Species Quotes
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Man, by his very nature, tends to give himself an explanation of the world into which he is born. And this is what distinguishes him from the other species. Every individual, even the least intelligent, the lowest of outcasts, from childhood on gives himself some explanation of the world. And with it he manages to live. And without it, he would sink into madness.
Elsa Morante
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There exists above the "productive" man a yet higher species.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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In a sense, what's happening is that the unconscious mind is a luxury the human species cannot afford at this point in our dilemma, and so the unconscious mind is simply rising into consciousness by being hardwired into this global infrastructure.
Terence McKenna
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We're an amazingly adaptive and resilient species. Once we put our mind to global warming, I have no doubt we'll figure a way through here that won't lead to utter calamity.
Andrew Revkin
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I firmly believe that mathematics does not exist outside of humans. It is something we, as a species, invent.
Keith Devlin
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When the Hymalayan peasant meets the he-bear in his pride,
He shouts to scare the monster, who will often turn aside.
But the she-bear thus accosted, rends the peasant tooth and nail,
For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.
Rudyard Kipling
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Ignorance produced genera, and science produced, and will continue to produce, proper names; nor of these shall we be afraid to increase the number, whenever we shall have occasion to denote different species.
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon
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Both classically- and romantically-minded spirits-inasmuch as these two species always exist-occupy themselves with a vision of the future: but the former do so out of a strength of their age, the latter out of its weakness.
Friedrich Nietzsche
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A forest of all manner of trees is poor, if not disagreeable, in effect; a mass of one species of tree is sublime.
John Ruskin
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There is nothing more mysterious than destiny - of a person, of our species, of our planet, or of the universe itself.
Brian Swimme
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Human populations must be greatly diminished, and as quickly as possible to limit further environmental damage. 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.
Eric Pianka
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What the psychedelics are for us as a species, rather than for each one of us as an individual, what they are for us as a species is an enzyme that catalyzes the language-making capacity.
Terence McKenna
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For a long time, science has gone in the direction of sort of putting people in their place. We learned that the sun doesn't revolve around the Earth, the Earth revolves around the sun; we learned that we're just another species, evolved, like all other species, so we're just another animal, really.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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Each species on our planet plays a role in the healthy functioning of natural ecosystems, on which humans depend.
William H. Schlesinger
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Group selection and individual selection are just two of the selection processes that have played important roles in evolution. There also is selection within individual organisms (intragenomic conflict), and selection among multi-species communities (an idea that now is getting attention in work on the human microbiome). All four of these levels of selection find a place in multi-level selection theory.
Elliott Sober
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If we assume, very conservatively, that there are two million species in the tropical rainforests, this means that something like five thousand species are being lost each year. This comes to roughly fourteen species a day, or one every hundred minutes.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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Human beings are remarkably resilient. When you think about it, our species has been teetering upon the edge of the existential cliff since Hiroshima. In short, we endure.
Rick Yancey
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The more species we look at, the more, frankly, we find that humans are not exceptional here.
Eric Lander
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As the snail's world grew more familiar, my own human world became less so; my species was so large, so rushed, and so confusing.
Elisabeth Tova Bailey
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Some of these species that are now no longer with us were killed off by a fungal disease that was moved around the planet by people.
Elizabeth Kolbert
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I should consent to breed under pressure, if I were convinced in any way of the reasonableness of reproducing the species. But my nerves and the nerves of any woman I could live with three months, would produce only a victim... lacking in impulse, a mere bundle of discriminations. If I were wealthy I might subsidize a stud of young peasants, or a tribal group in Tahiti.
Ezra Pound
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At the core of punctuated equilibria lies an empirical observation: once evolved, species tend to remain remarkably stable, recognizable entities for millions of years. The observation is by no means new, nearly every paleontologist who reviewed Darwin's Origin of Species pointed to his evasion of this salient feature of the fossil record.
Niles Eldredge
