Quotes About Human

our species, with its unique gift of foresight – product of the simulated virtual-reality we call the human imagination

algorithm of natural selection has generated a machine capable of internalizing the algorithm, setting up a model of itself – and much more – in microcosm inside the human skull.

The human psyche has two great sicknesses: the urge to carry vendetta across generations, and the tendency to fasten group labels on people rather than see them as individuals.

The fact that it has nothing else to contribute to human wisdom is no reason to hand religion a free licence to tell us what to do.

I am, indeed, quite sympathetic towards the idea that human culture provides a new milieu in which an entirely different kind of replicator selection can go on.

Dan Dennett reminds us that the common cold is universal to all human peoples in much the same way as religion is, yet we would not want to suggest that colds benefit us.

A widespread assumption, which nearly everybody in our society accepts – the non-religious included – is that religious faith is especially vulnerable to offence and should be protected by an abnormally thick wall of respect, in a different class from the respect that any human being should pay to any other.

To try to make a man, you would have to work at your biochemical cocktail-shaker for a period so long that the entire age of the universe would seem like an eye-blink, and even then you would not succeed.

By the way, what presumptuous egocentricity to believe that earth-shaking events, on the scale at which a god (or a tectonic plate) might operate, must always have a human connection. Why should a divine being, with creation and eternity on his mind, care a fig for petty human malefactions? We humans give ourselves such airs, even aggrandizing our poky little 'sins' to the level of cosmic significance!

Religion has at one time or another been thought to fill four main roles in human life: explanation, exhortation, consolation and inspiration.

A theist believes in a supernatural intelligence who, in addition to his main work of creating the universe in the first place, is still around to oversee and influence the subsequent fate of his initial creation. In many theistic belief systems, the deity is intimately involved in human affairs.

A human foetus, with no more human feeling than an amoeba, enjoys a reverence and legal protection far in excess of those granted to an adult chimpanzee. Yet

A deist, too, believes in a supernatural intelligence, but one whose activities were confined to setting up the laws that govern the universe in the first place. The deist God never intervenes thereafter, and certainly has no specific interest in human affairs.

God exists, if only in the form of a meme with high survival value, or infective power, in the environment provided by human culture.

It is a disturbing aspect of human nature that if there is a place where there are no consequences and where the most grotesque murders are tolerated in the name of a cult claiming to be a faith, a certain type of person will be attracted to it.

the United States decided it was not going to intervene in Syria—at least for the time being. The Syrian opposition felt betrayed and abandoned. Worse, Syrians were now completely without hope, which is the most dangerous human condition. A man or woman with no hope is capable of anything.

Because in the end history—like the Berlin Wall—shapes people, had shaped her, but would not in the end determine her, because in the end it cannot account for the great irrational—the great human—forces: the destructive power of evil, the redeeming power of love.

For Amy, love was the universe touching, exploding within one human being, and that person exploding into the universe. It was annihilation, the destroyer of worlds.

To be fair to them, they were only after something that walled them off from the past and from people in general, not something that offered any connection that might prove painful or human. Thet wanted stories, I came to realise, in which they were already imprisoned, not stories in which they appeared along with the storyteller, accomplices in escaping.

Such narrowly missed human connection as this can in fact be fatal, no matter who's at fault, and often results in unrecoverable free fall and a too-hasty conclusion that 'the whole goddamn thing's not worth bothering with or it wouldn't be so goddamn confusing all the goddamn time,' after which one party (or both) just wanders off and never thinks to look toward the other again. Such is the iffiness of romance.

Our parents' lives, even those enfolded in obscurity, offer us our first, strong assurance that human events have consequence. Here we are, after all.

Nature is the expression of the Logos, as are human beings, and our task is to wake up and participate consciously.

The power of myth lies in its ability to represent ourselves to ourselves. A myth is a story that expresses, but does not explain a universal human experience...The best myths have immediacy. We get them, see ourselves through them. They are mirrors.

To those who held the behaviorist view, human potential was almost perfectly malleable, shaped by the environment.