Humans Quotes

“Your comfort zone is a place where you keep yourself in a self-illusion and nothing can grow there but your potentiality can grow only when you can think and grow out of that zone.”
― Rashedur Ryan Rahman

“Most killers have pretty average lifestyles. Steady jobs too. Sometimes they're even living the family life-white picket fence and a four-door sedan. That's what makes them so scary. They act human and they slot into society and since a young age they've known how to hide the crazy; they put it up on a shelf and only bring it out on special occasions.”
― Paul Cleave, The Killing Hour

“Then to give the kids a historical perspective, Chacko told them about the earth woman. He made them imagine that the earth - 4600 million years old - was a 46 year old woman- as old as Aleyamma teaacher, who gave them Malayalam lessons. It had taken the whole of earth woman’s life for the earth to become what it was. For the oceans to part. For the mountains to rise. The earth woman was 11 yrs old when the first single celled organisms appeared. The first animals, creatures like worms and jellyfish, appeared only when she was forty. She was over forty five - just 8 months ago - when dinosaurs roamed the earth. The whole of human civilization as we know it, began only 2 hrs ago in the earth woman’s life…”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.”
― Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism

“My home drove me
into the wilderness.
Few look for me. Few hear me.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings

“In meetings philosophy might work,
on the field practicality works.”
― Amit Kalantri

“We proclaim human intelligence to be morally valuable per se because we are human. If we were birds, we would proclaim the ability to fly as morally valuable per se. If we were fish, we would proclaim the ability to live underwater as morally valuable per se. But apart from our obviously self-interested proclamations, there is nothing morally valuable per se about human intelligence.”
― GaryLFrancione

“Everything made by human hands looks terrible under magnification--crude, rough, and asymmetrical. But in nature every bit of life is lovely. And the more magnification we use, the more details are brought out, perfectly formed, like endless sets of boxes within boxes.”
― Roman Vishniac

“All cows were like other cows, all tigers like all other tigers - What on earth happened to human beings?”
― Harry Mulisch, Siegfried: A Black Idyll

“Humans live in a pit of cheating, exploiting, hurting, incarcerating. Every time, the species wastes some part of what it could be. This waste is poisonous.”
― David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

“I have argued that this sort of thinking is problematic in at least two regards:

First, the notion that nonhuman animals do not have an interest in continued existence—that they do not have an interest in their lives—involves relying on a speciesist concept of what sort of self-awareness matters morally. I have argued that every sentient being necessarily has an interest in continued existence—every sentient being values her or his life—and that to say that only those animals (human animals) who have a particular sort of self-awareness have an interest in not being treated as commodities begs the fundamental moral question. Even if, as some maintain, nonhuman animals live in an “eternal present”—and I think that is empirically not the case at the very least for most of the nonhumans we routinely exploit who do have memories of the past and a sense of the future—they have, in each moment, an interest in continuing to exist. To say that this does not count morally is simply speciesist.

Second, even if animals do not have an interest in continuing to live and only have interests in not suffering, the notion that, as a practical matter, we will ever be able to accord those interests the morally required weight is simply fantasy. The notion that we property owners are ever going to accord any sort of significant weight to the interests of property in not suffering is simply unrealistic. Is it possible in theory? Yes. Is it possible as a matter of practicality in the real world. Absolutely not. Welfarists often talk about treating “farmed animals” in the way that we treat dogs and cats whom we love and regard as members of our family. Does anyone really think that is practically possible? The fact that we would not think of eating our dogs and cats is some indication that it is not.”
― GaryLFrancione

“When you get down to the bottom of it, only about half of what we remember really happened. We tend to modify things to make ourselves look better in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Then, if what we did wasn't really very admirable, we tend to forget that it ever happened. A normal human being's grasp on reality is very tenuous at best. Our imaginary lives are usually much nicer.”
― David Leigh Eddings

“I was struck, and not for the first time, by how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

“Think how nature makes things compared to how we humans make things." We talked about how animals don't just preserve the next generation; they typically preserve the environment for the ten-thousandth generation. While human industrial processes can produce Kevlar, it takes a temperature of thousands of degrees to do it, and the fiber is pulled through sulfuric acid. In contrast, a spider makes its silk - which per gram is several times stronger than steel - at room temperature in water.”
― William Powers, Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid and Beyond the American Dream

“I follow suit, said the lion,
vacating his coat of arms
and movie logos; and the eagle said,
Get me off this flag.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Tent

“So, wonder! I also wonder about you," said Cadfael mildly. "Do you know any human creatures who are not strangers, one to another?”
― Ellis Peters, One Corpse Too Many

“In our day, there are stresses and fractures of the human-animal bond, and some forces at work would sever it once and for all. They pull us in the wrong direction and away from the decent and honorable code that makes us care for creatures who are entirely at our mercy. Especially within the last two hundred years, we've come to apply an industrial mind-set to the use of animals, too often viewing them as if they were nothing but articles of commerce and the raw material of science, agriculture, and wildlife management. Here, as in other pursuits, human ingenuity has a way of outrunning human conscience, and some things we do only because we can--forgetting to ask whether we should.”
― Wayne Pacelle, The Bond: Our Kinship with Animals, Our Call to Defend Them

“His moral lecture
blazed with hate.
What could have driven a child that far?”
― Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings

“Apes. The moon woke them--
round the world's navel revolved
prayer wheels of steps.”
― Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings

“God's dream is interwoven into reality by humans.”
― Santosh Kalwar

“I have a dream, humans were part of aliens on earth.
I also dream, that some humans are really indigenous.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“Perhaps they'd been conditioned by all the quarantines and blackouts, all the invisible boundaries CSIRA erected on a moment's notice. The rules changed from one second to the next, the rug could get pulled out just because the wind blew some exotic weed outside its acceptable home range. You couldn't fight something like that, you couldn't fight the wind. All you could do was adapt. People were evolving into herd animals.

Or maybe just accepting that that's what they'd always been.”
― Peter Watts, Maelstrom

“Referring to Jumper the spider, who needs to hide himself in human form, and he's learning to act like a human.

"I'm sure I can learn to walk faster than that," he said desperately.
"But you'll also need to learn the nuances of human behavior. Such as not going around naked."
"What's wrong with being natural?" he demanded.
"Humans aren't natural. They are girt about by all manner of conventions. It will take time for you to catch up with them all.”
― Piers Anthony, Jumper Cable

“If you could have walked on the planet before humans lived here, maybe the Ivory Coast would have seemed more beautiful than La Côte d'Azur.”
― Dejan Stojanovic, The Sun Watches the Sun

“We do not like the idea that any other creature can be better than we are. It is highly probable that if we ever have to face a superior race, we will die of it.”
― Murray Leinster, The Wailing Asteroid

“People are full of surprises, even for themselves, if they have been stirred enough.”
― James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

“Mrs. Horowitz said, "It is inexcusable that humans think they can murder other animals because they murder themselves. I must tell you, I hate humans. They terrify me."

"They should," I continued. "I interviewed Yehudi Menuhin the other day.”
― David Dubal, Evenings with Horowitz: A Personal Portrait

“For once,
engulf,
not air,
but hope.
For once,
breathe on,
a firm belief!”
― Jasleen Kaur Gumber

“A human being is a king of murder.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“Why is it that the difference between humans and animals is so insisted on? If this were a simple division as between different subjects then why is there so much impassioned writing about it? Why need humans insist on their wearisome catalogue of language, writing, works of the imagination, conceptual analysis and so forth, as differing them from other animals? Why do people angrily dispute any suggestion that, for example, ants build cities or that chimpanzees love their young, rather than that they follow instincts which do not include human feelings? Why the grudging admission by scientists, only within this century, that animals feel pain? Why do our modern languages slip so easily into animalistic words like bestial or feral to indicate a moral distinction between us and them? Why are internalised thoughts so embedded that set animal and spiritual at different ends of a spectrum? The answer is easily given. It is because of the still inescapably present inheritance of religious thought. ~ Peter Ellis”
― Krishanu Maiti, Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals