Homo Sapiens Quotes & Sayings

Homo sapiens is one of the few species on earth that care if they're seen having sex. The impala is unconcerned. The dingo roundly flaunts it. A masturbating chimpanzee will stare straight at you. To any creature other than you and I and 6 billion other privacy-needing H. sapiens, sex is like peeling a mango or scratching your ear. It's just something you do sometimes. — Mary Roach

In prehistoric times, Homo sapiens was deeply endangered. Early humans were less fleet of foot, with fewer natural weapons and less well-honed senses than all the predators that threatened them. Moreover, they were hampered in their movements by the need to protect their uniquely immature young - juicy meals for any hungry beast. — Robert Winston

If you plug in the neocortex ratio for Homo sapiens, you get a group estimate of 147.8-or roughly 150. "The figure 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us. — Malcolm Gladwell

An evolutionary perspective of our place in the history of the earth reminds us that Homo sapiens sapiens has occupied the planet for the tiniest fraction of that planet's four and a half thousand million years of existence. In many ways we are a biological accident, the product of countless propitious circumstances. As we peer back through the fossil record, through layer upon layer of long-extinct species, many of which thrived far longer than the human species is ever likely to do, we are reminded of our mortality as a species. There is no law that declares the human animal to be different, as seen in this broad biological perspective, from any other animal. There is no law that declares the human species to be immortal. — Richard E. Leakey

Beauty, like ecstasy, has always been hostile to the commonplace. And the commonplace, under its popular label of the normal,has been the supreme authority for Homo sapiens since the days when he was probably arboreal. — Ellen Glasgow

The most ridiculous concept ever perpetrated by Homo Sapiens is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of his creations, that he can be persuaded by their prayers, and becomes petulant if he does not receive this flattery. Yet this ridiculous notion, without one real shred of evidence to bolster it, has gone on to found one of the oldest, largest and least productive industries in history. — Robert A. Heinlein

Feeling extremely foolish, the acting representative of Homo sapiens watched his First Contact stride away across the Raman plain, totally indifferent to his presence. — Arthur C. Clarke

Animals have this in common with one another: unlike humans they appear to spend every minute of every hour of every day of their lives being themselves. A tree frog (so far as we can ascertain) doesn't wake up in the morning feeling guilty that it was a bad tree frog the night before, nor does it spend any time wishing it were a wallaby or a crane fly. It just gets on with the business of being a tree frog, a job it does supremely well. We humans, well ... we are never content, always guilty, and rarely that good at being what nature asked us to be
Homo sapiens. — Stephen Fry

To understand Homo sapiens' primary wish list, go back to mythology. We endowed the gods with the abilities we wished we had ourselves: immortality and eternal youth, flight, resplendent beauty, total power, climate control, ultimate weapons, delicious banquets minus the cooking and washing up - and artificial creatures at our beck and call. — Margaret Atwood

A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens-second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths. — Reynolds Price

The disastrous history of our species indicates the futility of all attempts at a diagnosis which do not take into account the possibility that homo sapiens is a victim of one of evolution's countless mistakes. — Arthur Koestler

Evolving life must experience a vast range of possibilities, based on environmental histories so unpredictable that no realized route - the pathway to consciousness in the form of Homo sapiens or Little Green Men, for example - can be construed as a highway to heaven, but must be viewed as a tortuous track rutted with uncountable obstacles and festooned with innumerable alternative branches. Any reasonably precise repetition of our earthly route on another planet therefore becomes wildly improbable even in a trillion cases. — Stephen Jay Gould

The heated debates about Homo sapiens' 'natural way of life' miss the main point. Ever since the Cognitive Revolution, there hasn't been a single natural way of life for Sapiens. There are only cultural choices, from among a bewildering palette of possibilities. — Yuval Noah Harari

We don't know who we are or how to function, much less how to bloom. Blind nature. Homo sapiens. Who's kidding whom? — Jeanette Winterson

language evolved as a way of gossiping. According to this theory Homo sapiens is primarily a social animal. Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction. It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It's much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat. — Yuval Noah Harari

We have become a plague upon ourselves and upon the Earth. It is cosmically unlikely that the developed world will choose to end its orgy of fossil energy consumption, and the Third World its suicidal consumption of landscape. Until such time as Homo Sapiens should decide to rejoin nature, some of us can only hope for the right virus to come along. — David Graeber

From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals. — John Muir

BRUCE STERLING Homo sapiens declared extinct, Nature, November 11, 1999:
Since I've been asked to offer an epitaph," the highly distributed poetware continued, "I believe that we should rearrange the Great Wall of China to spell out (in Chinese of course, since most of them were always Chinese)
'THEY WERE VERY, VERY CURIOUS, BUT NOT AT ALL FAR-SIGHTED. — Bruce Sterling

Humanism is a belief that Homo sapiens has a unique and sacred nature, which is fundamentally different from the nature of all other animals and of all other phenomena. Humanists believe that the unique nature of Homo sapiens is the most important thing in the world, and it determines the meaning of everything that happens in the universe. The supreme good is the good of Homo sapiens. — Yuval Noah Harari

The paradox of the human condition is expressed more in education than elsewhere in human culture, because learning to learn has been and continues to be Homo Sapiens' most formidable evolutionary task ... It must also be clear that we will never quite learn how to learn, for since Homo Sapiens is self-changing, and since the more culture changes the faster it changes, man's methods and rate of learning will never quite keep pace with his need to learn. — Jules Henry

What is human and the same about the males and females classified as Homo sapiens is much greater than the differences. — Estelle Ramey

I use the word "man" loosely. A better description would be "the most beautiful specimen of Homo sapiens sapiens with a set of XY chromosomes to grace the planet Earth at this moment, or any other era, epoch, or age in history. — Elle Lothlorien

Just so; she'd even feel aggrieved. But why? Because it's against the custom of the country. And whose fault is that? The man's again - I don't mean Ralph I mean the genus he belongs to: homo sapiens, Americanus. Why haven't we taught our women to take an interest in our work? Simply because we don't take enough interest in THEM. — Edith Wharton

100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. — Yuval Noah Harari

I myself find him a master of utterly terminal pessimism, appalled by all that an insane humanity may yet survive to do. We are pollution. He wants us to feel no pity for Homo sapiens, and so excludes appealing women and children from his tales. — Kurt Vonnegut

We call ourselves Homo sapiens
man the wise
because our intelligence is so important to us. For thousands of years, we have tried to understand how we think: that is, how a mere handful of matter can perceive, understand, predict, and manipulate a world far larger and more complicated than itself. The field of artificial intelligence, or AI, goes further still: it attempts not just to understand but also to build intelligent entities. — Stuart J. Russell

Homo sapiens! The name itself was an irony. They had not been wise at all, but incredibly stupid. Lords of the Earth with their great gray brains, their thinking minds had placed them above all other forms of life. Yet it had not been thought that compelled them to act, but emotion. From the dawn of their evolution they had killed, and conquered, and subdued. They had committed atrocities on others of their kind, ravaged the land, polluted and destroyed, left millions to starve in Third World countries, and finished it all with a nuclear holocaust. The mutants were right. Intelligent creatures did not commit genocide, or murder the environment on which they were dependent. — Louise Lawrence

I don't think you can impose limits on science because the very nature of homo sapiens is that he - she - is an inquisitive species. You can't control science. You have to control the effects of science. — Robert Winston

Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal. And it is doubly important to remember our origins at a time when we seek to turn ourselves into gods. — Yuval Noah Harari

We're all homos. Homo sapiens. — Michael Scott

My favorite quote: The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land ... In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such. — Aldo Leopold

I'm just capable of entertaining the fantastic idea that, in certain circumstances, Homo sapiens might actually be capable of thinking. It must be worth a go, since we've tried everything else. — Terry Pratchett

The right question to ask from a Darwinian prospective is what was it about bipedalism that was so advantageous? Why did it lead to a - why did that adaptation ultimately lead to a species Homo sapiens that has come to dominate the planet today with six and a half billion people? — Donald Johanson

The evolutionary facts about the emergence of man, e.g., the sudden appearance of Homo sapiens sapiens (Cro-Magnon man) no more than 35 thousand years ago, are as spectacular as the account in Genesis and allow hardly less room for theology. — Walker Percy

This sudden appearance of Homo sapiens is attributable to the rapid mutation of only seventeen brain-building genes. A scant few, really. — James Rollins

No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you're still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be. — Steven Pinker

Voltaire said about God that 'there is no God, but don't tell that to my servant, lest he murder me at night'. Hammurabi would have said the same about his principle of hierarchy, and Thomas Jefferson about human rights. Homo sapiens has no natural rights, just as spiders, hyenas and chimpanzees have no natural rights. But don't tell that to our servants, lest they murder us at night. — Yuval Noah Harari

The contingency of history (both for life in general and for the cultures of Homo sapiens ) and human free will (in the factual rather than theological sense) are conjoined concepts, and no better evidence can be produced than the "experimental" production of markedly different solutions in identical environments. — Stephen Jay Gould

There is a further advantage [to hydrogen bombs]: the supply of uranium in the planet is very limited, and it might be feared that it would be used up before the human race was exterminated, but now that the practically unlimited supply of hydrogen can be utilized, there is considerable reason to hope that homo sapiens may put an end to himself, to the great advantage of such less ferocious animals as may survive. But it is time to return to less cheerful topics. — Bertrand Russell

We live in an exciting time. We now know more than ever about our biology and about our history, allowing us to peer into the future with greater clarity than has previously been possible. But at the same time, the changes we are undergoing, brought about by our own advances in technology, medicine, transportation-- and by the growing impact we are having on the world around us-- mean that we live in a time in which the future looks increasingly less like the past. We have become an odd species, indeed, but our story is not yet over. Like all species, Homo sapiens continues to evolve, so there is one thing we can say with certainty: the people of tomorrow will not be the same as the people of today. — Scott Solomon

gods could only carry away Homo celestialis with them, you see, because the angels had already learned to make their bodies light. But most sapiens - even those of us with fully expressed theogenetica - haven't yet attained the psionic phylogeny necessary to sublimnify the organism. — Kai Ashante Wilson

Durkheim frequently criticized his contemporaries, such as Freud, who tried to explain morality and religion using only the psychology of individuals and their pairwise relationships. (God is just a father figure, said Freud.) Durkheim argued, in contrast, that Homo sapiens was really Homo duplex, a creature who exists at two levels: as an individual and as part of the larger society. — Jonathan Haidt

The story of John Ritter illustrates what it means to be a hero and how we treat our heroes. When we idealize real people they lose their humanity. They are turned into idols that we worship and may later want to destroy. Heroes are transformed from conscious-feeling fellow homo sapiens into characters in our stories. The greatest hero-characters will become legends or even mythic characters. We might think we know them, but when they are idolized they become more like treasured memories, existing in our minds as archetypal characters, rather than living-breathing human beings with thoughts and feelings of their own. — Jeff Rasley

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION OPENED up new ways to convert energy and to produce goods, largely liberating humankind from its dependence on the surrounding ecosystem. Humans cut down forests, drained swamps, dammed rivers, flooded plains, laid down hundreds of thousands of miles of railroad tracks, and built skyscraping metropolises. As the world was moulded to fit the needs of Homo sapiens, habitats were destroyed and species went extinct. Our once green and blue planet is becoming a concrete and plastic shopping centre. — Yuval Noah Harari

It must be stressed that there is nothing insulting about looking at people as animals. We are animals, after all. Homo sapiens is a species of primate, a biological phenomenon dominated by biological rules, like any other species. Human nature is no more than one particular kind of animal nature. Agreed, the human species is an extraordinary animal; but all other species are also extraordinary animals, each in their own way, and the scientific man-watcher can bring many fresh insights to the study of human affairs if he can retain this basic attitude of evolutionary humility. — Desmond Morris

We are at the cusp of another big evolutionary change. Something that happens only every hundred of thousands of years. Everything about humanity as we know and understand it, everything we learned about how to be successful in the world, is based on the species Homo sapiens that's been in existence for 150,000 years. Around 85,000 years ago their communication ability reached a stage in its development, with the mutation of the dropping of the larynx and the full mental potential, which allowed the development of language, which in turn made mind possible. If you don't have language, you can't think, you can't develop strategies. — Steve Rhodes

I had a vision of the afterlife of Homo sapiens: I saw a galactic ice sheet so vast and barren that, stumbling through the cold, you might only encounter another soul once in a lifetime. But this is eternity, a billion lifetimes, and though you walk endlessly alone, eventually you'll cross paths with everyone you lost touch with, every person who stood beside you in a grocery line, every distant uncle and forgotten friend, every human that's ever been. You walk and walk and fall and walk again, and when, at last, you near the warmth of another human heart, regardless of their race or language, age or appearance, you clutch them for all you're worth. The — Adam Johnson

It may just be," he added, "that there is something fundamentally unworkable about government itself. As long as Homo sapiens terra is a wild animal, which he has always been and always will be until he evolves into something different in a million or so years, maybe a workable system of government is a political science impossibility, just as transmutation of elements was a physical-science impossibility as long as they tried to do it by chemical means. — H. Beam Piper

Surely one zoo in the world should have the courage to draw the ultimate conclusion about our ancestry? A cage with Homo Sapiens in all its varying forms, perhaps then we would understand ourselves better. The question of course is whether the other animals would approve of it.
— Cees Nooteboom

Demane: "Gods could only carry away Homo celestialis with them, you see, because the angels had already learned to make their bodies light. But most sapiens - even those of us with fully expressed theogenetica - haven't yet attained the psionic phylogeny necessary to sublimnify the organism."
"Do doubt," Comalo nodded mellowly. "No doubt. I'd always maybe thought it was something like that. — Kai Ashante Wilson

The worst of it was that those people out there-the fear, the suffering the wholesale death-did not really touch him. Crake used to say that Homo sapiens sapiens was not hard-wired to individuate other people in numbers above two hundred, the size of a primal tribe, and Jimmy would reduce that number to two. — Margaret Atwood

We want to be special. We want our place in the cosmos to be central. We want evolution-even godless evolution-to have been directed toward us so that we stand at the pinnacle of nature's ladder of progress. Rewind the tape of life and we want to believe that we (Homo Sapiens) would appear again and again. Would we? Probably not. — Michael Shermer

Are we the only members of the Galaxy that can actually understand what a galaxy is? Could Homo sapiens really be the pinnacle of Creation - the cleverest critters in the cosmos? If we learn the answer is 'no,' that would affect our philosophies forever. — Seth Shostak

Ever since the Second World War, television signals (as well as FM radio and radar) have served as Homo sapiens' emissaries into deep space. High-frequency, high-power broadcasts have filled an Earth-centered bubble more than 60 light-years in radius with signals. — Seth Shostak

[ ... ] as Kurt Vonnegut pointed out [ ... ] the literary novel has become extraordinarily privatistic of late. It's as if the big issues (Does God exist? from whence springs decency? what sort of species is Homo Sapiens?) were either settled or not worth discusssing, and serious writers should therefore confine themselves to their various ethnic heritages and interpersonal relationships. — James K. Morrow

Homo sapiens simonus, aka Simon Miner. Only one of his kind. Male. Predatory. Highly adaptable. Dark brown hair and deep blue eyes. 6'3. His well-muscled frame was agile and strong. His deadly smile incapacitated his victims. Voice promised safety. Sexual prowess compromised victim's intellect (temporarily). Yet he was intent on one vital organ - the heart. — Erin Kellison

We normally think that theist religions sanctified the great gods. We tend to forget that they sanctified humans, too. Hitherto Homo sapiens had been just one actor in a cast of thousands. In the new theist drama, Sapiens became the central hero around whom the entire universe revolved. — Yuval Noah Harari

The classical argument for why a supposedly decent and moral creature like Homo sapiens can mistreat and even extirpate other species rests upon an extreme position in a continuum. The Cartesian tradition, formulated explicitly in the seventeenth century, but developed in "folk" and other versions throughout human history no doubt, holds that other animals are little more than unfeeling machines, with only humans enjoying "consciousness," however defined. — Stephen Jay Gould

As evolutionary time is measured, we have only just turned up and have hardly had time to catch breath, still marveling at our thumbs, still learning to use the brand-new gift of language. Being so young, we can be excused all sorts of folly and can permit ourselves the hope that someday, as a species, we will begin to grow up. — Lewis Thomas

Maybe there is something. Something deep. Something in border of physical and incomprehensible. Something unknowable.
Something completely beyond of all psychological, logical and scientific definitions about human. Something, for which the death is no irreversible limit.Something so strange and absurd.
Something infinite and eternal in Homo Sapiens. Never - dying fire.
The human spirit. — Alexandar Tomov

Homo sapiens, which as far as I can tell is only another way of saying weaponised chimpanzees who are hellbent on tearing their cage apart without realising it's not a cage, it's their fucking life support they're shredding. — Paul Russell

The Frankenstein myth confronts Homo Sapiens with the fact that the last days are fast approaching. Unless some nuclear or ecological catastrophe intervenes, so goes the story, the pace of technological development will soon lead to the replacement of Homo Sapiens by completely different beings who posses not only different physiques, but also very different cognitive and emotional worlds. This is something most Sapiens find extremely disconcerting. We like to believe that in the future people just like us will travel from planet to planet in fast spaceships. We don't like to contemplate the possibility that in the future, beings with emotions and identities like ours will no longer exist, and our place will be taken by alien life forms whose abilities dwarf our own. — Yuval Noah Harari

The function of education has never been to free the mind and the spirit of man, but to bind them; and to the end that the mind and spirit of his children should never escape, Homo Sapiens has employed praise, ridicule, admonition, accusation, mutilation, and even torture to chain them to the culture pattern. — Jules Henry

It took nature 100 million years to make the ape stand up and become Homo sapiens. It took us only 10,000 to make knowing obsolete. — Sugata Mitra

You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it ... fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf - your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens. — John Fowles

If you think about it, every single species is endangered. Homo sapiens at the front of the line, mosquitoes and lawyers at the back. — Henry Rollins

He had written commentaries for the Journal suggesting that people would be healthier if they lived more like their paleolithic ancestors had. Not that they should starve themselves from time to time, or needed to kill all the meat they ate - just that incorporating more paleolithic behaviors might increase health and well-being. After all, a fairly well-identified set of behaviors, repeated for many generations, had changed their ancestors a great deal; had created the species Homo sapiens; had blown their brains up like balloons. Surely these were behaviors most likely to lead to well-being now. And to the extent they neglected these behaviors, and sat around inside boxes as if they were nothing but brains and fingertips, the unhealthier and unhappier they would be. — Kim Stanley Robinson

My single greatest challenge is to remain centered and loving in an overwhelmingly nonvegan world. In today's world, cruelty and exploitation of other beings - human and non-human alike - are accepted, practiced, and profited from by most every institution of society - from commerce and science to education and entertainment. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Homo sapiens are either unaware of the cruelty or accept it as unavoidable and even normal. — Michael Klaper

We are all in flight from the real reality. That is the basic definition of Homo Sapiens. — John Fowles

It's the most charming thing about humans. You are all so sure that the lesser animals are bleeding with envy because they didn't have the good fortune to be born Homo sapiens. — Orson Scott Card

I contend that the continued racial classification of Homo sapiens represents an outmoded approach to the general problem of differentiation within a species. In other words, I reject a racial classification of humans for the same reasons that I prefer not to divide into subspecies the prodigiously variable West Indian land snails that form the subject of my own research. — Stephen Jay Gould

Homo sapiens," "homo faber" ... yes, but, first of all, "homo adorans. — Alexander Schmemann

The tragedy of my species xxx is that it does not live in its own time. Homo sapiens is locked on history's rearview mirror, never the road ahead, bent on catching some presumed lost paradise xxx
xxx
The human race is destroying itself with nostalgia ... — James K. Morrow

If you had a yard as a child, you probably remember it with a startling intimacy. You knew that yard: every inch, every bush, each step on the tree you could climb, the whorls and knots in the branches, the bare dirt spots, the sandy gravel, the soft grass. It was deep, profound, intimate local knowledge. You intuitively knew what was happening around you at all times. Primitive man would have felt that way about a much larger stretch of ground, but it was still "his" territory. This very ability is really what allowed Homo sapiens to expand and succeed the way he did. — Sam Sheridan

Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap. — William Gibson

I listen to the audience and try and bounce with them. All audiences are different. But they are all homo sapiens. — Eric Idle

Evolution has made Homo sapiens, like other social mammals, a xenophobic creature. Sapiens instinctively divide humanity into two parts, 'we' and 'they'. — Yuval Noah Harari

What was the Sapiens' secret of success? How did we manage to settle so rapidly in so many distant and ecologically different habitats? How did we push all other human species into oblivion? Why couldn't even the strong, brainy, cold-proof Neanderthals survive our onslaught? The debate continues to rage. The most likely answer is the very thing that makes the debate possible: Homo sapiens conquered the world thanks above all to its unique language. — Yuval Noah Harari

Since homo sapiens can survive only by unrestrained racial killing, a Jewish triumph of reason over impulse would mean the end of the species. What a race needed, thought Hitler, was a "worldview" that permitted it to triumph, which meant, in the final analysis, "faith" in its own mindless mission. — Timothy Snyder

fact, however, the lesson is just the opposite. The story demonstrates that by humanising animals we usually underestimate animal cognition and ignore the unique abilities of other creatures. — Yuval Noah Harari

The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history. — Robert A. Heinlein

Mutants, super beings, gods, aliens, a guy who sticks to walls at one extreme, a creature who eats planets at the other; Each one that comes into being, they feel, diminishes the rest of humanity, ordinary homo sapiens, that little bit more. — Jim Lee

The first thing I remember about the world and I pray that it may be the last is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling, which everyone has in some degree, and which is, at once, the glory and desolation of homo sapiens , provides the only thread of consistency that I can detect in my life. — Malcolm Muggeridge

1. The mind programs the functioning of the brain. We are born with a limited number of "hardwired" reflexes, but the human being has the "longest apprenticeship" of all animals, during which learning takes place. "Homo sapiens," he wrote, "arrives with a tremendous part of his nervous mass left unpatterned, unconnected, so that each individual, depending on where he happens to be born, can organize his brain to fit the demands of his surroundings. — Norman Doidge

I try to be realistic and pragmatic. I have a lot of hope for humanity as a species, but obviously as individuals we can be extremely flawed. We may have to go through some very terrible times in the near future, even if we ultimately survive as Homo sapiens. — Annalee Newitz

Why would any sane person lower his or her standard of living just to multiply the number of copies of the Homo sapiens genome? Nobody agreed to this deal: the Agricultural Revolution was a trap. — Yuval Noah Harari

We are misery-making machines! Homo sapiens has perfected the art of causing suffering. Pain is humankind's collective GDP. — Henry Rollins

Two hallmarks of Homo Sapiens are decoration and self-identification. — Carl Zimmer

When we look for the origins of all humanity today, let's not just look at Europe, because I think Africa was the cradle, the crucible that created us as Homo sapiens. — Donald Johanson

The extinction of the Australian megafauna was probably the first significant mark Homo sapiens left on our planet. — Yuval Noah Harari

A question for Christians who accept evolution: When did we gain a "soul"? Did Homo habilis have a soul? Homo ergaster? Did God only spontaneously add a soul when we evolved into Homo sapiens? — David G. McAfee

The First Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the foragers, was followed by the Second Wave Extinction, which accompanied the spread of the farmers, and gives us an important perspective on the Third Wave Extinction, which industrial activity is causing today. Don't believe tree-huggers who claim that our ancestors lived in harmony with nature. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species — Yuval Noah Harari

Over the past 10,000 years, Homo sapiens has grown so accustomed to being the only human species that it's hard for us to conceive of any other possibility. Our lack of brothers and sisters makes it easier to imagine that we are the epitome of creation, and that a chasm separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. When Charles Darwin indicated that Homo sapiens was just another kind of animal, people were outraged. Even today many refuse to believe it. Had the Neanderthals survived, would we still imagine ourselves to be a creature apart? Perhaps this is exactly why our ancestors wiped out the Neanderthals. They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate. Whether — Yuval Noah Harari

What is there about the notion of a person, at law, that makes every living member of the species Homo sapiens a person, irrespective of their mental capacities, but excludes every nonhuman animal - again, irrespective of their mental capacities? — Peter Singer

Animals can be driven crazy by placing too many in too small a pen. Homo sapiens is the only animal that voluntarily does this to himself. — Robert A. Heinlein

Perhaps if zoologists would contemplate the wide variations presented by many plants of indubitably one and the same species, and the still wider diversities of long cultivated races from an original stock, they would find more than one instructive parallel to the case of the longest domesticated of all species, man. — Asa Gray

However, once technology enables us to re-engineer human minds, Homo sapiens will disappear, human history will come to an end and a completely new kind of process will begin, which people like you and me cannot comprehend. Many scholars try to predict how the world will look in the year 2100 or 2200. This is a waste of time. Any worthwhile prediction must take into account the ability to re-engineer human minds, and this is impossible. There are many wise answers to the question, 'What would people with minds like ours do with biotechnology?' Yet there are no good answers to the question, 'What would beings with a different kind of mind do with biotechnology?' All we can say is that people similar to us are likely to use biotechnology to re-engineer their own minds, and our present-day minds cannot grasp what might happen next. — Yuval Noah Harari

Archaic humans paid for their large brains in two ways. Firstly, they spent more time in search of food. Secondly, their muscles atrophied. Like a government diverting money from defence to education, humans diverted energy from biceps to neurons. It's hardly a foregone conclusion that this is a good strategy for survival on the savannah. A chimpanzee can't win an argument with a Homo sapiens, but the ape can rip the man apart like a rag doll. — Yuval Noah Harari

The arts which we now call garden design and landscape design have three separate origins: sacred space, horticultural space and domestic space. Like Homo sapiens, the arts of garden and landscape design probably spread to Europe from West Asia. — Tom Turner

We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction. — Stephen Jay Gould