Human Arrogance Quotes

The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women - of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human. ~ Rebecca Solnit

I had written the sentence, 'You mustn't think that the evolution that gave rise to us was the only evolutionary possibility on this planet ... that cultural developments could be shaped through the mediation of another animal species. If the biological conditions were favorable, some civilization not inferior to our own could arise in the depths of the sea ... Would it do the same stupid things mankind has done? Would it invite the same historical calamities? What would we say if some animal other than man declared that its education and its numbers gave it the sole right to occupy the entire world and hold sway over all creation? ~ Karel Capek

I know a 'crime against nature' when I see one. It is usually a sign of crimes against nature that we cannot bear to see them at all, that we recoil and hide our eyes, and no one has ever cringed at the sight of a soybean factory. I also know phony arguments when I hear them
unbridled appetite passing itself off as altruism, and human arrogance in the guise of solemn 'duty.' We must, as C.S. Lewis advises, 'reject with detestation that covert propoganda for cruelty which tries to drive mercy out of the world by calling it names such as 'Humanitarianism' and 'Sentimentality. ~ Matthew Scully

How thoroughly the chimps and bonobos have erased the list of purported human distinctions!-self-awareness, language, ideas and their association, reason, trade, play, choice, courage, love and altruism, laughter, concealed ovulation, kissing, face-to-face sex, female orgasm, division of labor, cannibalism, art, music, politics, and featherless bipedalism, besides tool using, tool making, and much else. Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the apes casually knock them down--toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings of Earth. Instead, we are more like the nouveau riche, incompletely accommodated to our recent exalted state, insecure about who we are, and trying to put as much distance as possible between us and our humble origins. It's as if our nearest relatives, by their very existence, refute all our explanations and justifications. So as counterweights to human arrogance and pride, it is good for us that there are still apes on Earth. ~ Carl Sagan

Nature has a myriad of weapons to combat human arrogance. ~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos ~ Stephen Jay Gould

Humility raises us not by human arrogance but by divine grace. ~ Augustine Of Hippo

To have arrived on this earth as a product of a biological accident, only to depart through human arrogance, would be the ultimate irony. ~ Richard Leakey

For I am aware what ability is requisite to persuade the proud how great is the virtue of humility, which raises us, not by a quite human arrogance, but by a divine grace, above all earthly dignities that totter on this shifting scene. ~ Augustine Of Hippo

Putting the AR movement directly in opposition to the environmental movement, which should be our natural allies in fighting human arrogance and domination of the planet. ~ Peter Singer

You say that your hope is in God, and he will, I am sure, stand by you. But you must not forget that you have been given worldly means to use and employ against human arrogance and wrong; it is necessary to see such things with a broad mind in order to oppose them. ~ Knute Nelson

The place where God has supremely destroyed all human arrogance and pretension is the cross. ~ D. A. Carson

The idea that we are "stewards of the earth" is another symptom of human arrogance. Imagine yourself with the task of overseeing your body's physical processes. Do you understand the way it works well enough to keep all its systems in operation? Can you make your kidneys function? Can you control the removal of waste? Are you conscious of the blood flow through your arteries, or the fact that you are losing a hundred thousand skin cells a minute? ~ Lynn Margulis

I think human arrogance will be the demise of civilization. ~ Adam Ferrara

Interestingly, this was the only incident of blatant prejudice that I can

remember. But I am aware that such opinions exist in human beings, and

it's not a question of being Egyptian or being an Arab or being a Muslim.

One could be a Christian against a Jew or a Jew against a Christian, or a

white against a black, or a man against a woman. My philosophy is not

to let such attitudes stop me from what I want to do. I don't take it very

seriously, although as you can see, I remember the incident very well.

The point was I had to get on with my work and had to behave properly,

and in the process perhaps even change the opinion of these people. But

on the other hand, if I did nothing but complain and feel sorry for myself,

then I wouldn't get anywhere. ~ Ahmed H. Zewail

The body cannot be the soul. ~ Swami Vivekananda

Own it. Just take it and say, 'Yes I will be great, I am going to be great.' Great doesn't mean being a movie star, great doesn't mean having millions of dollars. Great means being able to be confident, strong, and a solid human being that has dignity and integrity. That is great. ~ Rosie Perez

Throughout the biblical story, from Genesis to Revelation, every radical challenge from the biblical God is both asserted and then subverted by its receiving communities - be they earliest Israelites or latest Christians. That pattern of assertion-and-subversion, that rhythm of expansion-and-contraction, is like the systole-and-diastole cycle of the human heart.

In other words, the heartbeat of the Christian Bible is a recurrent cardiac cycle in which the asserted radicality of God's nonviolent distributive justice is subverted by the normalcy of civilization's violent retributive justice. And, of course, the most profound annulment is that both assertion and subversion are attributed to the same God or the same Christ.

Think of this example. In the Bible, prophets are those who speak for God. On one hand, the prophets Isaiah and Micah agree on this as God's vision: "they shall beat their swords into plowshares, / and their spears into pruning hooks; / nation shall not lift up sword against nation, / neither shall they learn war any more" (Isa. 2:4 = Mic. 4:3). On the other hand, the prophet Joel suggests the opposite vision: "Beat your plowshares into swords, / and your pruning hooks into spears; / let the weakling say, 'I am a warrior'" (3:10). Is this simply an example of assertion-and-subversion between prophets, or between God's radicality and civilization's normalcy?

That proposal might also answer how, as noted in Chapter 1, Jesus the ~ John Dominic Crossan

It is not really "artificial" intelligence if a human designed the artifice. ~ Nate Silver

Fictionally speaking, desire is the sugar in human food. ~ David Foster Wallace

Our concern for human rights comes to the fore when there are gross violations of human decencies. Then other countries, including China, must recognize that this affects the American attitude towards their country. But towards what precise institutions will it evolve? I think we ought to leave something to history. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Today I know that all things are watching, that nothing goes unseen, that even wallpaper has a better memory than human beings. ~ Gunter Grass

Men are created from the molds of new born human babies, and the human demon does not cross that route ever; both, however, share the biological history of the human body. ~ Ibrahim Ibrahim

The mythology of a people is far more than a collection of pretty or terrifying fables to be retold in carefully bowdlerized form to our schoolchildren. It is the comment of the men of one particular age or civilization on the mysteries of human existence and the human mind, their model for social behaviour, and their attempt to define in stories of gods and demons their perception of the inner realities. We can learn much from the mythologies of earlier peoples if we have the humility to respect ways of thought widely differing from our own. In certain respects we may be far cleverer than they, but not necessarily wiser. We cannot return to the mythological thinking of an earlier age; it is beyond our reach, like the vanished world of childhood. Even if we feel a nostalgic longing for the past, like that of Jon Keats for Ancient Greece of William Morris for medieval England, there is now no way of entry. The Nazis tries to revive the myths of ancient Germany in their ideology, but such an attempt could only lead to sterility and moral suicide. We cannot deny the demands of our own age, but this need not prevent us turning to the faith of another age with sympathetic understanding, and recapturing imaginatively some of its vanished power. It will even help us view more clearly the assumptions and beliefs of our own time ~ H. R. Ellis Davidson

It is the fight for a new economy, a new energy system, a new democracy, a new relationship to the planet and to each other, for land, water, and food sovereignty, for Indigenous rights, for human rights and dignity for all people. When climate justice wins we win the world that we want. We can't sit this one out, not because we have too much to lose but because we have too much to gain. . . . We are bound together in this battle, not just for a reduction in the parts per million of CO2, but to transform our economies and rebuild a world that we want today. ~ Naomi Klein

Internal peace is an essential first step to achieving peace in the world. How do you cultivate it? It's very simple. In the first place by realizing clearly that all mankind is one, that human beings in every country are members of one and the same family. ~ Dalai Lama

For generations, parents have shaped 'fine' but deeply restless human beings. We may know 'how to act' but we're losing sight of how to love, how to bond, how to have healthy relationships. This is evident in our broken homes, the rise in depression and mental illness, suicide rates, and so forth. ~ Rebecca Eanes

Every evil starts with 15 volts. ~ Philip G. Zimbardo

which will enable either a human or an automatic operator to control the insect's movements remotely and to absorb and transmit information. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

And how many ideas have there been upon earth, in human history, which only ten years earlier were unimaginable and which suddenly appeared when their mysteriously appointed season arrived, to go spreading all over the earth? ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I found a comfort in trying to solve some poetic problems because there were human ones I just couldn't solve. ~ Edward Hirsch

In this image (watching sensual murder through a peephole) Lorrain embodies the criminal delight of decadent art. The watcher who records the crimes (both the artist and consumer of art) is constructed as marginal, powerless to act, and so exculpated from action, passive subject of a complex pleasure, condemning and yet enjoying suffering imposed on others, and condemning himself for his own enjoyment. In this masochistic celebration of disempowerment, the sharpest pleasure recorded is that of the death of some important part of humanity. The dignity of human life is the ultimate victim of Lorrain's art, thrown away on a welter of delighted self-disgust. ~ Jennifer Birkett

One looks in mirrors to have one's arrogance confirmed. ~ Eleanor Catton

I'm the guy who builds things. So when this dam is done, it will have Pete Conroy's name written on it somewhere. Even if nobody else in the world ever finds that place, it doesn't matter because I'll know that it was me and my men who did the job. Just as important, my men always come first. I get a lot more work out of men by treating them like decent human beings. I don't treat them like slaves, as some of the foremen do. ~ Jerry Borrowman

Rows and rows of books lined the shelves and I let my eyes linger on the sturdy spines, thinking how human books were, so full of ideas and images, worlds imagined, worlds perceived; full of fingerprints and sudden laughter and the sighs of readers, too. It was humbling to consider all these authors, struggling with this word or that phrase, recording their thoughts for people they'd never meet. In that same way, the detritus of the boxes was humbling - receipts, jotted notes, photos with no inscriptions, all of it once held together by the fabric of lives now finished, gone. ~ Kim Edwards

Our bodies have five senses: touch, smell, taste, sight, hearing. But not to be overlooked are the senses of our souls: intuition, peace, foresight, trust, empathy. The differences between people lie in their use of these senses; most people don't know anything about the inner senses while a few people rely on them just as they rely on their physical senses, and in fact probably even more. ~ C. JoyBell C.

I've come to the conclusion that all Human females are crazy. ~ Anna Carven

One can only describe the human but can never define it because humans are complex in their nature. ~ Zaman Ali

In the very earliest times, when both people and animals lived on earth, a person could become an animal if he wanted to, and an animal could become a human being. Sometimes they were people and sometimes animals and there was no difference. All spoke the same language. That was the time when words were like magic. NALUNGLAQ, A NETSILIK ESKIMO ~ Virginia Morell

One human could simply withhold its feelings and intentions from another human by failing to audibilize or it could audibilize things that were not real. The other human would be aware only of what it heard and would change its behavior in response to a nonexistent stimulus. They called it 'lying. ~ Robert Buettner

Prayer is beyond any question the highest activity of the human soul. Man is at his greatest and highest when upon his knees he comes face to face with God. ~ D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Darkness fell, revealing a sparkling night sky so beautiful that we decided to sleep out under the stars. At gray dawn, Phyllis woke me with an urgent voice. "Bill, Bill," she said, "when I woke up I saw this huge boulder beside me, but it wasn't there last night. Look! Look!" she said and pointed next to her. It was the huge buffalo bull! He had come back during the night and lay down beside us to sleep. I was awestruck. I felt so honored, so grateful, so loved. I loved that buffalo with all my heart and soul. I felt like he knew it, and that was why he had come back to sleep with us.

But maybe there's a different reason. Judith Niles, a wise spiritual friend of mine recently told me that the spontaneous melody is "the voice of the soul." The minute she said it I knew she was right. Now I feel sure that the creatures responded to "the voice of the soul" amplified through my body. When we human beings finally get it together the natural world is going to respond to us in more wonderful ways than we can ever begin to imagine. ~ William "Billy" Packer

If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind? ~ Frederic Bastiat

Own your biases, don't be owned by them. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Human nature is still, to a very great extent, regarded irrationally because it is pleasant to regard people as objects of praise and blame. ~ Bertrand Russell

The human race will disappear. Other races will appear and disappear in turn. The sky will become icy and void, pierced by the feeble light of half-dead stars. Which will also disappear. Everything will disappear. And what human beings do is just as free of sense as the free motion of elementary particles. Good, evil, morality, feelings? Pure 'Victorian fictions'. Only egotism exists. ~ H.P. Lovecraft

This need for recognition and glory must have its roots in human loneliness. ~ Yiyun Li