Human Exceptionalism Quotes

[D]umb evolutionary processes have dramatically amplified the intelligence in the human lineage even compared with our close relatives the great apes and our own humanoid ancestors; and there is no reason to suppose Homo sapiens to have reached the apex of cognitive effectiveness attainable in a biological system. ~ Nick Bostrom

The way individuals live together. The truth of each individual is only the truth of his own narrow perspective. The entirety of mankind and of human qualities is always seen through a prisim, where its colours are broken. Observation is so utterly different from experinnce; there is no hope of fusing their contardictions, as the I and the not-I have been foes from the world's beginning. ~ Jakob Wassermann

I don't understand why things always go from perfect to weird with us. It's like we're incapable of normal human interaction. ~ Stephanie Perkins

The human bones are but vain lines dawdling, the whole universe a blank mold of stars. ~ Jack Kerouac

Acting represents all that human beings experience, and if you want it to be 'nice,' you will never be a serious communicator of the human experience. ~ Larry Moss

The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society. ~ Edmund Wilson

Prabhakar was waiting for me at the bus station, smiling happily through the rain. He led me through the people gathered at the bus station, past shops selling cheap household items and eating places where pakoras were being fried in bubbling oil. The brands and consumerism of urban India had disappeared, and although I felt an acute sense of displacement, I was oddly comforted by the rough utilitarianism of the place, which reminded me of the India I had grown up in.

There were no cafes where I could hide my loneliness behind a cup of coffee and an open laptop, no shopping aisles where I could wander, picking out items that momentarily created an image of a better life. There was no escape here except through human relationships, and for that I was utterly dependent on Prabhakar speeding through the rain on his motorcycle. ~ Siddhartha Deb

I begin with movement ... I believe that all human visual experiences are born from movement ... ~ Ernst Ludwig Kirchner

I have known some grim bells, with not a single joyous note in the whole peal, so forced to hurry for a human festival, with their harshness made light of, as though the Bishop of Hereford had again been forced to dance in his boots by a merry highwayman. ~ Alice Meynell

To endow animals with human emotions has long been a scientific taboo. But if we do not, we risk missing something fundamental, about both animals and us. ~ Frans De Waal

I don't think we have to worry about Mr. Isidore," she said earnestly; she walked swiftly toward him, looked up into his face. "They don't treat him very well either, as he said. And what we did on Mars he isn't interested in; he knows us and he likes us and an emotional acceptance like that - it's everything to him. It's hard for us to grasp that, but it's true." To Isidore she said, standing very close to him once again and peering up at him, "You could get a lot of money by turning us in; do you realize that?" Twisting, she said to her husband, "See, he realizes that but still he wouldn't say anything."

"You're a great man, Isidore," Pris said. "You're a credit to your race."

"If he was an android," Roy said heartily, "he'd turn us in about ten tomorrow morning. He'd take off for his job and that would be it. I'm overwhelmed with admiration." His tone could not be deciphered; at least Isidore could not crack it. "And we imagined this would be a friendless world, a planet of hostile faces, all turned against us." He barked out a laugh.

"I'm not at all worried," Irmgard said.

"You ought to be scared to the soles of your feet," Roy said.

"Let's vote," Pris said. "As we did on the ship, when we had a disagreement."

"Well," Irmgard said, "I won't say anything more. But if we turn this down, I don't think we'll find any other human being who'll take us in and help us. Mr. Isidore is - " She searched for the word.< ~ Philip K. Dick

A lie distorts the image of reality. It is a delusion of the human mind which can disrupt an individual's sense of what is morally right or wrong. ~ Eraldo Banovac

Most of the infections linked to human cancers are common in human populations; they are ubiquitous. They were present during the whole human evolution process. ~ Harald Zur Hausen

Meeks was telling him about the value of work. He said that it had been his personal experience that if you wanted to get ahead, you had to work. He said this was the law of life and it was no way to get around it because it was inscribed on the human heart like love thy neighbour. He said these two laws were the team that worked together to make the world go round and that any individual who wanted to be a success and win the pursuit of happiness, that was all he needed to know. ~ Flannery O'Connor

Good work, like good talk or any other form of worthwhile human relationship, depends upon being able to assume an extended shared world. ~ Stefan Collini

I've always felt as if writing a novel is like giving birth. After the process is over, I am emotionally exhausted. But then the work's not done. I have to then raise the book to adulthood, through marketing and giveaways and pandhandling for reviews (its college education). And even while I'm nurturing it into something that is well adjusted and lovable, I've got other "kids" that need equal attention. It truly is work. My hat is off to real parents everywhere, who raise human children and novel ones at the same time. You are amazing. ~ Ash Gray

Let me say to begin with: It is not neurotic to have conflict ... Conflicts within ourselves are an integral part of human life. ~ Karen Horney

Some believe that every library looks like a splendid cemetery of human thoughts and ideas. Could librarians be called grave-diggers? However that may be, like a cemetery, a library will never stop being of use. ~ Lara Biyuts

No one must ever let power or social, economic, or political interest turn him or her away from other human beings, from the attention they deserve and the respect they are entitled to. nothing must ever lead to a person to compromise this principle or faith in favor of a political strategy aimed at saving or protecting a community from some peril. The freely offered, sincere heart of a poor, powerless individual is worth a thousand times more in the sight of God than the assiduously courted, self-interested heart of a rich one. ~ Tariq Ramadan

Concepts of triage and medical rationing are a barometer of how those in power in a society value human life. ~ Sheri Fink

My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. I am truly a 'lone traveler' and have never belonged to my country, my home, my friends, or even my immediate family, with my whole heart; in the face of all these ties, I have never lost a sense of distance and a need for solitude ... ~ Albert Einstein

Love turns ma into an ocean of happiness, an image of peace, a temple of wisdom. Love is every man's very Self, his true beauty, and the glory of his human existence. ~ Swami Muktananda

As Daniel Pink notes in To Sell Is Human, "Like it or not, we're all in sales now."4 ~ Carmine Gallo

And what greater might do we possess as human beings than our capacity to question and to learn? ~ Ann Druyan

We need to radically and intelligently reduce human populations to fewer than one billion. We need to eliminate nationalism and tribalism and become Earthlings. And as Earthlings, we need to recognize that all the other species that live on this planet are also fellow citizens and also Earthlings. This is a planet of incredible diversity of life-forms; it is not a planet of one species as many of us believe. ~ Paul Watson

The deepness of human love and dignity will define the tolerance of humanity. ~ Debasish Mridha

My approach is a very human one, as a fan. ~ Lisa Guerrero

In order to win the femininity game, women and girls must abandon the valued "masculine" characteristics of self-efficacy and self-determination. However, this is the catch: the femininity game ultimately presents girls and women with a "no-win" situation. Although failure to live up to the expectations of femininity can have devastating effects on girls' and women's self-esteem, so can success in attaining them. A "winner" of the femininity game has effectively stripped herself of valued human characteristics in adopting an undervalued identity. ~ Lauraine Leblanc

I figure if I just stay true to myself and I am the Whitney that I've always been, people will look at me not as Whitney from the show, but as a human being. ~ Whitney Port

If God absolutely and pretemporally decrees that particular persons shall be saved and others damned, apart from any cooperation of human freedom, then God cannot in any sense intend that all shall be saved, as 1 Timothy 4:10 declares. The promise of glory is conditional on grace being received by faith active in love. ~ Thomas C. Oden

Habit is, of all the plants of human growth, the one that has the least need of nutritious soil in order to live, and is the first to appear on the most seemingly barren rock. ~ Marcel Proust

Every once in a while, something happens to you that makes you realise that the human race is not quite as bad as it so often seems to be. ~ Ian Hacking

According to what he tells us himself, Mrs. Fryxell used to say of Napoleon: 'I wish he could be punished for all his slaughter by having to go through a childbirth for every human being who was shot on his account'. (A. Fryxell: Min historias historia). ~ Moberg Vilhelm

Dignity is the only one thing I have chosen over rules and benefits of slavery. I am not perfect because I chose to be myself; a human and this is the simplest form of dignity. ~ Rola Mahmoud

The Capitalist system with its exploitation of those who are economically weak, with its robbery of the workers labour power, with its unethical way of appraising human beings by the number of things and the amount of money he possesses, instead of by their internal value and their achievements, must be replaced by a new and just economic system, in a word by German Socialism. ~ Gregor Strasser

To err is human, to purr feline. ~ Robert Byrne

Custom is the great guide to human life. ~ David Hume

Arrested personal growth serves industrial "growth". By suppressing the nature dimension of human development (through educational systems, social values, advertising, nature-eclipsing vocations and pastimes, city and suburb design, denatured medical and psychological practices, and other means), industrial growth society engenders an immature citizenry unable to imagine a life beyond consumerism and soul-suppressing jobs. ~ Bill Plotkin

It had been a dangerous gamble - and unfair to the Hemlocks, who knew nothing of their role in the deadly game - but sometimes you have to take chances. Was it wise to risk five lives for the sake of one? Probably not. But it was human. If I'd learned one thing from my one encounter with the crazy vampaneze, it was that even the undead could be human. We had to be - without a touch of humanity, we'd be like Murlough, nothing more than bloodthirsty monsters of the night. ~ Darren Shan

There are consolations that the strongest human love is powerless to give.
(page 330) ~ Richard Powers

Upset by two nostalgias facing each other like two mirrors, he lost his marvelous sense of unreality and he ended up recommending to all of them that they leave Macondo, that they forget everything he had taught them about the world and the human heart, that they shit on Horace, and that wherever they might be they always remember that the past was a lie, that memory has no return, that every spring gone by could never be recovered, and that the wildest and most tenacious love was an ephemeral truth in the end. A ~ Gabriel Garcia Marquez

We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity. ~ Fred Hampton

I often wonder and imagine
What lies just beyond the fringe
Of the human experience;
What is it that we do not see? ~ Justin Wetch

If we did not take action to solve this crisis, it could indeed threaten the future of human civilization. That sounds shrill. It sounds hard to accept. I believe it's deadly accurate. But again, we can solve it. ~ Al Gore