years of thinking about God" (1998)

Pleasure, World, Bird, Sense

“There's no such thing as life without bloodshed. I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.”

Cormac McCarthy (1933) American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter

The New York Times, April 19, 1992, "Cormac McCarthy's Venomous Fiction" http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/mccarthy-venom.html by Richard B. Woodward

Life, Way, Soul, Idea

“Which do you think came first—the blood or the heart—and why? Did the heart in all these different species of fish, reptiles, birds, and mammals evolve before there were blood vessels throughout their bodies? When did the blood evolve? Was it before or after the vessels evolved? If it was before, what was it that carried blood to the heart, if there were no vessels? Did the heart beat before the blood evolved? Why was it beating if there was no blood to pump? If it wasn’t beating, why did it start when it had no awareness of blood? If the blood vessels evolved before there was blood, why did they evolve if there was no such thing as blood? And if the blood evolved before the heart evolved, what was it that caused it to circulate around the body? The marvelous human body (and the bodies of all the other creatures) consists of so many amazingly interdependent parts: a heart, lungs (to oxygenate the blood), kidneys (to filter wastes from the blood), blood vessels, arteries, blood, skin (to protect it all), etc. The intricate codependence of just the respiratory system and the circulatory system—not to mention all the other bodily systems—is difficult to explain.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

The Origin of Species: 150th Anniversary Edition (2009)

Bird, Thinking, Fish, Heart

“In medieval Europe, monks grew vegetables, herbs, flowers, berries, and fruit trees together for mutual benefit. You should plan plant populations relative to the root level each species occupies in the soil relative to the feeding capacity of each species.”

Ken Kern American writer

p, 125
The Owner-Built Homestead (1977)

Flowers, Tree

“If you look at a tree and think of it as a design assignment, it would be like asking you to make something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, provides habitat for hundreds of species, accrues solar energy's fuel, makes complex sugars and food, changes colors with the seasons, creates microclimates, and self-replicates.”

William McDonough (1951) American architect

"William McDonough: Godfather of Green", WNYC Studio 360 (18 March 2008).

Food, Color, Thinking, Tree

“Since Darwin, scientists have agreed that there is no ‘magical’ essential difference between human and other animals, biologically-speaking. Why then do we make an almost total distinction morally? If all organisms are on one physical continuum, then we should also be on the same moral continuum. … The only arguments in favour of painful experiments on animals are: 1) that the advancement of knowledge justifies all evils – well does it? 2) that possible benefits for our own species justify mistreatment of other species – this may be a fairly strong argument when it applies to experiments where the chances of suffering are minimal and the probability of aiding applied medicine is great, but even so it is still just ‘speciesism’, and as such it is a selfish emotional argument rather than a reasoned one.”

Richard D. Ryder (1940) British psychologist

" Speciesism https://books.google.it/books?id=Rz30CgAAQBAJ&pg=PT59" (1970). Reported in Speciesism, Painism and Happiness: A Morality for the Twenty-First Century by Richard D. Ryder (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2011), Chapter 2.

Pain, Knowledge, Strong, Suffering

“If an organised body is not in the situation and circumstances best adapted to its sustenance and propagation, then, in conceiving an indefinite variety among the individuals of that species, we must be assured, that, on the one hand, those which depart most from the best adapted constitution, will be most liable to perish, while, on the other hand, those organised bodies, which most approach to the best constitution for the present circumstances, will be best adapted to continue, in preserving themselves and multiplying the individuals of their race.”

James Hutton (1726–1797) Scottish geologist and physician

This passage suggests that more than than 50 years before the publication of On the Origin of Species, Hutton anticipated Darwin's theory of natural selection.
Source: An Investigation into the Principles of Knowledge (1794)

““What’s a simurgh?”
“A member of the winged species avian simurghi,” sniffed the simurgh. “Easy to identify because of his gorgeous plumage, ready wit, intelligent conversation, amiable disposition, and fabulous abilities.””

Lin Carter book The Wizard of Zao

Source: The Wizard of Zao (1978), Chapter 3 (p. 33)

Intelligence

“Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.”

Joyce Carol Oates (1938) American author

"The Calendar's New Clothes," New York Times (30 December 1999)

Passion, Forgetting

“There is a relation belonging to this species of property, unlike that of the apprentice or the hired man, which awakens whatever there is of kindness or of nobility of soul in the heart of him who owns it; this can only be alienated, obscured, or destroyed, by collecting this species of property into such masses that the owner is not personally acquainted with the individuals who compose it.”

Jefferson Davis (1808–1889) President of the Confederate States of America

Senate speech, 1860.
1860s

Soul, Heart, Personality

“The great break in the organic chain between man and his nearest allies, which cannot be bridged over by any extinct or living species, has often been advanced as a grave objection to the belief that man is descended from some lower form; but this objection will not appear of much weight to those who, convinced by general reasons, believe in the general principle of evolution. Breaks incessantly occur in all parts of the series, some being wide, sharp and defined, others less so in various degrees; as between the orang and its nearest allies—between the Tarsius and the other Lemuridæ—between the elephant and in a more striking manner between the Ornithorhynchus or Echidna, and other mammals. But all these breaks depend merely on the number of related forms which have become extinct. At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace throughout the world the savage races. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

Charles Darwin book The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex

volume I, chapter VI: "On the Affinities and Genealogy of Man", pages 200-201 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=213&itemID=F937.1&viewtype=image The sentence "At some future period … the savage races" is often quoted out of context to suggest that Darwin desired this outcome, whereas in fact Darwin simply held that it would occur. The Descent of Man (1871)

World, Hope, Distant, Appearance

“It is no shame to lose to me, mortal. Even among mythical creatures there are very few who can give a unicorn a good game."
"I am pleased that you were not wholly bored," Martin said. "Now will you tell me what you were talking about concerning the destruction of my species?”

Roger Zelazny book Unicorn Variation

"Oh, that," Tlingel replied.
Unicorn Variation (1982)

Game

“It remains to mention some of the ways in which people have spoken misleadingly of logical form. One of the commonest of these is to talk of ' the logical form' of a statement; as if a statement could never have more than one kind of formal power; as if statements could, in respect of their formal powers, be grouped in mutually exclusive classes, like animals at a zoo in respect of their species. But to say that a statement is of some one logical form is simply to point to a certain general class of, e. g., valid inferences, in which the statement can play a certain role. It is not to exclude the possibility of there being other general classes of valid inferences in which the statement can play a certain role.”

P. F. Strawson (1919–2006) British philosopher

Source: Introduction to Logical Theory (1952), p. 53 as cited in: Ian Hacking (1975) Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy?, p. 83.

People, Way, Animals

“It is a better world with some buffalo left in it, a richer world with some gorgeous canyons unmarred by signboards, hot-dog stands, super highways, or high-tension lines, undrowned by power or irrigation reservoirs. If we preserved as parks only those places that have no economic possibilities, we would have no parks. And in the decades to come, it will not be only the buffalo and the trumpeter swan who need sanctuaries. Our own species is going to need them too. It needs them now.”

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

This is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and its Magic Rivers is a collection of essays and photographs edited by Wallace Stegner and published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1955. This passage is from the collection's first essay, "The Marks of Human Passage", which is by Stegner (page 17).

World, Dogs

“Upper middle-class upbringing has rooted out any element of what might appear to be self-assertion or egoism; good manners is to be like everyone else. So the male of the species becomes accustomed to suppress any stirring of impatience or originality. Shaw once said you can't learn to skate without making a fool of yourself; the British middle-class attitude seems to be that, in that case, you hadn't better skate at all. The result seems to be considerably more oppressive than being brought up in a Jewish ghetto or a west side slum.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: The Bicameral Critic (1985), p. 112, An integrity born of hope: Notes on Christopher Isherwood (1976)

Fools, Learning, Appearance

“We are approaching a more fluid state. I have talked about cultural boiling. The idea of the phase-transition period which, in fractal mathematics, is the chaotic flux between one state and another. …Culturally, and as a species, we are approaching a phase-transition. I don’t know quite what that means, on a human level.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

De Abaitua interview (1998)

Mathematics, Idea

“The Orestia shows that society is a defense against nature. Everything intelligible -- institutions, objects, persons, ideas -- is the result of Apollonian clarification, adjudication, and action. Western politics, science, psychology and art are creations of arrogant Apollo. Through every century, winning or losing, western mind has struggled to keep nature at bay. The Orestia’s sexist transition from matriarchy to patriarchy records the rebellion every imagination must make against nature. Without that rebellion, we as a species are condemned to regression or stasis. Even rebelling, we cannot get far. But vying with fate is godlike.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), p. 101

Fate, Art, Imagination, Intelligence

“In every part of the universe we observe means adjusted with the nicest artifice to the ends which they are intended to produce; and in the mechanism of a plant, or animal body, admire how every thing is contrived for advancing the two great purposes of nature, the support of the individual, and the propagation of the species.”

Adam Smith book The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Section II, Chap. III.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Part II

Support, Nature, Universe, Animals

“There is no species of poetry which is better adapted to the taste of a melancholy man than a sonnet. Its brevity precludes the possibility of it becoming tiresome.”

Henry Kirke White (1785–1806) English poet

Melancholy hours, The Poetical Works and remains of Henry Kirke White, G. Routledge, London 1835.
Melancholy Hours

“In the latter part of the seventeenth century, there were several eminent men in England who were greatly in advance of the age in which they lived, and strenuously exerted themselves to discover and promulgate the true principles of Geology. Among these Dr. Martin Lister, physician to Queen Anne, was one of the most distinguished. This accomplished naturalist in his great work on shells… figures and describes many fossil shells as real animal productions, and carefully compares them with recent species. He also recognised the distinction of strata by the organic remains they contain; and to him the honour is due of having first suggested the construction of geological maps…”

Gideon Mantell (1790–1852) British scientist and obstetrician

The Medals of Creation or First Lessons in Geology (1854)

Men, Age, Animals, Parting

“I contend that the continued racial classification of Homo sapiens represents an outmoded approach to the general problem of differentiation within a species. In other words, I reject a racial classification of humans for the same reasons that I prefer not to divide into subspecies the prodigiously variable West Indian land snails that form the subject of my own research.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Ever Since Darwin

"Why We Should Not Name Human Races—A Biological View", p. 231
Ever Since Darwin (1977)

Problem

“Commentators — even, and especially, Christian ones — frequently lapse into a kind of moral parochialism when it comes to discussions about animals, as if God only cared for one of the millions of species in the created world. This, in turn, has led to a practical form of idolatry. By "idolatry" I mean here the deification of the human species by regarding human beings as the sole, main, or even exclusive concern of God the Creator.”

Andrew Linzey (1952) British theologian and divine

Source: Animal Gospel: Christian Faith as if Animals Mattered (1998), p. 115

God, World, Animals

“In brief, our genetic heritage is at odds with our genetic future. For the first time in human history, the qualities it takes to survive as a species are compatible with the qualities it takes to love.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part 1: The Myth of Male Power, p. 65.

Love, History, Time, Future

“The very saddest sound in all my memory was burned into my awareness at age five on my uncle's dairy farm in Wisconsin. A cow had given birth to a beautiful male calf. The mother was allowed to nurse her calf but for a single night. On the second day after birth, my uncle took the calf from the mother and placed him in the veal pen in the barn—only ten yards away, in plain view of the mother. The mother cow could see her infant, smell him, hear him, but could not touch him, comfort him, or nurse him. The heartrending bellows that she poured forth—minute after minute, hour after hour, for five long days—were excruciating to listen to. They are the most poignant and painful auditory memories I carry in my brain. Since that age, whenever I hear anyone postulate that animals cannot really feel emotions, I need only to replay that torturous sound in my memory of that mother cow crying her bovine heart out to her infant. Mother's love knows no species barriers, and I believe that all people who are vegans in their hearts and souls know that to be true.”

Michael Klaper (1947) American physician

Quoted in Joanne Stepaniak, The Vegan Sourcebook (Lowell House, 1998), pp. 39-40.

Love, Pain, People, Age

“Over the last few weeks, some newsgroups have been full of tales of war and battle fleets, of billions dying in the clash of species. To all such—and those living more peaceably around them—we say look out on the universe. It does not care, and even with all our science there are some disasters that we can not avert. All evil and good is petty before Nature. Personally, we take comfort from this, that there is a universe to admire that cannot be twisted to villainy or good, but which simply is.”

Vernor Vinge A Fire Upon the Deep (1st edition)

Source: A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), Chapter 35 (pp. 483-484).

War, Nature, Universe, Science

“Through all of history and pre-history it has been accepted that there is something wrong with the human animal. Health may be the natural condition of other species, but in humans it is sickness that is normal. To be chronically unwell is part of what it means to be human. It is no accident that every culture has its own versions of therapy. Tribal shamans and modern psychotherapists answer the same needs and practise the same trade.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Beyond the Last Thought: Freud's cigars and the long way round to Nirvana (p. 84)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

Health, History, Nature, Animals

“A somewhat casual observer from outer space might well deduce that the course of evolution in this planet had produced a species of large four-wheeled bugs with detachable brains; peculiar animals which rested when they sent their brains away from them but performed in rather predictable manner when their brains were recalled.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Kenneth Boulding (1966) Economics and Ecology. p. 225
1960s

Animals

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

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

As quoted 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)
This quote's earliest known source is from Leon C. Megginson (see Charles Darwin)
Misattributed

Intelligence, Change

“Many people think there are no transitional species because the only fossil forms they’re aware of at all are a handful of plastic pieces in a prehistoric play set. They’ve no idea how rich the fossil record is! We know of several hundred species just within dinosaurs, to say nothing of the thousands of examples of each of hundreds more taxa apart from that. Experts estimate that all the collective genera still roaming around now only amount to about 1% of all the species that have ever lived. Practically everything there ever was ain’t no more. Every species living today has definite relatives both extant and extinct, and evident in the fossil record. And in one sense, all of them, even the things still alive, count as transitional species.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

"9th Foundational Falsehood of Creationism" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qfoje7jVJpU, Youtube (May 8, 2008) Youtube, Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism

People, Idea, Thinking, Sense

“What I most heartily wish for is, a union between the two countries: by a union I mean something more than a mere word—a union, not of parliaments, but of hearts, affections, and interests—a union of vigour, of ardour, of zeal for the general welfare of the British empire. It is this species of union, and this only, that can tend to increase the real strength of the empire, and give it security against any danger. But if any measure with the name only of union be proposed, and the tendency of which would be to disunite us, to create disaffection, distrust, and jealousy, it can only tend to weaken the whole of the British empire. Of this nature do I take the present measure to be. Discontent, distrust, jealousy, suspicion, are the visible fruits of it in Ireland already: if you persist in it, resentment will follow; and although you should be able, which I doubt, to obtain a seeming consent of the parliament of Ireland to the measure, yet the people of that country would wait for an opportunity of recovering their rights, which they will say were taken from them by force.”

Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey (1764–1845) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland

Speech in the House of Commons on the proposed unification of Great Britain and Ireland (7 February 1799), reported in The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803. Vol. XXXIV (London: 1819), p. 334.
1790s

People, Jealousy, Nature, Waiting

“Tiny, nonfunctional wings, a dangerous appendix, eyes that can’t see, and silly ear muscles simply don’t make sense if you think that species were specially created.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

Source: Why Evolution is True (2009), p. 64

Thinking, Sense

“When we consider the positive evil caused to the disqualified half of the human race by their disqualification — first in the loss of the most inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment, and next in the weariness, disappointment, and profound dissatisfaction with life, which are so often the substitute for it; one feels that among all the lessons which men require for carrying on the struggle against the inevitable imperfections of their lot on earth, there is no lesson which they more need, than not to add to the evils which nature inflicts, by their jealous and prejudiced restrictions on one another. Their vain fears only substitute other and worse evils for those which they are idly apprehensive of: while every restraint on the freedom of conduct of any of their human fellow-creatures (otherwise than by making them responsible for any evil actually caused by it), dries up pro tanto the principal fountain of human happiness, and leaves the species less rich, to an inappreciable degree, in all that makes life valuable to the individual human being.”

John Stuart Mill The Subjection of Women

Source: The Subjection of Women (1869), Ch. 4

Life, Men, Happiness, Fear

“The idea that we were designed by our past was the principal insight of Charles Darwin. He was the first to realize that you can abandon divine creation of species without abandoning the argument from design.”

Matt Ridley (1958) economist

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 1. Human Nature

Idea, Past

“In a sense the present work is to be regarded as a secondary-study of the work of a group of writers in the field of social theory. But the genus "secondary study" comprises several species; of these an example of only one, and that perhaps not the best known, is to be found in these pages.
The primary aim of the study is not to determine and state in summary form what these writers said or believed about the subjects they wrote about. Nor is it to inquire directly with reference to each proposition of their "theories" whether what they have said is tenable in the Hght of present sociological and related knowledge. Both these questions must be asked repeatedly, but what is important is not so much the fact that they are asked, or even answered, but the context in which this takes place.”

Talcott Parsons (1902–1979) American sociologist

Source: The structure of social action (1937), p. v; Preface first edition

Question, Knowledge, Sense, Study

“Make a list of all the environmental and social problems that today afflict us and our poor battered planet. – not just the extinction of species and animals and plants, that fifty years ago was the first signs of impending global disaster, but traffic congestion, oil prices, pressure on the health service, the growth of mega-cities, migration patterns, immigration policies, unemployment, the loss of arable land, desertification, famine, increasingly violent weather, the acidification of the oceans, the collapse of fish stocks, rising sea temperatures, the loss of rain forest. The list goes on and on. But they all share an underlying cause. Every one of these global problems, environmental as well as social becomes more difficult – and ultimately impossible - to solve with ever more people.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth? (BBC Horizon, 2009)

People, Health, Problem, Fish

“The truth is that the family, like marriage, is one of those institutions whose very importance renders them complex. Abstract ideas are the only simple ones, because they have little to do with life. The family is not the arbitrary creation of a legislator; it is a natural consequence of the division of the species into two sexes, of the human child's protracted helplessness, of maternal love which ministers to this helplessness, of paternal love which is far more artificial and recent in human history, and composed just as much of love for the mother as of that for the child.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Family Life

Love, Life, Marriage, Truth

“It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on the Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing intelligence this is not correct. We have or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned.”

Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) British astronomer

Quoted in "The Olduvai Theory: Sliding Towards a Post-Industrial Stone Age" by Richard C. Duncan http://dieoff.org/page125.htm Originally from Fred Hoyle, Of Men and Galaxies (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964).

Intelligence, Sense

“We're basically a vegetarian species and should be eating a wide variety of plant foods and minimizing our intake of animal foods. … Usually, the first thing a country does in the course of economic development is to introduce a lot of livestock. Our data are showing that this is not a very smart move, and the Chinese are listening. They're realizing that animal-based agriculture is not the way to go. … Ironically, osteoporosis tends to occur in countries where calcium intake is highest and most of it comes from protein-rich dairy products. The Chinese data indicate that people need less calcium than we think and can get adequate amounts from vegetables.”

T. Colin Campbell (1934) American biochemist

Reported in "Huge Study Of Diet Indicts Fat And Meat" http://www.nytimes.com/1990/05/08/science/huge-study-of-diet-indicts-fat-and-meat.html?pagewanted=2 by Jane Brody, in The New York Times (8 May 1990), p. 2.

People, Food, Way, Thinking

“If we are to end our wars, we have to dispense with a threatening, vengeful, bloodthirsty God. If we're to have any kind of world brotherhood, we have to dispense with a God who reserves his favors for a chosen few. Life is given to all. The sun shines freely on each of us. Would a God be less kindly? More than this, we must also dispense with our species God, and extend our ideas of divinity outward to the rest of nature which couches us and our religious theorizing with such a gracious and steady support.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The God of Jane: A Psychic Manifesto (1981), p. 63

Life, God, War, World

“It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us, by this time, a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

“Wisconsin: On a Monument to the Pigeon”, p. 109.
A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "Wisconsin: Marshland Elegy," "Wisconsin: The Sand Counties" "Wisconsin: On a Monument to the Pigeon," and "Wisconsin: Flambeau"

Men, Knowledge, Sense, Time

“The Englishman wants to be recognized as a gentleman, or as some other suitable species of human being, the American wants to be considered a good guy.”

Louis Kronenberger (1904–1980) American critic and writer

Source: Company Manners: A Cultural Inquiry into American Life (1954), p. 120.

Guy

““I think I know the real reason.”
“Which is?”
“Alcohol in the dust clouds. Goddamn stuff is everywhere. Any lousy species ever invents the telescope and the spectroscope and starts looking in between the stars, what do they find?” He knocked the glass on the table. “Loads of stuff, but much of it alcohol.” He drank from the glass. “Humanoids are the galaxy’s way of trying to get rid of all that alcohol.””

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Use of Weapons (1990), Chapter IX (p. 148).

Alcohol, Way, Star, Thinking

“I've had letters from Chinese scientists at the peak of the SARS epidemic who said the problem is a hybridization between the viruses planted into GMO feed, which is then fed to animals, then the virus jumped from the animals to humans. We're going to see more and more of these kinds of risks. I think the whole issue of the H1N1 virus was the fact that it had genes for three influenza types--human, chicken, pig. All of these crossings are becoming possible because of the crossing of genes across species barriers.”

Vandana Shiva (1952) Indian philosopher

On the SARS epidemic, as quoted in " A Visit to My Kitchen: Vandana Shiva http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maria-rodale/a-visit-to-my-kitchen-van_b_775298.html?ir=India&adsSiteOverride=in", The Huffington Post (28 October 2011)

Problem, Thinking, Animals

“Modernity invented the future, but that's all over. In the current version 'progressive history' camouflages phylogenetic death-drive tactics, Kali-wave: logistically accelerating condensation of virtual species extinction. Welcome to the matricide laboratory.”

Nick Land (1962) British philosopher

"No Future" (1995), in Fanged Noumena, p. 392

Death, History, Future