Species Quotes - Page 40

• We are alive. We are human, with good and bad in us. That's all we know for sure. We can't create a new species or a new world. That's been done. Now we have to live within those boundaries . What are our choices? We can despair and curse, and change nothing. We can choose evil like our enemies have done and create a world based on hate. Or we can try to make things better.

  Carol Matas

  Hate, Evil, Choices

  Carol Matas (1993). “Daniel's Story”, p.70, Scholastic Inc.

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• Abraham Maslow said that the fully realized person transcends his local group and identifies with the species. But the election of Ronald Reagan might've been the beginning of my giving up on my species. Because it was absurd. To this day it remains absurd. More than absurd, it was frightening: it represented the rise to supremacy of darkness, the ascendancy of ignorance.

  George Carlin

  Giving Up, Ignorance, Darkness

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• Seeds have the power to preserve species, to enhance cultural as well as genetic diversity, to counter economic monopoly and to check the advance of conformity on all its many fronts.

  Michael Pollan

  Garden, Diversity, Conformity

  Michael Pollan (2007). “Second Nature: A Gardener's Education”, p.224, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• the description of lust was simple: two people learn they're compatible , attraction grows, and the ancient instinct to preserve the species kicks in.

  Nicholas Sparks

  Simple, Two, People

  Nicholas Sparks (2013). “True Believer”, p.126, Hachette UK

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• We are so used to the notion of our own inevitability as life's dominant species that it is hard to grasp that we are here only because of timely extraterrestrial bangs and other random flukes. The one thing we have in common with all other living things is that for nearly four billions years our ancestors have managed to slip through a series of closing doors every time we needed them to.

  Bill Bryson

  Doors, Years, Four

  Bill Bryson (2014). “A Short History of Nearly Everything”, p.319, Lulu Press, Inc

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• I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of of our fossils, radioactive at that.

  Lewis Thomas

  Children, Real, Errors

  Lewis Thomas (1996). “Fragile Species”, p.25, Simon and Schuster

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• I am a rare species, not a stereotype.

  Ivan E. Coyote

  Stereotype

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• My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.

  Ursula K. Le Guin

  Earth Day, World, Ruins

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• The single simplest reason why human space flight is necessary is this, stated as plainly as possible: keeping all your breeding pairs in one place is a retarded way to run a species.

  Warren Ellis

  Running, Space Flight, Way

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• Of course he would count the time that we'd been two entirely different species.

  Maggie Stiefvater

  Two, Different, Shiver

  Maggie Stiefvater (2014). “Shiver Series (Shiver, Linger, Forever, Sinner)”, p.209, Scholastic Inc.

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• The dull people decided years and years ago, as everyone knows, that novel-writing was the lowest species of literary exertion, and that novel reading was a dangerous luxury and an utter waste of time.

  Wilkie Collins

  Reading, Writing, Years

  Wilkie Collins (2014). “My Miscellanies”, p.60, The Floating Press

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• I fell asleep that night thinking about the kiss that might have been. What did a kiss feel like, anyway? Somehow I knew it wouldn’t be like the one I got from Mom or Dad at bedtime. The same species, maybe, but a radically different beast, to be sure. Like a wolf and a whippet – only science would put them on the same tree.

  Wendelin Van Draanen

  Mom, Dad, Kissing

  Wendelin Van Draanen (2008). “Flipped”, p.15, Knopf Books for Young Readers

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• I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death--because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses.

  Saul Bellow

  Clever, Thinking, Age

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• Karl Marx was right, socialism works, it is just that he had the wrong species

  E. O. Wilson

  Socialism, Working It

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• I am a personal optimist but a skeptic about all else. What may sound to some like anger is really nothing more than sympathetic contempt. I view my species with a combination of wonder and pity, and I root for its destruction. And please don't confuse my point of view with cynicism; the real cynics are the ones who tell you everything's gonna be all right.

  George Carlin

  Real, Views, Roots

  George Carlin (2007). “The Best of Brain Droppings”, p.11, Peter Pauper Press, Inc.

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• He was onto something. Something huge. It wasn't just how to run; it was how to live, the essence of who we are as a species and what we're meant to be.

  Christopher McDougall

  Running, Essence, Who We Are

  Christopher McDougall (2010). “Born to Run: The hidden tribe, the ultra-runners, and the greatest race the world has never seen”, p.99, Profile Books

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• Lacking a shared language, emotions are perhaps our most effective means of cross-species communication. We can share our emotions, we can understand the language of feelings, and that's why we form deep and enduring social bonds with many other beings. Emotions are the glue that binds.

  Marc Bekoff

  Communication, Mean, Feelings

  Marc Bekoff (2010). “The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy — and Why They Matter”, p.15, New World Library

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• We aren’t exactly emptying the oceans; it’s more like clear-cutting a forest with thousands of species to create massive fields with one type of soybean.

  Jonathan Safran Foer

  Ocean, Cutting, Soybeans

  "Eating Animals". Book by Jonathan Safran Foer, 2010.

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• It may be a species of impudence to think that the way you understand God is the way God is. (60).

  Joseph Campbell

  Inspirational, God, Thinking

  Joseph Campbell (2001). “Thou Art that: Transforming Religious Metaphor”, p.60, New World Library

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• The difference between raman and varelse is not in the creature judged, but in the creature judging. When we declare an alien species to be raman, it does not mean that they have passed a threshold of moral maturity. It means that we have.

  Orson Scott Card

  Mean, Maturity, Differences

  Orson Scott Card (2013). “The Ender Quintet”, p.254, Macmillan

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• As far as we know, we are the only species on the planet who have been given the gift-or curse, perhaps-of awareness about our own mortality. Everything here eventually dies; we're just the lucky ones who get to think about this fact every day.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Thinking, Facts, Lucky

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2009). “Eat Pray Love: One Woman's Search for Everything”, p.161, Bloomsbury Publishing

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• what a horrible loutish planet this is. the dominant species consists of sadistic morons, faces bearing the hideous lineaments of spiritual famine swollen with stupid hate. hopeless rubbish.

  William S. Burroughs

  Spiritual, Hate, Stupid

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• Why fight the 'natural' (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this--one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

  David Mitchell

  Fighting, Order, Soul

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• Joan was nothing more than a friend. He was not in love with her. One does not fall in love with a girl whom one has met only three times. One is attracted, yes; but one does not fall in love. A moment's reflection enabled him to diagnose his sensations correctly. This odd impulse to leap across the compartment and kiss Joan was not love. It was merely the natural desire of a good-hearted young man to be decently chummy with his species.

  P. G. Wodehouse

  Girl, Falling In Love, Kissing

  P. G. Wodehouse (2012). “Something New: Or, Something Fresh”, p.107, The Floating Press

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• Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself. A community of a hundred million species can survive anything short of total global catastrophe. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature drop of twenty degrees—which would be a lot more devastating than it sounds. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature rise of twenty degrees. But a community of a hundred species or a thousand species has almost no survival value at all.

  Daniel Quinn

  Diversity, Community, Survival

  "Ishmael". Book by Daniel Quinn, 1992.

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