Quotes on Humans

Spirit itself is not human; it may spring up in any life... it may exist in all animals, and who know in how many undreamt-of beings, or in the midst of what worlds?

More than any other product of human scientific culture scientific knowledge is the collective property of all mankind.

In the depths of the human soul... the desire to give meaning to one's own life is joined by the fleeting vision of beauty and of the mysterious unity of things.

Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants.

I and you-We are infinate, rich, large, contradictory, living, breathing miracles-free human beings, children of God and the everlasting universe. That's what we do.

A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.

The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. And every time it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules, and those who said, 'We already did. We have made the world new.' The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities, and hang on.

In a high tech world the cure for the tragic shortcomings and perilous fallacies of human intuition is education, but education in economics, evolutionary biology, probability and statistics - unfortunately most High School and College curricula have barely changed since Medieval times!

Somewhere between apathy and anarchy lies the thinking human being.

Times have changed, and science has made great progress, and so has our work; but our principles have only been confirmed, and along with them our conviction that mankind can hope for a solution to its problems, among which the most urgent are those of peace and unity, only by turning its attention and energies to the discovery of the child and to the development of the great potentialities of the human personality in the course of its formation.

Experiments with animals have long been handicapped by our anthropocentric attitude: We often test them in ways that work fine with humans but not so well with other species.

History shows that the human mind, fed by constant accessions of knowledge, periodically grows too large for its theoretical coverings, and bursts them asunder to appear in new habiliments, as the feeding and growing grub, at intervals, casts its too narrow skin and assumes another.

Science fiction is very well suited to asking philosophical questions; questions about the nature of reality, what it means to be human, how do we know the things that we think we know.

There is no doubt that creativity is the most important human resource of all. Without creativity, there would be no progress, and we would be forever repeating the same patterns.

The sense of tragedy - according to Aristotle - comes, ironically enough, not from the protagonist's weak points but from his good qualities. Do you know what I'm getting at? People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues. ... [But] we accept irony through a device called metaphor. And through that we grow and become deeper human beings.

I wait. Now the night flows back, the mighty stillness embraces and includes me; I can see the stars again and the world of starlight. I am twenty miles or more from the nearest fellow human, but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation.

Huts they made then, and fire, and skins for clothing, And a woman yielded to one man in wedlock... ... Common, to see the offspring they had made; The human race began to mellow then. Because of fire their shivering forms no longer Could bear the cold beneath the covering sky.

No amount of scholastic attainment, of able and profound exposition of brilliant and stirring eloquence can atone for the absence of a deep impassioned sympathetic love for human souls.

No human investigation can be called real science if it cannot be demonstrated mathematically.

By the age of eighteen, a human has acquired enough joy and heartache to provide the food of reflection for a century.

Creativity is putting your imagination to work, and it's produced the most extraordinary results in human culture.