Quotes About Impact

What the Beatles did was something incredible, it was more than what a band could do. We have to give them respect.

Whereas John and Yoko might have comfortably lounged around in holiday mode on palatial country estates...the Lennons had this extraordinary urge and need to put something back. To stand up for reason in an unreasonable world, to take advantage of their extraordinary media profile to refocus public attitude and outlook on the murdering of other humans. (Ritchie Yorke)

I will tell you what this people need, with regard to preaching; you need, figuratively, to have it rain pitchforks, tines downwards, from this pulpit, Sunday after Sunday. Instead of the smooth, beautiful, sweet, still, silk-velvet-lipped preaching, you should have sermons like peals of thunder, and perhaps we then can get the scales from our eyes.

We're not born creative or destructive. Each one of us has the ability to create or destroy, to leave the world better than we found it, or worse.

This was a key moment in my life. I had always assumed that light carries farther than human voices and voices carry farther than body heat. But that night I realized it is not so, for when the people stand as one, their voices carry farther than light and their heat is carried farther still. That, I discovered, is what "the people" means.

Insensitive people are only upset when they actually see the blood, but actually by the time that the blood has been shed the tragedy has already completed.

Those words of my friend were like fertilizer poured over the poisonous weed of an idea deeply planted in me.

Böse Absichten reisen nicht so weit wie gute. (S.37, Leuchtturmwärter)

I think top scientists need to be compensated at a different scale in society. Somebody with experience will tell you that true scientists are not motivated by money - they are motivated by the quest itself. That is true. But I think an additional recognition will not hurt.

I must analyze, from what I do now, what will be the impact two or three or five years in the future. What is the statement I want to make?

Whoever said men hit harder when women are around, is right. Word for word, we beat the love out of each other.

And what is 'sensitivity'? It means two things. Firstly, paying attention to my sensations, emotions and thoughts. Secondly, allowing these sensations, emotions and thoughts to influence me.

Have you seen those zombies who roam the streets with their faces glued to their smartphones? Do you think they control the technology, or does the technology control them?

We cannot explain the choices that history makes, but we can say something very important about them: history's choices are not made for the benefit of humans.

We cannot explain the choices that history makes, but we can say something very important about them: history's choices are not made for the benefit of humans. There is absolutely no proof that human well-being inevitably improves as history rolls along.

Homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer.

Were the Australian extinction an isolated event, we could grant humans the benefit of the doubt. But the historical record makes Homo sapiens look like an ecological serial killer.

Cultures are mental parasites that emerge accidentally, and thereafter take advantage of all people infected by them.

Three important revolutions shaped the course of history: the Cognitive Revolution kick-started history about 70,000 years ago. The Agricultural Revolution sped it up about 12,000 years ago. The Scientific Revolution, which got under way only 500 years ago, may well end history and start something completely different. This book tells the story of how these three revolutions have affected humans and their fellow organisms.

If the future of humanity is decided in your absence, because you are too busy feeding and clothing your kids, you and they will not be exempt from the consequences.

Terrorism works by pressing the fear button deep in our minds and hijacking the private imagination of millions of individuals.

Unfortunately, the Sapiens regime on Earth has so far produced little that we can be proud of. We have mastered our surroundings, increased food production, built cities, established empires and created far-flung trade networks. But did we decrease the amount of suffering in the world?

An empire that cannot sustain a blow and remain standing is not really an empire.

Just as the Atlantic slave trade did not stem from hatred towards Africans, so the modern animal industry is not motivated by animosity. Again, it is fuelled by indifference.