Quotes About Humanity

But since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, the real question facing us is not 'What do we want to become?', but 'What do we want to want?' Those who are not spooked by this question probably haven't given it enough thought.

The Hindu epic the Bhagavad Gita relates how in the midst of a murderous civil war, the great warrior prince Arjuna is consumed with doubt. Seeing his friends and relatives in the opposing army, he hesitates over whether to fight and kill them. He begins to wonder what good and evil are, who decided it, and what the purpose of human life is.

Yet none of these things exists outside the stories that people invent and tell one another. There are no gods in the universe, no nations, no money, no human rights, no laws, and no justice outside the common imagination of human beings. People

Among all the world's large creatures, the only survivors of the human flood will be humans themselves, and the farmyard animals that serve as galley slaves in Noah's Ark.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men evolved differently, that they are born with certain mutable characteristics, and that among these are life and the pursuit of pleasure.

so humankind in the twenty-first century needs to ask itself an unprecedented question: what are we going to do with ourselves? In a healthy, prosperous and harmonious world, what will demand our attention and ingenuity? This question becomes doubly urgent given the immense new powers that biotechnology and information technology are providing us with. What will we do with all that power?

Biotechnology enables us to defeat bacteria and viruses, but it simultaneously turns humans themselves into an unprecedented threat. The same tools that enable doctors to quickly identify and cure new illnesses may also enable armies and terrorists to engineer even more terrible diseases and doomsday pathogens. It is therefore likely that major epidemics will continue to endanger humankind in the future only if humankind itself creates them, in the service of some ruthless ideology.

Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively. Bear in mind, though, that Hammurabi might have defended his principle of hierarchy using the same logic: 'I know that superiors, commoners and slaves are not inherently different kinds of people. But if we believe that they are, it will enable us to create a stable and prosperous society.

It and the other online giants tend to view humans as audiovisual animals – a pair of eyes and a pair of ears connected to ten fingers, a screen and a credit card. A crucial step towards uniting humankind is to appreciate that humans have bodies.

Our children's books, our iconography and our TV screens are still full of giraffes, wolves and chimpanzees, but the real world has very few of them left. There are about 80,000 giraffes in the world, compared to 1.5 billion cattle; only 200,000 wolves, compared to 400 million domesticated dogs; only 250,000 chimpanzees –in contrast to billions of humans. Humankind really has taken over the world.

It seems that about 50,000 years ago, Sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans were at that borderline point. They were almost, but not quite, entirely separate species.

the crucial factor in our conquest of the world was our ability to connect many humans to one another.

Humans have two types of abilities – physical and cognitive. In the past, machines competed with humans mainly in raw physical abilities, while humans retained an immense edge over machines in cognition. Hence as manual jobs in agriculture and industry were automated, new service jobs emerged that required the kind of cognitive skills only humans possessed: learning, analysing, communicating and above all understanding human emotions.

nourish the ground in which wheat grew. The body of Homo sapiens had not evolved for such tasks. It was adapted to climbing apple trees and running after gazelles, not to clearing rocks and carrying water buckets. Human spines, knees, necks and arches paid the price. Studies of ancient skeletons indicate that the transition to agriculture brought about a plethora of ailments, such as slipped discs, arthritis and hernias.

relationship between humans and a small group of ethereal

FIGURA 20. Un cartel de propaganda nazi que muestra a la derecha un «ario racialmente puro» y a la izquierda una persona de «raza mezclada». La admiración de los nazis por el cuerpo humano es evidente, como lo es su temor a que las razas inferiores pudieran contaminar a la humanidad y causar su degeneración.

Of the thousands of species that our ancestors hunted and gathered, only a few were suitable candidates for farming and herding. Those few species lived in particular places, and those are the places where agricultural revolutions occurred. Scholars once proclaimed that the agricultural revolution was a great leap forward for humanity.

Lo que distinguía a los nazis de otras sectas humanistas era una definición distinta de «humanidad», que estaba profundamente influida por la teoría de la evolución. En contraste con otros humanistas, los nazis creían que la humanidad no es algo universal y eterno, sino una especie mutable que puede evolucionar o degenerar. El hombre puede evolucionar hacia el superhombre o degenerar en un subhumano.

A wise man was asked what he learned about the meaning of life. 'Well,' he answered, 'I have learned that I am here on earth in order to help other people. What I still haven't figured out is why the other people are here.

More and more people believe that all of humankind is the legitimate source of political authority, rather than the members of a particular nationality, and that safeguarding human rights and protecting the interests of the entire human species should be the guiding light of politics.

Since we might soon be able to engineer our desires too, perhaps the real question facing us is not 'what do we want to be come?' but 'what do we want to want?

Comerciantes, conquistadores y profetas fueron los primeros que consiguieron trascender la división evolutiva binaria de «nosotros frente a ellos» y prever la unidad potencial de la humanidad.

Merchants, conquerors and prophets were the first people who managed to transcend the binary evolutionary division, 'us vs them', and to foresee the potential unity of humankind. For

in practical terms there are surprisingly few differences between Shiite Iran, Sunni Saudi Arabia, and Jewish Israel. All are bureaucratic nation-states, all pursue more or less capitalist policies, all vaccinate kids against polio, and all rely on chemists and physicists to make bombs. There is no such thing as Shiite bureaucracy, Sunni capitalism, or Jewish physics. So how do we make people feel loyal to one human tribe and hostile to another?