Human Giant Quotes & Sayings

The way we envision the stars is by imagining they're attached to a giant invisible sphere surrounding the earth. It is a total fiction, really - just a construction we came up with to help us get our heads around the complexity of it all ... The ecliptic, put simply is the plane of the earth's orbit around the sun. But since we all live here on earth, we observe the sun to be moving along this plane instead. Why? Because what would be the point of looking at things from the perspective of the sun? That's no use to anyone ... Ergo, it's an imaginary circle, as it's only a part of our human construction of the cosmos. — Benjamin Wood

Every person who was a genius, a mental giant, or a great contributor to the human race watered the seeds of his greatness from the well of isolation, until the seed became a plant, and then finally, a formidable tree. — Aaidh Ibn Abdullah Al-Qarni

Then she was there in the doorway of the ambulance at his feet. She jumped up like a lion, then stood up on two feet like a human. Her hair was thick and full. She had a mouthful of giant teeth. He could see four pronounced canines in the front and strong claws where her fingernails had been. Her strong body was shriveled and emaciated with her ribs and hip bones sticking out prominently like a concentration camp victim. Her stench was overpowering, like a deer carcass left to rot on the side of the road. — Joseph M. Chiron

I knew Frank Herbert for more than thirty-eight years. He was a magnificent human being, a man of great honor and distinction, and the most interesting person at any gathering, drawing listeners around him like a magnet. To say he was an intellectual giant would be an understatement, since he seemed to contain all of the knowledge of the universe in his marvelous mind. He was my father, and I loved him deeply. — Frank Herbert

As I witness and participate in our visionary efforts to revitalize Detroit and contrast them with the multibillion dollars' worth of megaprojects advanced by politicians and developed that involve casinos, giant stadiums, gentrification, and the Super Bowl, I am saddened by their shortsightedness. At the same time I rejoice in the energy being unleashed in the community by our human-scale programs that involve bringing the country back into the city and removing the walls between schools and communities, between generations, and between ethnic groups. And I am confident just as in the early twentieth century people came from around the world to marvel at the mass production lines pioneered by Henry Ford, in the twenty-first century they will be coming to marvel at the thriving neighborhoods that are the fruit of our visionary programs. — Grace Lee Boggs

What I mean to say is probably something like this: any single human being, no matter what kind of person he or she may be, is all caught up in the tentacles of this animal like a giant octopus, and is getting sucked into the darkness. You can put any kind of spin on it you like, but you end up with the same unbearable spectacle. — Haruki Murakami

People are craving this great progress in electronics, going after computers, the Internet, etc. It's a giant progress technologically. But they must have a balance of soul, a balance for human beauty. That means art has an important role. — Mstislav Rostropovich

People think our work is monumental because it's art, but human beings do much bigger things: they build giant airports, highways for thousands of miles, much, much bigger than what we create. — Christo

If the Internet can be described as a giant human consciousness, then viral marketing is the illusion of free will. — George Pendle

Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy as dark as a buried Babylon. — George Eliot

Holding a tiny dixie cup in my hand makes me feel like a giant human being that can crush things — Brandon Scott Gorrell

Returning to the boat we passed bridges, railroad tracks, warehouses, factories, wharves and what not. It was like following in the wake of a demented giant who had sown the earth with crazy dreams. If I could only have seen a horse or a cow, or just a cantankerous goat chewing tin cans, it would have been a tremendous relief. But there was nothing of the animal, vegetable or human kingdom in sight. It was a vast jumbled waste created by pre-human or sub-human monsters in a delirium of greed. It was something negative, some not-ness of some kind or other. It was a bad dream and towards the end I broke into a trot, what with disgust and nausea, what with the howling icy gale which was whipping everything in sight into a frozen pie crust. When I got back to the boat I was praying that by some miracle the captain would decide to alter his course and return to Piraeus. — Henry Miller

Mack Gaffey, resident veterinarian and owner of Oak Falls Kennel for the Canine Challenged came to greet him. He was a tall, painfully thin man with a tuft of wiry gray hair sticking out in horns on his head and a pair of thick-rimmed glasses.
"Sheriff, glad you could make it." They shook hands.
"Alright Mack," Al said. "So you've had yourself some vandalism, huh?"
Mack nodded and lead him around his white GMC. On hood of the van was a fogged-up ZipLock bag. "Some sicko took a dump on my van."
Mack held up the bag so Al could see the giant, steaming turd inside. "It's human shit, Al. I did the tests this morning."
The sheriff frowned and started wiping the hand he shook Mack's with against his pants. "Well, this stinks."
"You should smell it out of the bag, Sheriff. — Daniel Younger

You are a fertile God. Many seeds are dropped into the soil. Many do not sprout. Yet beneath the appearance of waste nothing is wasted, nothing lost. Giant trees crash to the forest floor, decompose, and become the soil out of which the saplings arise. Similarly, in human affairs, movements are created, rise, do Your work in the world, decline, go back into the soil, and provide the rich humus out of which new life springs. Generations come and go. Sun and rain, winter and summer, seed time and harvest. Always Your Word remains constant. Your people are called over and over, generation after generation, back into this constancy, back to this mysterious fluid stability - the only security worth having. Can You not waste a little more time on us? — Michael D. O'Brien

And let's face it people, no one is ever honest with you about child birth. Not even your mother. "It's a pain you forget all about once you have that sweet little baby in your arms." Bullshit. I CALL BULLSHIT. Any friend, cousin, or nosey-ass stranger in the grocery store that tells you it's not that bad is a lying sack of shit. Your vagina is roughly the size of the girth of a penis. It has to stretch and open andturn into a giant bat cave so the life-sucking human you've been growing for nine months can angrily claw its way out. Who in their right mind would do that willingly? You're just walking along one day and think to yourself, "You know, I think it's time I turn my vagina into an Arby's Beef and Cheddar (minus the cheddar) and saddle myself down for a minimum of eighteen years to someone who will suck the soul and the will to live right out of my body so I'm a shell of the person I used to be and can't get laid even if I pay for it. — Tara Sivec

I'm interested in the human impact of the giant foot of misplaced government. After all, we encounter it every day. — Dave Eggers

Standing there small among the boxes of Kandy Kakes that rose like brownish cartoon cliffs around him, he resembled the videos I'd seen of sea lions floating angelically among the kelp, black bodies filmed from below, their shapes cut out in bright sunlight, bodies mistakable for those of a human being. I felt the memory of a shadowy arm around me, a watcher again, sitting there on the couch with my boyfriend, watching the animals become prey. Somewhere there were giant whales feeding on creatures too small to see, pressing them against fronds of baleen with a tongue the size of a sedan. There were polar bears killing seals, tearing ovoid chunks from out of their smooth, round bellies. In the surrounding vastness of the warehouse, I heard something scratching against the concrete floor and knew there were rats here, scraping a thin film of nutrient from the dry packaged matter that surrounded them. Life was everywhere, inescapable, imperative. — Alexandra Kleeman

A giant caterpillar, its segmented body made of severed human heads, their faces screaming, their tongues functioning as legs, rippled up a wall and began tearing out chunks of concrete where a ledge had been worn, destroying another shrine. — Jim Butcher

The most vulnerable and yet most unconquerable of things is human vanity; nay, through being wounded its strength increases and can grow to giant proportions. — Friedrich Nietzsche

When you say 'mother' or 'father' you describe three different phenomena. There is the giant who made you and loomed over your early years; there is whatever more human-scale version might have been possible to perceive later and maybe even befriend; and there is the internalized version of the parent with whom you struggle- to appease, to escape, to be yourself, to understand and be understood by- and they make up a chaotic and contradictory trinity. — Rebecca Solnit

Ever since, two summers ago, Joe Marino had begun to come into her bed, a preposterous fecundity had overtaken the staked plans, out in the side garden where the southwestern sun slanted in through the line of willows each long afternoon. The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was something frantic in such fertility, a crying-out like that of children frantic to please. Of plants, tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot. Picking the watery orange-red orbs, Alexandra felt she was cupping a giant lover's testicles in her hand. — John Updike

The prisoner's dilemma may seem to represent a rather specific and unusual scenario, but in fact it shows up all over the place in human and animal life. It turns out, for example, to underlie arms races in international relations, inaction on climate change, obstacles to trade, and even natural phenomena such as why trees grow so tall - giant redwoods could save terrific resources by only growing to, say, 50 feet (they usually grow to over 200), but in the competition for light, whoever grows that bit taller at the expense of the others will do better. In — Dominic Johnson

Don't talk to me about sense.
i've been alive for forty-seven years and I have absolutely no understanding of human nature whatsoever. I might as well be living with a completely different species, giant squids or perhaps some kind of insect colony. — Christopher Fowler

There are certain human truths, like death, that nobody gets to escape, and pain, which everybody not only feels but needs. You have to go through it. So for everybody, at some point - very often for teenagers - the world is a terrible place. The world is a giant, awful black hole of evil conspiracy. Sometimes that's because you have perspective on what the world's really like, and sometimes it's because you've completely lost perspective and you're having a terrible day. But no matter what, everybody shares that feeling, and life is kind of about your ways around that, your ways around certain truths. — Joss Whedon

So doesn't that make the universe a giant lottery, then? you purchase a ticket when you're born. and it's all just random whether you get a good ticket or a bad ticket. it's all just luck. my head swirls on this, but then softer thoughts soothe, like a flatted third on a major chord. no, no, it's not all random, if it really was all random, the universe would abandon us completely. and the universe doesn't. it takes care of its most fragile creations in ways we can't see. like with the parents who adore you blindly. and the big sister who feels guilty for being human over you. and a little gravelly-voiced kid whose friends have left him over you. and even a pink-haired girl who carries your picture in her wallet. maybe it is a lottery, but the universe makes it all even out in the end. the universe takes care of all of its birds. — R.J. Palacio

Though it may be interesting to know how many hairs there are on the human head, or how the giant red spot on the surface of Jupiter was formed, the real truths we are interested in are those about ourselves. — Stephen Richards

No alarm clock in the world works quite as well as a hungry wolf in your bed. Struggling to breathe, I shoved at the giant oaf lying across my chest, but he staunchly refused to move. Despite his human soul, I was pretty sure — Alexis Kade

An Ebola particle is only around eighty nanometres wide and a thousand nanometres long. If it were the size of a piece of spaghetti, then a human hair would be about twelve feet in diameter and would resemble the trunk of a giant redwood tree. — Richard Preston

REMEMBER YOUR GREATNESS

Before you were born,
And were still too tiny for
The human eye to see,
You won the race for life
From among 250 million competitors.
And yet,
How fast you have forgotten
Your strength,
When your very existence
Is proof of your greatness.
You were born a winner,
A warrior,
One who defied the odds
By surviving the most gruesome
Battle of them all.
And now that you are a giant,
Why do you even doubt victory
Against smaller numbers,
And wider margins?
The only walls that exist,
Are those you have placed in your mind.
And whatever obstacles you conceive,
Exist only because you have forgotten
What you have already
Achieved. — Suzy Kassem

Dinosaurs are the jumper cables to the human mind. Kids can't curb their enthusiasm when they're in a hall of dinosaurs and mammoths and mammoth hunters and trilobites and giant fish that could chomp up a shark. These natural objects in motion and context make kids want to read; you can't stop them from reading and thinking. — Robert T. Bakker

The giant industries that are polluting our planet as well as violating human rights worldwide are the ones nearest and dearest to the hearts of American politicians. — Woody Harrelson

The terms of the political debate must be redefined to focus clearly on the real issue: the contest for power between the big and central and the small and local--between corporations and ordinary people. The time is ripe for a realignment of political alliances, which is likely to come into full flower only when the true populists realize that their enemy is not only big government but also the giant corporations that owe no allegiance to place, people, or human interest. — David Korten

Sometimes love doesn't look like what we think it should look like. Sometimes it's paradoxical. Sometimes we have to step outside our comfort zone. Sometimes we have to be more honest than we thought we'd ever have to be or more supportive than we are taught is appropriate. When we traverse those boundaries, that's when we really understand what this whole love thing is all about. We become more than just human. We become part of the giant, beautiful ever-changing reality of life. By loving without limits, we become wise, strong, and beautiful. We become more of what we already are. — Vironika Tugaleva

And it seemed as though for a moment, the world encapsulated them in a giant sigh. As if the world was exhausted by humanity - by the bellows of war and bullets, of hateful cries and grieving tears. Of all the pain, the endless pain humanity had brought into its peaceful existence. A great heaving sigh to wash it all away. But like the sea, when washed away, war only crashed harder, a surging line of arched backs and brackish tears. — Kelseyleigh Reber

And so without our primordial attachments to others, what would we be?
Evidently, we would be the players of a game, one that resembled a giant chess match, with our fellow human beings as the rooks, the knights, and the pawns. For this is the essence of sociopathic behavior, and desire. — Martha Stout

Maybe there's a heaven, like they say, a place where everything we've ever done is noted and recorded, weighed on big karma scales. Maybe not. Maybe this whole thing is just a giant experiment run by aliens who find out human hijinks amusing. Or maybe we're an abandoned project started by a deity who checked out a long time ago, but we're still hard-wired to believe, to try to make meaning out of the seemingly random. Maybe we're all part of the same unconscious stew, dreaming the same dreams, hoping the same hopes, needing the same connection, trying to find it, missing, trying again - each of us playing our parts in the other's plotlines, just one big ball of human yarn tangled up together. Maybe this is it. — Libba Bray

When we understand that we are a human race, what affects you affects me, what affects her affects you and so on and so on, then we'll look at this thing [HIV/AIDS] for what it really is. It's a disease that's out to kill all of us. What will make it continue is our prejudices, our ideas about it, and the fact that we don't look at ourselves as one giant community. — Queen Latifah

Right up till the 1980s, SF envisioned giant mainframe computers that ran everything remotely, that ingested huge amounts of information and regurgitated it in startling ways, and that behaved (or were programmed to behave) very much like human beings ... Now we have 14-year-olds with more computing power on their desktops than existed in the entire world in 1960. But computers in fiction are still behaving in much the same way as they did in the Sixties. That's because in fiction [artificial intelligence] has to follow the laws of dramatic logic, just like human characters. — Walter Jon Williams

Looking closer at human beings, it becomes clear that each of us is a world of our own. Our forehead is a breezy meadow, our elbows are arid wastelands, our eyes are salty lakes, and our gut is the most amazing giant forest ever, populated by the weirdest of creatures. — Giulia Enders

Entire industries and some of our very largest professions depend on the persistence of our current system. Other social institutions - like giant publishers and test-prep companies - are synched to its workings. A certain teaching method implies certain goals and certain tests. The tests, in turn, have a serious impact on hiring practices and career advancement. Human nature being what it is, those who prosper under a given system tend to become supporters of that system. Thus the powerful tend to have a bias toward the status quo; our educational customs tend to perpetuate themselves, and because they interconnect with so many other aspects of our culture, they are extraordinarily difficult to change. — Salman Khan

Do you like vegetables?" Sophie asked, hoping to steer the conversation towards a slightly less dangerous kind of food.
"You is trying to change the subject," the Giant said sternly. "We is having an interesting babblement about the taste of the human bean. The human bean is not a vegetable. — Roald Dahl

That don't look good," Kramisha said. "Not good at all." She paused and then her eyes went from me to Heath, whose attention was so focused on me I swear he didn't look like he would notice if a giant white elephant in a tutu danced around the room. "Ain't that the human kid who was down here before? — Kristin Cast

The giant raised his fist, and a voice cut through the dream.
"Leo!" Jason was shaking his shoulder. "Hey, man, why are you hugging Nike?"
Leo's eyes fluttered open. His arms were wrapped around the human-sized statue in Athena's hand. He must have been thrashing in his sleep. He clung to the victory goddess like he used to cling to his pillow when he had nightmares as a kid. (Man, that had been so embarrassing in the foster homes.)
He disentangled himself and sat up, rubbing his face.
"Nothing," he muttered. "we were just cuddling. Um, what's going on? — Rick Riordan

The glass display cases had shown rock-throwers crafted by the Australian aborigines - like giant wooden shoehorns, they'd looked, but smoothed and carved and ornamented with the most painstaking care. In the 40,000 years since anatomically modern humans had migrated to Australia from Asia, nobody had invented the bow-and-arrow. It really made you appreciate how non-obvious was the idea of Progress. Why would you even think of Invention as something important, if all your history's heroic tales were of great warriors and defenders instead of Thomas Edison? How could anyone possibly have suspected, while carving a rock-thrower with painstaking care, that someday human beings would invent rocket ships and nuclear energy? — Eliezer Yudkowsky

I wondered if Bill Goldman had ever experienced the same giant rats I had encountered while living in Manhattan - the ones the size of cats, that make you freeze in your tracks. The kind that are not afraid of human beings and carry themselves with that swagger and give you that look that seems to imply, "Yeah, what are you gonna do about it? — Cary Elwes

[T]he prime purpose of the occupation was not to take land or push people from their homes. It did that too of course, and effectively, but overall, with its checkpointed and its walls and its prisons and its permits, it functioned as a giant humiliation machine, a complex and sophisticated mechanism for the production of human despair. — Ben Ehrenreich

If you want to save the snow leopard, or the giant Redwoods, or the Okavango delta, or the Amazon, or the atmosphere, or the Earth, or those you love, or yourself, or the human race, this is the only path that can achieve that-so the truth is the sooner you support and adopt this path of transformation through understanding the better. The choice is self-destruction or self-discovery. — Jeremy Griffith

In fact, the early demographer Thomas Malthus believes that the only way the human population would ever check itself was by running headlong into a disaster, like a pandemic or famine. Sometimes we get so frustrated with the slowness of human political processes that we wish a giant flaming rock would solve the problem for us. — Annalee Newitz

As long as humanity has been human, it has looked toward the heavens and dreamed that some day, some way, there would be giant federal contracts involved. — Dave Barry

Our Klutz clangs into Stop signs while riding a bike, and knocks over giant displays of expensive fine china. Despite being five foot nine and weighing 110 pounds, she is basically like a drunk buffalo who has never been a part of human society. But Fred Tom loves her anyway. — Mindy Kaling

We're here to mark that day in history when the Allied peoples joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue. Here in Normandy the rescue began. Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history. — Ronald Reagan

Well, hell," muttered Drake. "Do you do that to all the human women?"
"No. Usually they've already started taking off their clothes by now. She's beginning to hurt my feelings."
"We need to get you a paper bag or a giant scar or something."
"Yeah," said the man, his tone dry. "I'll get right to work on that — Shannon K. Butcher

Yes, when the man you're in love with is breaking up with you, this is the typical human female response." I waved frantically at myself. "Hysterical crying on the side of the road, yelling at an invisible, glowing giant. — Ashlan Thomas

Dawn in Mongolia was an amazing thing. In one instant, the horizon became a faint line suspended in the darkness, and then the line was drawn upward, higher and higher. It was as if a giant hand had stretched down from the sky and slowly lifted the curtain of night from the face of the earth. It was a magnificent sight, far greater in scale ... than anything that I, with my limited human faculties, could fully comprehend. — Haruki Murakami

The place where the story happened was a world on the back of four elephants perched on the shell of a giant turtle. That's the advantage of space. It's big enough to hold practically anything, and so, eventually, it does.
People think that it is strange to have a turtle ten thousand miles long and an elephant more than two thousand miles tall, which just shows that the human brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably originally designed for cooling the blood. It believes mere size is amazing.
There's nothing amazing about size. Turtles are amazing, and elephants are quite astonishing. But the fact that there's a big turtle is far less amazing than the fact that there is a turtle anywhere. — Terry Pratchett

A lonely human we think is lonely.
Freakin thoughts surround it.
A lonely bird we think is lonely.
Damn! Did you see!
The giant nature around it.
Disrespectful of nature if we be,
lonely are only we. — Chetan M. Kumbhar

Hapi?" I asked.
"Why, yes, I am happy!" Hapi beamed. "I'm always happy because I'm Hapi! Are you happy?"
Zia frowned up at the giant. "Does he have to be so big?"
The god laughed. Immediately he shrank down to human size, though the crazy cheerful look on his face was still pretty unnerving.
"Oh, Setne!" Hapi chuckled and pushed the ghost playfully. "I hate this guy. Absolutely despise him!"
Hapi's smile became painfully wide. "I'd love to rip off your arms and legs, Setne. That would be amazing!"
Setne ... drifted a little farther away from the smiling god.
"Oh!" Hapi clapped excitedly. "The world is going to end tomorrow. I forgot!"
"You'd never get to Memphis without my help. You'd get torn into a million pieces!"
He seemed genuinely pleased to share that news. — Rick Riordan

A whizzpopper!" cried the BFG, beaming at her. "Us giants is making whizzpoppers all the time! Whizzpopping is a sign of happiness. It is music in our ears! You surely is not telling me that a little whizzpopping if forbidden among human beans? — Roald Dahl

The government is a giant logjam in the eternal river of human potential. — Stefan Molyneux

The truth is that solitude is the creative condition of genius, religious or secular, and the ultimate sterilising of it. No human soul can long ignore "the giant agony of the world" and live, except indeed the mollusc life, a barnacle upon eternity. — Helen Waddell

HIDEOUS! Sorry, Mom, but vomit green is NOT my colour. And that dress is impossible to walk in! It's so tight around my legs that it looks like a giant fish tail. While the other bridesmaids walked gracefully to the "Wedding March" song, I flopped my way down the aisle like a human-sized catfish or something! Those rug burns were pure agony! It was getting late and I was running out of time! The last thing I wanted to do was to traumatise Brandon by showing up at the dance looking like a MUTANT FISH GIRL or something. Right now I'm SO frustrated that I'm seriously considering just NOT going to the dance. Why is my life so hopelessly CRUDDY?! — Rachel Renee Russell

Giant hogweed is considered extremely dangerous because its sap, in combination with ultraviolet light, can burn human skin. Every year, millions are spent digging up plants and destroying them, without any great success. However, hogweed can spread only because the original forested meadows along the banks of rivers and streams no longer exist. If these forests were to return, it would be so dark under the forest canopy that hogweed would disappear. The same goes for Himalayan balsam and Japanese knotweed, which also grow on the riverbanks in the absence of the forests. Trees could solve the problem if people trying to improve things would only allow them to take over. — Peter Wohlleben

When I turned 11, my dad decorated a room at the Standard hotel in Los Angeles in a '60s, Austin Powers style. There was human bowling: You run inside a giant inflatable ball and try to knock down pins. To this day, adults say it was one of the craziest parties they've ever been to. — Zoe Kravitz

Dearest Penelope,
I am a giant jerk. I don't mean to imply that I am abnormally sized human who happens to also be a jerk, but, instead, that I am a normal-sized human who happens to sometimes be an extra-large jerk. When you buy me an ugly holiday sweater next Christmas, it needn't be an extra-large man's sweater, but it should probably feature some much-despised ... figure that will serve to indicate to the world the immense degree of my jerkiness. What I'm really saying is ... I've thought more about it, and I'd like to be of help to you in your quest so that come Christmas you can just find me a basic ugly holiday sweater that has no other object but to be a basic ugly holiday sweater, and I can wear it the next time we beat God and the devil alike at trash can bowling.
Yours,
Flynt — Kate Ellison

What the History is really about lies behind this: man, giant-sized, seen against the background of the entire world, universalized in his conflict with destiny, the gods, and the cosmic order. The medium that is most fertile in showing the true nature of reality is the human mind, remembering, reflective, and fertile most of all when its memory and reflection are put at the service of its dreaming and fantastic side. — Herodotus

Do you think it's possible that things that seem to be discrete in three dimensions might all be part of the same bigger object in four dimensions? ... What if humanity- that collective noun we so often employ- really is, at a higher level, a singular noun? What it what we perceive in three dimensions as seven billion individual human beings are really all just aspects of one giant being? — Robert J. Sawyer

Toward the end of Carmel's life, the perception of super talls shifted dramatically, thanks largely to televised NBA games, By 1975, pretty much everyone had seen super tall people on TV, in the context of being celebrated in front of sold-out basketball arenas. This new frame of reference could not have been more positive. By 1995 Shaquille O'Neal was known as The Man of Steel, not the Traveling Human Giant. The idea of super tall people as freaks was replaced by the idea of super tall people as amazing athletes. — Arianne Cohen

The victory of humanity over man.
Humanity had conquered the inhuman.
And by what means? In what way? How had it overcome the giant of anger and hatred? What arms had it used? What engine of war? The cradle. — Victor Hugo

I sat on a somewhat higher sand dune and watched the eastern sky. Dawn in Mongolia was an amazing thing. In one instant, the horizon became a faint line suspended in the darkness, and then the line was drawn upward, higher and higher. It was as if a giant hand had stretched down from the sky and slowly lifted the curtain of night from the face of the earth. It was a magnificent sight, far greater in scale, [ ... ] than anything that I, with my limited human faculties, could comprehend. As I sat and watched, the feeling overtook me that my very life was slowly dwindling into nothingness. There was no trace here of anything as insignificant as human undertakings. This same event had been occurring hundreds of millions - hundreds of billions - of times, from an age long before there had been anything resembling life on earth. — Haruki Murakami

The gravitation constant is the same always. But the economic constants-these elasticities of demand and supply-depending, as they do, upon human consciousness, are liable to vary. Prosperity ends in a crisis. The era of optimism dies in the crisis, but in dying it gives birth to an era of pessimism. This new era is born, not an infant, but a giant; for an industrial boom has necessarily been a period of strong emotional excitement, and an excited man passes from one form of excitement to another more rapidly than he passes to quiescence. Under the new error, business is unduly depressed. — Arthur Cecil Pigou

A giant octopus living way down deep at the bottom of the ocean. It has this tremendously powerful life force, a bunch of long, undulating legs, and it's heading somewhere, moving through the darkness of the ocean ... It takes on all kinds of different shapes - sometimes it's 'the nation,' and sometimes it's 'the law,' and sometimes it takes on shapes that are more difficult and dangerous than that. You can try cutting off its legs, but they just keep growing back. Nobody can kill it. It's too strong, and it lives too far down in the ocean. Nobody knows where its heart is. What I felt then was a deep terror. And a kind of hopelessness, a feeling that I could never run away from this thing, no matter how far I went. And this creature, this thing doesn't give a damn that I'm me or you're you. In its presence, all human beings lose their names and their faces. We all turn into signs, into numbers. — Haruki Murakami

Love is the weapon which Omnipotence reserved to conquer rebel man when all the rest had failed. Reason he parries; fear he answers blow for blow; future interest he meets with present pleasure; but love, that sun against whose melting beams the winter cannot stand
that soft subliming slumber which wrestles down the giant, there is not one human being in a million, nor a thousand men in all earth's huge quintillion, whose clay heart is hardened against love. — Martin Farquhar Tupper

The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies. — Marc Bloch

When Winston Churchill wanted to rally the nation in 1940, it was to Anglo-Saxon that he turned: "We shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight on the landing grounds; we shall fight in the fields and the streets; we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." All these stirring words came from Old English as spoken in the year 1000, with the exception of the last one, surrender, a French import that came with the Normans in 1066
and when man set foot on the moon in 1969, the first human words spoken had similar echoes: "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." Each of Armstrong's famous words was part of Old English by the year 1000. — Robert Lacey

You're part of the human fabric of experience. You don't have to have cancer to write about cancer. You don't have to have somebody close to you die to understand what death is. Definitely, the more you live, the more experiences fall into your spectrum. As a writer, you must have been told: Write about what you know. But Kafka didn't. Gogol didn't. Did Shakespeare write only what he knew? Our own selves are limitless. And our capacity for empathy is giant. — Regina Spektor

The greatest cause of evil included all human motives in one giant paradox. Good and bad were so inextricably mixed that we couldn't make them out; bad seemed to lead to good, and good motives led to bad. The paradox is that evil comes from man's urge to heroic victory over evil. — Ernest Becker

Historians are wont to name technological advances as the great milestones of culture, among them the development of the plow, the discovery of smelting and metalworking, the invention of the clock, printing press, steam power, electric engine, lightbulb, semiconductor, and computer. But possibly even more transforming than any of these was the recognition by Greek philosophers and their intellectual descendants that human beings could examine, comprehend, and eventually even guide or control their own thought process, emotions, and resulting behavior.
With that realization we became something new and different on earth: the only animal that, by examining its own cerebration and behavior, could alter them. This, surely, was a giant step in evolution. Although we are physically little different from the people of three thousand years ago, we are culturally a different species. We are the psychologizing animal. — Morton Hunt

With 'Human Giant,' we tested almost everything live and made tweaks based on what worked and what didn't. — Jason Woliner

I may be just an empty flesh terminal reliant on technology for all my ideas, memories and relationships, but I am confident that all of that everything that makes me a unique human being is still out there somewhere, safe in a theoretical storage space owned by giant, multinational corporations. — Stephen Colbert

The train station - busy, swarming with people, luggage, porters, taxi drivers and limousine chauffeurs - a giant honeycomb, with worker bees flying in and out, carrying the trash, which covers the entire floor, in and out of the building. Only the honey has been consumed by the selected few, and nothing but the mucus remains. The line - a monstrous larva - the line stretches from the information window and extends almost out of the door. A human worm - hundreds of legs and hands, twisting and breathing disease. What was I thinking? This is just a city like any other, a city with its inhabitants, always busy, from the morning until the nighttime, always itching for a fight, always ready to chew me up and spit me out. A stripped and ragged bone, tossed aside when I can no longer feed its hungry belly. The belly of a beast - a human beast - merciless, yet placatory on the surface. I light a cigarette, spit on the floor, and walk towards the daylight. — Henry Martin

Standing on the bridge, looking across at that empty city, everything in the compass of my gaze had been set there by a human hand. Somehow those pylons had been strung with wire, and those towers raised, and roofs tiled. There had been food and drink for millions of mouths. I don't cry easy, but my vision blurred as I stared on the ruins of what we had been, and I watched the small band of men in rags move toward it to pick at it like birds on the carcass of some giant. — Marcel Theroux

There was a time when I thought dudes had friendship all figured out. The focus on eating things in front of giant screens, pretending to punch one another, competing over who can utter the grossest and most profane personal insults imaginable - this struck me as the very apex of human social exchange. — Lynn Coady

It's foolish to trump up stories about how primitive humans built pyramids, stone henge or other ancient giant structures. The only logical explanation is ... those relics ain't built by human kind. It is easier to admit this pity explanation than to justify otherwise. — Toba Beta

The third movement is one of the most moving passages ever written, and I've never listened to it without feeling as if I alone have been lifted up on the shoulders of some giant creature touring the charred landscape of all human feeling. — Nicole Krauss

For me, art in our time is strongest when it is aware of science, includes science, is inspired by science, or is about science. On the linguistic level, the new words coined by scientists to describe their new discoveries form a giant growing lexicon that means English is simply bursting with new possibilities, resembling the Elizabethan age in that respect. Then conceptually, science is creating new stories to tell, by deluging us with new information and potentialities. In this deluge we need art to do its usual job of sorting things out, by giving things their human dimension and by exploring how they might feel and what they might mean. So to me the arts and the sciences are completely intertwined. Maybe that's always been true, but now more than ever. — Kim Stanley Robinson