Human Origins Quotes

Yes, the natural sciences are telling us a great deal about human origins, the origins of our species the origins of our minds; we're on our way to explaining a large part of it. I'll accept an answer provided only by such means as obtaining and exploring, analyzing and arguing over the evidence - not because of a scribe's myopic view of the subject written 500 years before the birth of Christ! ~ E. O. Wilson

The weakness of God is stronger than human strength. And it leads, as Jesus said it would lead, to a life of following him, which would itself be about taking up the cross and so finding life, about the meek inheriting the earth. The point of it all, once more, is vocational: if we can study Genesis and human origins without hearing the call to be an image-bearing human being renewed in Jesus, we are massively missing the point, perhaps pursuing our own dream of an otherworldly salvation that merely colludes with the forces of evil, as gnosticism always does. ~ N. T. Wright

I couldn't help thinking how well Cain had prospered after killing his brother: he founded the first city
and, although we don't like to talk about it all that much, we are all his children. ~ Philip Gourevitch

Darwin caused controversy, not merely because his ideas contradicted Genesis, but because they fell foul of the way in which Genesis had been read by those influenced by the Enlightenment, for it was the Enlightenment that conceived of the human as almost exclusively rational and intellectual, and set the human at a distance from the animal. ~ Andrew Louth

In addition to the conditions under which life is given to man on earth, and partly out of them, men constantly create their own, self-made conditions, which, their human origins notwithstanding, possess the same conditioning power as natural things. whatever touches or enters into a sustained relationship with human life immediately assumes the character of a condition of human existence. this is why men, no matter what they do, are always conditioned beings. whatever enters the human world of its own accord or is drawn into it by human effort becomes part of the human condition. ~ Hannah Arendt

anthrapologize FW 151.7 v. Express regret or apologize for the science of man or anthropology. So many mistakes, unintentional and sometimes not, have been made in the study of human origins and development, especially racial, along with customs and beliefs, that some apologies are needed. ~ Bill Cole Cliett

Yet opponents should not herald the demise of evangelicalism. Although much of popular evangelicalism cannot intellectually meet the analyses that call it into question as a viable explanation for human origins and destiny, for most evangelicals it does not need to. Because of the transition from comprehending their religion as a set of doctrines to conceptualizing their religion as an emotional relationship with God, evangelicals have actually made their religion more resilient to intellectual challenges. Calling into question evangelicalism's intellectual foundation ultimately does not undermine the religion because for many evangelicals their adherence was never about those foundations anyway. Evangelicalism becomes true because it FEELS true. Modern evangelicalism has largely transitioned to a new form of truth, one based not on intellectual assent to propositions but on emotional connections. ~ Todd M. Brenneman

When I realized, in 1978, that Lucy did represent a new species of human ancestor, and that I had an opportunity to name this new species, I realized this was a revolutionary step in understanding human origins. ~ Donald Johanson

I've got the best job in the world, and i meet some of the most amazing human beings on the planet. I'm one lucky guy. ~ Ty Pennington

Apart from Love, which is not a human emotion, of all the rest my last words would best read: It's all for the experience. ~ Vanna Bonta

[You have Rights] antecedent to all earthly governments: Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws; Rights, derived from the Great Legislator of the universe. ~ John Adams

One who is a slaveholder at heart never recognizes a human being in a slave. ~ Angelina Grimke

For most of human history, we appear to have lived in tribes of seventy-five to 150 people. Those who could not handle the complexity of the relationships would go off on their own. Lions need to eat, after all. Today ~ Randy J. Paterson

I must admit that I personally measure success in terms of the contributions an individual makes to her or his fellow human beings. ~ Margaret Mead

When people write software, they are not writing it for themselves. In fact, they are not even writing primarily for the computer. Rather, good programmers know that code is written for the next human being who has to read it in order to maintain or reuse it. If that person cannot understand the code, it's all but useless in a realistic development scenario. ~ Mark Lutz

Fear is what makes us human and it is in overcoming fear that we show our strength. ~ Bianca Marais

Clark had always been fond of beautiful objects, and in his present state of mind, all objects were beautiful. He stood by the case and found himself moved by every object he saw there, by the human enterprise each object had required. Consider the snow globe. Consider the mind that invented those miniature storms, the factory worker who turned sheets of plastic into white flakes of snow, the hand that drew the plan for the miniature Severn City with its church steeple and city hall, the as**sembly-line worker who watched the globe glide past on a conveyer belt somewhere in China. Consider the white gloves on the hands of the woman who inserted the snow globes into boxes, to be packed into larger boxes, crates, shipping containers. Consider the card games played belowdecks in the evenings on the ship carrying the containers across the ocean, a hand stubbing out a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a haze of blue smoke in dim light, the cadences of a half dozen languages united by common profanities, the sailors' dreams of land and women, these men for whom the ocean was a gray-line horizon to be traversed in ships the size of overturned skyscrapers. Consider the signature on the shipping manifest when the ship reached port, a signature unlike any other on earth, the coffee cup in the hand of the driver delivering boxes to the distribution center, the secret hopes of the UPS man carrying boxes of snow globes from there to the Severn City Airport. Clark shook the globe and he ~ Emily St. John Mandel

It is a love/hate relationship I have with the human race. I am an elitist, and I feel that my responsibility is to drag the human race along with me, that I will never pander to, or speak down to, or play the safe game. ~ Harlan Ellison

A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes - within the limits of endowment and environment- he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions. ~ Viktor E. Frankl

If we dare to come closer to our fellow human beings, we will be able to see and understand them better. ~ Kjell Magne Bondevik

Wherever human life is concerned, the unnatural stricture of excessive verticality cannot stand against more natural horizontality. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright

It is not to his own age, but to those following, and especially to our own time, that we are to look for the shaping and enormous influence upon human life of the genius of this poet. And it is measured not by the libraries of comments that his works have called forth, but by the prevalence of the language and thought of his poetry in all subsequent literature, and by its entrance into the current of common thought and speech. It may be safely said that the English-speaking world and almost every individual of it are different from what they would have been if Shakespeare had never lived. Of all the forces that have survived out of his creative time, he is one of the chief. ~ William Shakespeare

Superhuman' is an extraordinary personality living in the godliness and wisdom taking over the human intelligence, a pure eternal life, driven by the divine force, living for the welfare of the mankind unconditionally. Superhumans are those who live to unite with the Supreme Power. ~ Vishal Chipkar

I tell you, we would be hard put to determine what is more evil
religion or the pure idea. The intervention of the supernatural or the elegant abstract solution! Both have bathed this earth in suffering; both have brought the human race literally and figuratively to its knees. ~ Anne Rice

A life without a lonely place, that is, without a quiet center, becomes destructive. ~ Henri Nouwen

To watch people push themselves further than they think they can, it's a beautiful thing. It's really human. ~ Abby Wambach

This, more than anything else, is what I have never understood about your people. You can roll dice, and understand that the whole game may hinge on one turn of a die. You deal out cards, and say that all a man's fortune for the night may turn upon one hand. But a man's whole life, you sniff at, and say, what, this naught of a human, this fisherman, this carpenter, this thief, this cook, why, what can they do in the great wide world? And so you putter and sputter your lives away, like candles burning in a draft. ~ Robin Hobb

We are the rocks and reefs of the human sea, tumultuous outcrops, magnets for wrecks. The peaks of mountains you cannot see: that's us, all right. Dark even on the brightest day. Stony and defiant of the prevailing currents until we are eventually worn down and dissolved. Sometimes soaked and sometimes dry as a bone. Hammered by tides and grimly standing our ground against the pounding. Probably even secretly enjoying the pounding. ~ Brian Doyle

Jubal paused, surprised at himself. He had intended to make the usual agnostic approach . . . and found himself compulsively following his legal training, being an honest advocate in spite of himself, attempting to support a religious belief he did not hold but which was believed by most human beings. He found that, willy-nilly, he was attorney for the orthodoxies of his own race against - he wasn't sure what. An unhuman viewpoint. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

An anxious unrest, a fierce craving desire for gain has taken possession of the commercial world, and in instances no longer rare the most precious and permanent goods of human life have been madly sacrificed in the interests of momentary enrichment. ~ Felix Adler

He looked like he'd see the lifespan of the human race a thousand times, and had swallowed its history of violence, of sadness, of loss. ~ Quil Carter

When we meet someone with a deeper spiritual insight, we think God cares more for them than for us. Yet surely God has the right to make use of one of His creatures to give His other children the food they need. He had this right in the days of Pharaoh, for, in Holy Scripture, He told him: "And therefore have I raised thee, that I may show My power in thee, and My name may be spoken of throughout all the earth." Centuries have passed since He uttered these words and His ways have not changed: He has always used human beings to accomplish His work among souls. ~ John Beevers

Those who devote their lives to earning a living are incapable of living a human existence. ~ Herbert Marcuse

I know it's not good to be weak and helpless. But I don't think it's good to be too strong either. In our society, they talk about survival of the fittest. But we're not animals. We're human. ~ Natsuki Takaya

There cannot be any concessions on the matter of human rights or the criteria for visa liberalisation. ~ Francois Hollande

Reason is the glory of human nature, and one of the chief eminences whereby we are raised above our fellow-creatures, the brutes, in this lower world. ~ Isaac Watts

The gospel proclaims human freedom and dignity more than human enslavement and depravity. What is needed is a balance of biblical values and emphasis on the empowering quality of the gospel. The spiritual values of humility, long suffering, endurance, and obedience are to be affirmed alongside self-reliance, freedom, proclamation, mission, and authority. ~ Henri J.M. Nouwen

Despair was their God; divine misery, exhaustion and death. God is nothing more than divine absurdity. God is an expression of human weakness. The dying called on God. I saw it for myself, I heard their cries. God is a fancy word that binds us to reality. In Auschwitz there was no God. ~ Rosie Glacér

The immense majority of human biographies are a gray transit between domestic spasm and oblivion. ~ George Steiner

The First Amendment serves not only the needs of the polity but also those of the human spirit- a spirit that demands self-expression . ~ Thurgood Marshall

Protestantism and Catholicism must not be compared to Sunnism and Shi'ism in the Islamic context as has been done by certain scholars. Sunnism and Shi'ism both go back to the origins of Islam and the very beginning of Islamic history whereas Protestantism is a later protest against the existing Catholic Church and came into being some fifteen hundred years after the foundation of Christianity. ~ Seyyed Hossein Nasr