Human Reactions Quotes

Human reactions to robots varies by culture and changes over time. In the United States we are terrified by killer robots. In Japan people want to snuggle with killer robots. ~ Daniel H. Wilson

The value of the things is not in themselves autonomously, but that God made them, and thus they deserve to be treated with high respect. The tree in the field is to be treated with respect. It is not to be romanticized as the old lady romanticizes her cat (that is, she reads human reactions into it). This is wrong because it is not true. When you drive the axe into the tree when you need firewood, you are not cutting down a person; you are cutting down a tree. But while we should not romanticize the tree, we must realize God made it and it deserves respect because He made is as a tree. ~ Francis Schaeffer

Are human reactions what they've always been, or has a century or more of movies influenced our response to every stimulus ~ Dean Koontz

In Economics as almost everywhere else, with all our cleverness, we have become decidedly less wise, while knowing more and more about less and less. We have lost the sense of proportion--so indispensable for every economist--while analysing the curiosities of hypothetical economic situations and forgetting what has a bearing on real economic life. In spinning out the fine threads of the New Economics, we forget the most elementary principles of economics, and while stressing what might
at best in highly exceptional circumstances we overlook what are almost perennial truths. While proudly parading our elaborate equations we unlearnt that simple common sense which consists in reckoning with human reactions and institutions as they really are. ~ Wilhelm Ropke

Could some of the challenging behaviours that often partner autism begin as experiements on measuring human reactions? Are these children exploring boundaries - seeing what makes the toy squeak or the adult shriek? ~ Adele Devine

We've determined that Ms. Hauptman is a potential threat to the public safety, and we are bringing her in as a murder suspect who has supernatural powers that make her too dangerous to be incarcerated in the usual ways. ~ Patricia Briggs

The images which the [press] photographer has filtered from reality, whether particular events or the anguish of human reactions to them, already bear a stamp of authenticity which the photographer is powerless to alter by one jot or tittle; the meaning of the objects, by a process of purification, itself becomes the theme of the work. ~ Yukio Mishima

In case, I would prefer to say, that some circumstances should strike me in a different light to the one in which it struck you. Human reactions vary and so does human experience.

~Hercule Poirot ~ Agatha Christie

The capacity of the human mind for swallowing nonsense and spewing it forth in violent and repressive action has never yet been plumbed. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Dogma is a defensive reaction against doubt in the mind of the theorist, but doubt of which he is unaware. ~ Harold Lasswell

For A to sit down and think, What shall I do? is commonplace; but to think what B ought to do is interesting, romantic, moral, self-flattering, and public-spirited all at once. It satisfies a great number of human weaknesses at once. To go on and plan what a whole class of people ought to do is to feel one's self a power on earth, to win a public position, to clothe one's self in dignity. Hence we have an unlimited supply of reformers, philanthropists, humanitarians, and would-be managers-in-general of society. ~ William Graham Sumner

What are we watching?" [ ... ]
[ ... ] He hugged her closer. "The sacrifices I make for you -just watch."
She was intrigued enough to pay attention to the screen. "Pride and Prejudice," she read out. "It's a book written by a human. Nineteenth century?"
"Uh-huh."
"The hero is ... Mr. Darcy?"
"Yes. According to Ti, he's the embodiment of male perfection." Dev ripped open a bag of chips he'd grabbed and put it in Katya's hands. "I don't know -the guy wears tights. ~ Nalini Singh

There is no supernatural, there is only nature. Nature alone exists and contains all. All is. There is the part of nature that we perceive, and the part of nature that we do not perceive ... If you abandon these facts, beware; charlatans will light upon them, also the imbecile. There is no mean: science, or ignorance. If science does not want these facts, ignorance will take them up. You have refused to enlarge human intelligence, you augment human stupidity. When Laplace withdraws Cagliostro appears. ~ Victor Hugo

A man who should undertake to inquire into everything for himself, could devote to each thing but little time and attention. His task would keep his mind in perpetual unrest, which would prevent him from penetrating to the depth of any truth, or of grappling his mind indissolubly to any conviction. His intellect would be at once independent and powerless. He must therefore make his choice from amongst the various objects of human belief, and he must adopt many opinions without discussion, in order to search the better into that smaller number which he sets apart for investigation. It is true that whoever receives an opinion on the word of another, does so far enslave his mind; but it is a salutary servitude which allows him to make a good use of freedom.

A principle of authority must then always occur, under all circumstances, in some part or other of the moral and intellectual world. Its place is variable, but a place it necessarily has. The independence of individual minds may be greater, or it may be less: unbounded it cannot be. Thus the question is, not to know whether any intellectual authority exists in the ages of democracy, but simply where it resides and by what standard it is to be measured. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

One life stamps and influences another, which in turn stamps and influences another, on and on, until the soul of human experience breathes on in generations we'll never meet. ~ Mary Blakely

Allowing our government to kill citizens compromises the deepest moral values upon which this country was conceived: the inviolable dignity of human persons. ~ Helen Prejean

I would like to do a series about sequencing the human genome, and also analyze more human diversity among other ethnic groups - a 'Faces of America 2.' ~ Henry Louis Gates

I have, let me confess it in all humility, a pitiful human wish that someone should know just how clever I have been ~ Agatha Christie

There will still be things that machines cannot do. They will not produce great art or great literature or great philosophy; they will not be able to discover the secret springs of happiness in the human heart; they will know nothing of love and friendship. ~ Bertrand Russell

Learning can take place in the backyard if there is a human being there who cares about the child. Before learning computers, children should learn to read first. They should sit around the dinner table and hear what their parents have to say and think. ~ Dixie Carter

Many leave the labours of half their life to their executors and to chance, because they will not send them abroad unfinished, and are unable to finish them, having prescribed to themselves such a degree of exactness as human diligence can scarcely ontain. ~ Samuel Johnson

I expect it will turn out that sexual intercourse is possible between Gethenian double-sexed and Hainish-norm one-sexed human beings, though such intercourse will inevitably be sterile. It remains to be proved; Estraven and I proved nothing except perhaps a rather subtler point. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I don't pretend to be a very educated man, except maybe educated in the heart, and in being able to feel for the sorrows and fears of every ornery fellow human being. ~ Sinclair Lewis

And even though he's the father of capitalism and wrote the most famous and maybe the best book ever on why some nations are rich and others are poor, Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments wrote as eloquently as anyone ever has on the futility of pursuing money with the hope of finding happiness. How do you reconcile that with the fact that no one did more than Adam Smith to make capitalism and self-interest respectable? That is a puzzle I try to unravel toward the end of this book. Besides the emptiness of excessive materialism, Smith understood the potential we have for self-deception, the danger of unintended consequences, the seductive lure of fame and power, the limitations of human reason, and the unseen sources of what makes our lives both so complex and yet at times so orderly. The Theory of Moral Sentiments is a book of observations about what makes us tick. As a bonus, almost in passing, Smith tells us how to lead the good life in the fullest sense of that phrase. ~ Russ Roberts

The things you have are a shared effort, Gods blessings and human strength. Give thanks for the blessings in all situations. ~ Unarine Ramaru

The mere understanding, however useful and indispensable, is the meanest faculty in the human mind and the most to be distrusted. ~ Thomas De Quincey

Happiness is the meaning and purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence. ~ Gretchen Rubin

Incredulity and indifference were her only reaction: incredulity, because she could not conceive of what would bring human beings to such a state - indifference, because she could not regard those who reached it, as human any longer. ~ Ayn Rand

Unless thinkers carry their respect for cause and effect into the field of human relations, they may not have much awareness of people. ~ Isabel Briggs Myers

(There is, however, one thing about which all the prophecies seem to agree: the messiah is a human being, not divine. Belief in a divine messiah would have been anathema to everything Judaism represents, which is why, without exception, every text in the Hebrew Bible dealing with the messiah presents him as performing his messianic functions on earth, not in heaven.) ~ Reza Aslan

A rational nature admits of nothing but what is serviceable to the rest of mankind. ~ Marcus Aurelius

As long as the human race is able to concern itself with more than mere survival, soccer will have its place. ~ Desmond Morris

Life isn't always smooth. If it were, we would never grow & develop
as human beings. If we succeed, we are envied; if we fail, we are
ridiculed & attacked. Sadly, this is how people are. Unexpected
grief & suffering may lie ahead of you. But it is precisely when you
encounter such trying times that you must not be defeated. NEVER GIVE
UP! NEVER RETREAT! ~ Daisaku Ikeda

Believe it, my good friend, to love truth for truth's sake is the principal part of human perfection in the world, and the seed-plot of all other virtues; and if I mistake not, you have as much of it as I ever met with in anybody. ~ Anthony Collins

Like casinos, large corporate entities have studied the numbers and the ways in which people respond to them. These are not con tricks - they're not even necessarily against our direct interests, although sometimes they can be - but they are hacks for the human mind, ways of manipulating us into particular decisions we otherwise might not make. They are also, in a way, deliberate underminings of the core principle of the free market, which derives its legitimacy from the idea that informed self-interest on aggregate sets appropriate prices for items. The key word is 'informed'; the point of behavioural economics - or rather, of its somewhat buccaneering corporate applications - is to skew our perception of the purchase to the advantage of the company. The overall consequence of that is to tilt the construction of our society away from what it should be if we were making the rational decisions classical economics imagines we would, and towards something else. ~ Nick Harkaway

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. ~ Douglas Adams

How well that human potential has been fulfilled over the years by people with a deep and abiding connection to Pennsylvania. ~ William Schreyer

These two sections [of Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise], plus some of the author's notes, are all we have
this in itself is a tragedy and waste of war. Had this novel been finished we would be hailing it as one of the supreme works of literature. As it stands, it is like a great cathedral gutted by a bomb. The ruined shell still soars to heaven, a reminder of the human spirit triumphing despite human destructiveness. ~ Irene Nemirovsky

Love by its very nature is extravagant, but we poor human beings, so caught up in fear and worry, limit the very love we were created to bring into the world. ~ Mary Morrell

A flamenco dancer, lurking under a shadow, prepares of the terror of her dance. Somebody has wounded her with words, alluding to the fact that she has no fire, or 'duende'. She knows she has to dance her way past her limitations, and that this may destroy her forever. She has to fail, or she has to die. I want to dwell for a little while on this dancer because, though a very secular example, she speaks very well for the power of human transcendence. I want you to imagine this frail woman. I want you to see her in deep shadow, and fear. When the music starts, she begins to dance, with ritual slowness. Then she stamps out the dampness from her soul. Then she stamps fire into her loins. She takes on a strange enchanted glow. With a dark tragic rage, shouting, she hurls her hungers, her doubts, her terrors, and her secular prayer for more light into the spaces around her. All fire and fate, she spins her enigma around us, and pulls into the awesome risk of her dance.

She is taking herself apart before our sceptical gaze.

She is disintegrating, shouting and stamping and dissolving the boundaries of her body. Soon, she becomes a wild unknown force, glowing in her death, dancing from her wound, dying in her dance.

And when she stops – strangely gigantic in her new fiery stature – she is like one who has survived the most dangerous journey of all. I can see her now as she stands shining in celebration of her own death. In the silence that follows, no ~ Ben Okri

If people took some simple pleasure in reality (which is entirely independent of time), they would never have needed to come up with the idea that they could ever again lose anything with which they had truly bonded. No constellation is as steadfast, no accomplishment as irrevocable as a connection between human beings which, at the very moment it becomes visible, works more forcefully in those invisible depths where our existence is as lasting as gold lodged in stone, more constant than a star. ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Thus human beings judge of one another, superficially, casually, throwing contempt on one another, with but little reason, and no charity. ~ Emmuska Orczy

The inherent prejudice in unnaturally-produced nationalism causes a form of cultural blindness, which prevents us from seeing the obvious ways we could co-exist in the world as a co-operative human family. ~ Bryant McGill

Everyone makes mistakes, it's part of the human learning curve, as long as you do learn from them ~ Lucinda Riley

So the lion is the law-breaker. Just as to the primitive man the lion is the lawbreaker, the great nuisance, dangerous to human beings and to animals, that breaks into the Kraal at night and fetches the bull out of the herd: he is the destructive instinct. ~ Carl Jung

As for the reaction of his colleagues - all those hoicked eyebrows - Wesley discovered he relished the prospect. Which led to an interesting insight into human nature, or at least the human nature of the academic: one liked to be perceived by one's students as Old School, but by one's peers as New School. I ~ Stephen King

I say human beings have purposeful brains beyond acting like flocks of scared pigeons. ~ Janny Wurts

Our all-powerful God got so scared He scattered the human race across the face of the earth, and shattered their language to keep His children apart. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Equality ... is the result of human organization. We are not born equal. ~ Hannah Arendt

I would never tell you what to believe, Daniel, so please don't tell me that my opinion is wrong. We should be allowed a few basic human rights in life: the right to decide what goes into our bodies and the right to have an opinion without feeling shamed for it. ~ Jewel E. Ann

I have these obsessions that I do not completely understand, with the deep mark, with the ruptured surface, with scars and traces, traces that human beings are leaving on the earth. It is not a comment on the environment ... it is metaphysical. ~ Sophie Ristelhueber

It is the illusion that if we find our one true soul mate, everything wrong with us will be healed; but that makes the lover into God, and no human being can live up to that. ~ Timothy Keller

We have a lot to gain through furthering stem cell research, but medical breakthroughs should be fundamentally about saving, not destroying, human life. Therefore, I support stem cell research that does not destroy the embryo. ~ Michael Steele