Quotes About Nonhuman

the modern world, the artist took over the role of the shaman. To enforce one particular mode of consciousness, modern humanity forfeited all direct contact with its nonhuman shadows.

I had rarely before paid much attention to the natural world. But my exposure to traditional magicians and seers was shifting my senses; I became increasingly susceptible to the solicitations of nonhuman things. In the course of struggling to decipher the magicians' odd gestures or to fathom their constant spoken references to powers unseen and unheard, I began to see and to hear in a manner I never had before.

Bruno] Latour argues that one of the foundational gestures of western modernity has been the effort to formulate and police a heightened antimony between nonhuman nature and human culture. -- Randall Styers, Making Magic , p. 17

We cannot justify treating any sentient nonhuman as our property, as a resource, as a thing that we an use and kill for our purposes.

A lot happens to the concept of agency once nonhuman things are figured less as social constructions and more as actors, and once humans themselves are assessed not as autonoms but as vital materialities.

one of the first steps toward an integral postmodernity is the development and establishment of a genuine environmental ethics, or a moral and ethical stance to nonhuman holons.

Truthfulness under oath is, by now, a matter of our civic religion, our relation to our fellow citizens rather than our relation to a nonhuman power.

The whole project of science," she explains, "is to crush any notion of powerful nonhuman Others," and the vocation of the scientist is "to keep all that was uncanny or unspeakable stuffed out of sight.

There are a lot of obstacles in the way of our understanding animal intelligence - not the least being that we can't even agree whether nonhuman species are conscious. We accept that chimps and dolphins experience awareness we like to think dogs and cats do. But what about mice and newts? What about a fly? Is anything going on there at all?

Of course, the plea for respect for nonhuman life goes far beyond the scientific delight of familiarity with our planet mates. The nonhuman forms of life with which we 6,000 million talking, upright apes share this finite planet are directly or indirectly connected to our well-being.

It has often been said that our environmental crisis is a crisis of perception. We do not readily see the patterns that would reveal our dependence on the natural world, nor are we commonly aware of the systems within which we are deeply embedded. Our attention, entrained on objects and focused on flat screens, is far removed from the dynamic and animated nonhuman world. We are as good as blind to the wonder at our feet or the daily spectacle of an ever-changing sky.

The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.

English doesn't give us many tools for incorporating respect for animacy. In English, you are either a human or a thing. Our grammar boxes us in by the choice of reducing a nonhuman being to an it, or it must be gendered, inappropriately, as a he or a she.

People feel that in her, the nonhuman. People are afraid of her. Something in her inspires a nonhuman attachment. Sur elle, the human feelings seem to slip, they glisser—

The brutal consequences of "monkey" arise because that word removes some of us from humanity, placing us among nonhuman animals in the natural world. "Monkey" strengthens racist, ableist, and speciesist hierarchies. Once a person is deemed not human, then all sorts of violence become acceptable.

Don't touch the baby, Mennie." – Acheron "Now I know you didn't just come at me with your attitude, Mr. High And Might Atlantean God. Believe you me, if there's one thing I know how to do it's birth nonhuman infants. Been doing it since before even your old ass was born." – Menyara

Just about every children's book in my local bookstore has an animal for its hero. But then, only a few feet away in the cookbook section, just about every cookbook includes recipes for cooking animals. Is there a more illuminating illustration of our paradoxical relationship with the nonhuman world?

A man craves ultimate truths. Every mortal mind, I think, is that way. But what is ultimate truth? It's the end of the road, where there is no more mystery, no more hope. And no more questions to ask, since all the answers have been given. But there is no such place. The Universe is a labyrinth made of labyrinths. Each leads to another. And wherever we cannot go ourselves, we reach with mathematics. Out of mathematics we build wagons to carry us into the nonhuman realms of the world.

Part of me is nonhuman and eccentric, which is what a hobbit is, and I don't mind being eccentric.

Making love is not just becoming as one, or even two, but becoming as a hundred thousand. Desiring-machines or the nonhuman sex: not one or even two sexes, but n sexes.

The impasse was this: If I let myself speculate even tentatively about that something, if I acknowledged the possibility of a nonhuman agent or agents, some mysterious Other, intervening in my life, could I still call myself an atheist?

Piaget suspected, for example, that games undertaken voluntarily will outcompete games imposed and played under threat of force, given that some of the energy that could be expended on the game itself, whatever its nature, has to be wasted on enforcement. There is evidence indicating the emergence of such voluntary game-like arrangements even among our nonhuman kin.6

The dog was still whimpering. But now Goldberg thought that maybe he heard another sound too, another whimpering maybe, or something worse, underneath the first—a terrible, pain-stricken noise so nonhuman that paradoxically it could only come from another human being. "Deputy Chief Goldberg?" He swallowed and dived in. "There's this lawyer named Harry Sutton.…

We do some experiments in humans, some in mice, and there are some questions that can only be answered in nonhuman primates. It's true that you can't immediately say that those experiments will translate into human health, but nevertheless, it is obvious that having an understanding of human memory is going to be important for human health.