Quotes About Humans

At the software-architecture level, the complexity of a problem is reduced by dividing the system into subsystems. Humans have an easier time comprehending several simple pieces of information than one complicated piece.

Those plants are so fragile, they had to domesticate humans just to take endless care of them!

The biologist J.B.S. Haldane once said that there are two reasons why humans do not turn into angels: moral imperfection and a body plan that cannot accommodate both arms and wings.

it's time to retire the morality play in which modern humans are a vile race of despoilers and plunderers who will hasten the apocalypse unless they undo the Industrial Revolution, renounce technology, and return to an ascetic harmony with nature.

You are as prone to love as the sun is to shine; it being the most delightful and natural employment of the soul of humans.

Many of the qualities that come so effortlessly to dogs - loyalty, devotion, selflessness, unflagging optimism, unqualified love - can be elusive to humans.

This is the most challenging activity that humans get into, which is love. You know, where we have the sense that we can't live without love. That life has very little meaning without love.

Humans love truth and justice, and rejoice in ceremonies that honor those qualities. For that sentiment we should indeed thank God.

It takes a lot of strength to hold onto and care for the things we love, so why is it that god seems to have made humans unable to conjure up that degree of power and love?

I never appreciated 'positive heroes' in literature. They are almost always cliches, copies of copies, until the model is exhausted. I prefer perplexity, doubt, uncertainty, not just because it provides a more 'productive' literary raw material, but because that is the way we humans really are.

The utility that allowed emotions to persist in the genes of our species may have been the ability to personalize value. Rather than simply detecting risk and avoiding danger, the organism could consider, "How dangerous is this to me?" Other animals can represent value, but only humans can make it personal. In this view, an emotion is the experience that something of value is happening to you. If so, emotions could not exist without autonoesis. No self, no emotion.

I quoted Menand's restatement of Kierkegaard: Anxiety is the price humans pay for freedom. My restatement of Kierkegaard and Menand is that anxiety is the price humans pay for autonoetic consciousness.

humans were still just a bunch of bipedal apes, divided into arbitrary tribes that were constantly at war over their ruined planet's dwindling natural resources.

The spring-time ain't going to let you fool it by hiding away inside a durn cotton mill. It knows you got to stay on the land to feel good. That's because humans made the mills. God made the land, but you don't see Him building durn cotton mills. That's how I know better than to go up there like the rest of them. I stay where God made a place for me.

What color was the scorpion? I remembered the question Henenu had asked me years ago. The answer was vital: brown scorpions didn't have the power to kill humans, but white ones did. 'Brown.' He summoned up a wobbly smile. 'Not very big, either. I shouldn't be carrying on like this. You'll think I'm a child.' 'Not many children know the kind of words you were using,' I replied dryly.

What's more, in this view, we ourselves are not God; we are creaturely knowers. Our glory as humans is to know from a particular place and orientation, to journey toward what we do not yet know. Always we are on the way. We are on the way with respect to knowing God as well as knowing our world. We understand partially. We know as we give ourselves and as we are known.

I've never argued that humans are massively hot-wired. What I was trying to point out was that you can't understand how we learn unless you identify the learning mechanisms. And these have some genetic basis.

Humans and nations are imperfect, and through our collective efforts, we hope to improve our nation and bring hope and opportunity to millions who lack it.

He who has not repeatedly heard and studied the Gita, yet desires liberation, will be laughed at by children. But those who hear it and study it are not humans. They are certainly like the gods.

Climate change is happening, humans are causing it, and I think this is perhaps the most serious environmental issue facing us.

Humans Control the Earth; Nerds Should Guide the Humans

All interesting, worthwhile humans suffered and struggled and overcame adversity of one sort or another. Pain is constructive. Misery can be useful. I believed this the way I believe the sun rises in the east. Then I had children, and I slowly began to disbelieve and disavow it.

If I was an alien looking down at Earth and studying the way we've treated the planet, would I really think humans are worthy of all these resources? Probably not.

Humans aren't as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth. So maybe part of our formal education should be training in empathy. Imagine how different the world would be if, in fact, that were 'reading, writing, arithmetic, empathy.'