Anthropocentrism Quotes

I remember when I first encountered anthropocentrism. I was in primary school and, in preparation for our confirmation, the class was learning about the afterlife. ~ John Burnside

Humanity may destroy the possibilities for life on earth unless the freedom and power that we have acquired are channeled in new creative directions by a spiritual awareness and moral commitment that transcend nationalism, racism, sexism, religious sectarianism, anthropocentrism, and the dualism between human culture and nature. This is the great issue for the 1990s and the twenty-first century. ~ Steven Clark Rockefeller

In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small). ~ Julio Cortazar

Copenhagen interpretation Niels Bohr's combination of instrumentalism, anthropocentrism and studied ambiguity, used to avoid understanding quantum theory as being about reality. ~ David Deutsch

Human beings are important only to the survival of the human race. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The trouble with human beings is not really that they love themselves too much; they ought to love themselves more. The trouble is simply that they don't love others enough.
The End of Anthropocentrism? ~ Mary Midgley

It necessarily follows that chance alone is at the source of every innovation, and of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among many other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. And nothing warrants the supposition - or the hope - that on this score our position is ever likely to be revised. There is no scientific concept, in any of the sciences, more destructive of anthropocentrism than this one. ~ Jacques Monod

That which is called humanism, but what would be more correctly called irreligious anthropocentrism, cannot yield answers to the most essential questions of our life ~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The biggest enemy we face is anthropocentrism. This is that common attitude that everything on this Earth was put here for [human] use. ~ Eric Pianka

The main shortcoming of humanistic scholarship is its extreme anthropocentrism. Nothing, it seems, matters in the creative arts and critical humanistic analyses except as it can be expressed as a perspective of present-day literate culture. Everything tends to be weighed by its immediate impact on people. Meaning is drawn from that which is valued exclusively in human terms. The most important consequence is that we are left with very little to compare with the rest of life. The deficit shrinks the ground on which we can understand and judge ourselves. ~ Edward O. Wilson

In the discoveries of science the harmony of the spheres is also now the harmony of life. And as the eerie illumination of science penetrates evermore deeply into the order of nature, the cosmos appears increasingly to be a vast system finely tuned to generate life and organisms of biology very similar, perhaps identical, to ourselves. All the evidence available in the biological sciences supports the core proposition of traditional natural theology - that the cosmos is a specially designed whole with life and mankind as a fundamental goal and purpose, a whole in which all facets of reality, from the size of galaxies to the thermal capacity of water, have their meaning and explanation in this central fact.

Four centuries after the scientific revolution apparently destroyed irretrievably man's special place in the universe, banished Aristotle, and rendered teleological speculation obsolete, the relentless stream of discovery has turned dramatically in favor of teleology and design, and the doctrine of the microcosm is reborn. As I hope the evidence presented in this book has shown, science, which has been for centuries the great ally of atheism and skepticism, has become at last, in the final days of the second millennium, what Newton and many of its early advocates had so fervently wished - the "defender of the anthropocentric faith. ~ Michael Denton

We are so logic-driven that we can't stand the absence of it. ~ Frans De Waal

Anthropocentrism is simply irrational. And yet this is the thrust of much of our traditional religious thought and teaching, particularly in the West. ~ Russell E. Train

In universal pantheism, religion is seen as a system of reverent behavior toward the Earth rather than subscription to a particular creed. Because Pantheists identify God with Nature rather than an anthropomorphic being, Pantheists oppose the arrogant world-view of anthropocentrism. ~ Harold W. Wood Jr.

I have a serious question."
"I will give a serious answer."
"Can a god be killed?"
The humor drained from Roman's face. "Well, that depends on if you're a pantheist or a Marxist."
"What's the difference?"
"The first believes that divinity is the universe. The two are synonymous and nonexistent without each other. The second believes in anthropocentrism, seeing man in the center of the universe, and god as just an invention of human conscience. Of course, if you follow Nietzsche, you can kill God just by thinking about him. ~ Ilona Andrews

Human nature has nevertheless been changed by the ever new appearance of these teachers of the purpose of existence: It now has one additional need - the need for the ever new appearance of such teachers and teachings of a "purpose." Gradually, man has become a fantastic animal that has to fulfill one more condition of existence than any other animal: man has to believe, to know, from time to time why he exists; his race cannot flourish without a periodic trust in life - without faith in reason in life. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Much ecocriticism has taken for granted that its task is to overcome anthropocentrism, just as feminism seeks to overcome androcentrism. The metaphysical argument for biocentrism is meant to sustain moral claims about the intrinsic value of the natural world, which will in turn affect our attitudes and behaviour towards nature. ~ Greg Garrard

It is only other people's ridiculous beliefs or customs that seem ridiculous to us. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge. ~ Christopher Hitchens

There is no life without the conditions of life that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not the discrete ontology of the person, but rather the interdependency of persons, involving reproducible and sustaining social relations, and relations to the environment and to non-human forms of life, broadly considered. This mode of social ontology (for which no absolute distinction between social and ecological exists) has concrete implications for how we re-approach the issues of reproductive freedom and anti-war politics. The question is not whether a given being is living or not, nor whether the being in question has the status of a "person"; it is, rather, whether the social conditions of persistence and flourishing are or are not possible. Only with this latter question can we avoid the anthropocentric and liberal individualist presumptions that have derailed such discussions. ~ Judith Butler

Always there lurks the assumption that although the Western consumer belongs to a numerical minority, he is entitled either to own or to expend (or both) the majority of the world resources. Why? Because he, unlike the Oriental, is a true human being. No better instance exists today of what Anwar Abdel Malek calls "the hegemonism of possessing minorities" and anthropocentrism allied with Europocentrism: a white middle-class Westerner believes it his human prerogative not only to manage the nonwhite world but also to own it, just because by definition "it" is not quite as human as "we" are. There is no purer example than this of dehumanized thought. ~ Edward W. Said