Species Quotes

Darwin's dice have rolled badly for Earth. The human species is, in a word, an environmental abnormality. Perhaps a law of evolution is that intelligence usually extinguishes itself.

No species ... possesses a purpose beyond the imperatives created by genetic history ... The human mind is a device for survival and reproduction, and reason is just one of its various techniques.

Wonderful theory, wrong species.

In a purely technical sense, each species of higher organism-beetle, moss, and so forth, is richer in information than a Caravaggio painting, Mozart symphony, or any other great work of art.

It may be argued that to know one kind of beetle is to know them all. But a species is not like a molecule in a cloud of molecules-it is a unique population.

In the process of natural selection, then, any device that can insert a higher proportion of certain genes into subsequent generations will come to characterize the species.

The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and, when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right.

[Reformers] might be classified as a distinct species having eyes in the back of their heads.

At a time when individualism is becoming an endangered species, jazz represents a celebration of the individual.

The only real good technology is no technology at all. Technology is taxation without representation, imposed by our elitist species (man) upon the rest of the natural world.

I feel that one species, mankind, doesn't have the right to exterminate

We are on red alert when it comes to how we are perceiving ourselves as a species. There's no desire to be an adult. Adulthood is not a goal. It's not seen as a gift.

You should know as much as you can about the human species if you have a hand in designing human society.

An important species of pleasure, and therewith the source of morality, arises out of habit.

Let us beware of saying that death is the opposite of life. The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species.

A schoolteacher or professor cannot educate individuals, he educates only species.

Think what cowards men would be if they had to bear children. Women are altogether a superior species.

Species evolve exactly as if they were adapting as best they could to a changing world, and not at all as if they were moving toward a set goal.

'Tis substantially true, that virtue or morality is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule indeed extends with more or less force to every species of free Government.

To be a painter now is to be part of a very small, endangered species.

For my own part I think no innocent species of wit or pleasantry should be suppressed: and that a good pun may be admitted among the smaller excellencies of lively conversation.

If venereal delight and the power of propagating the species were permitted only to the virtuous, it would make the world very good.

As species are exterminated by shifting climate zones, ecosystems can collapse, destroying more species.

Any reading not of a vicious species must be a good substitute for the amusements too apt to fill up the leisure of the labouring classes.

Eurasia ended up with the most domesticated animal species in part because it's the world's largest land mass and offered the most wild species to begin with.

Whenever one reads of the determination of the species, or opens a book on natural science and history, in whatever language, one inevitably comes across the name of Linne.

There are 400,000 species of beetles on this planet, but only 8,000 species of mammals.

The oceans are the planet's last great living wilderness, man's only remaining frontier on earth, and perhaps his last chance to produce himself a rational species.

I am a big believer of what Darwin discovered in the Galapagos, proving that the species most responsive to change will survive over apparently stronger or more intelligent competitors.

I am talking about the general psychological health of the species, man. He needs the existence of mysteries. Not their solution.

The oldest continuously operated aquarium in the country features 630 species and more than 8,000 animals. The walruses are especially popular.

Many species reciprocate, but only humans gossip, and much of what we gossip about is the vale of other people as partners for reciprocal relationships.

The form most contradictory to human life that can appear among the human species is the "self-satisfied man."

Reason shows itself in all occurrences of life; whereas the brute makes no discovery of such a talent, but in what immediately regards his own preservation or the continuance of his species.

Indeed, the whole human species is endangered, by nuclear weapons or by other means of wholesale destruction which further advances in science are likely to produce.

My first attempts to transmit typhus to laboratory animals, including the smaller species of monkeys, had failed, as had those of my predecessors, for reasons which I can easily supply today

Every day we, as a species, do so much to destroy Creation's ability to give us life. But that Creation continues to do everything in its power to give us life anyway. And that's true love.

I firmly believe that mathematics does not exist outside of humans. It is something we, as a species, invent.

Species evolve to meet the environment. An intelligent species changes the environment to suit itself. As soon as a species becomes intelligent, it should stop evolving.

If epic poetry is a definite species, the sagas do not fall within it.

I read assiduously. I kept in touch with my species.

Girls and boys respond to stress differently - not just in our species, but in every mammal scientists have studied. Stress enhances learning in males. The same stress impairs learning in females.

Protecting our future on this planet depends on the conscious evolution of our species.

It is almost impossible to convince people who are under the influence of ideological bigotry that whose whom they regard as belonging to the enemy species are human.

Some species increase, others diminish, and in a short space the generations of living creatures are changed and, like runners, pass on the torch of life.

The conclusion, therefore, is that there are two major forces in society: love, which multiplies the species, and the nose, which subordinates it to the individual. Procreation, equilibrium.

I hold flesh-food to be unsuited to our species. We err in copying the lower animal world if we are superior to it.

Man's most human characteristic is not his ability to learn, which he shares with many other species, but his ability to teach and store what others have developed and taught him.

Our survival as a species depends on our ability to recognize that our well-being and the well-being of others are in fact one and the same.

Man is an individual. The animals, plants and minerals are divided into species. They are not individualized in the same sense that man is.