Human Specimens Quotes & Sayings

Mankind must work continually to produce individual great human beings - this and nothing else is the task ... for the question is this : How can your life, the individual life, retain the highest value, the deepest significance? Only by living for the good of the rarest and most valuable specimens. — Friedrich Nietzsche

God made all the animals in a single day; he could have swept them all away in the flood and re-created them in one day when they were again needed. Therefore it was an odd idea to save specimens of them for eleven months in the ark, whilst aware that eight persons could not feed or water them by any human possibility. If they were to be preserved by miracle, the ark was not necessary - to let them swim would have answered the purpose and been more indubitably miraculous. — Mark Twain

No one has a calling to sit in the pews of the church — Sunday Adelaja

I'm not really entertained anymore, everything sounds the same. We have a crisis right now of innovative music. I'm probably the only person left trying to do something different and brand new. — Kool Keith

I would hazard a guess that we have found fossilized human remains of at least a thousand different specimens in South and East Africa, more or less complete at that. I think this is where the prelude to human history was primarily played out. — Richard Leakey

The best thing you can do for the planet is be vegan or vegetarian. — William McNamara

The entire hominid collection known today would barely cover a billiard table, ... the collection is so tantalizingly incomplete, and the specimens themselves often so fragmented and inconclusive, that more can be said about what is missing than about what is present ... but ever since Darwin's work inspired the notion that fossils linking modern man and extinct ancestor would provide the most convincing proof of human evolution, preconceptions have led evidence by the nose in the study of fossil man. — John Reader

It's easy to blame everyone else when it hurts to blame yourself. But in the end you have to face it. — Iris Johansen

I guess sometimes the greatest memories are made in the most unlikely of places, further proof that spontaneity is more rewarding than a meticulously planned life. — J.A. Redmerski

It does not, however, seem impossible that by an attention to breed, a certain degree of improvement, similar to that among animals, might take place among men. Whether intellect could be communicated may be a matter of doubt: but size, strength, beauty, complexion, and perhaps even longevity are in a degree transmissible ... As the human race could not be improved in this way, without condemning all the bad specimens to celibacy, it is not probable, that an attention to breed should ever become general. — Thomas Malthus

A new force in pro football, Taylor demanded not just a tactical response but an explanation. Many people pointed to his unusual combination of size and speed. As one of the Redskins' linemen put it, "No human being should be six four, two forty-five, and run a four-five forty." Bill Parcells thought Taylor's size and speed were closer to the beginning than to the end of the explanation. New York Giants' scouts were scouring the country for young men six three or taller, 240 pounds or heavier, with speed. They could be found. In that pool of physical specimens what was precious - far more precious than an inch, or ten pounds, or one tenth of a second - was Taylor's peculiar energy and mind: relentless, manic, with grandiose ambitions and private standards of performance. — Michael Lewis

Linnaeus's last lesson, of which he himself was unaware, was that professorships kill philosophers. Oh, I'm vain enough to want my burgeoning Flora Japonica to be published one day
as a votive offering to human knowledge
but a seat at Uppsala, or Leiden, or Cambridge, holds no allure. My heart is the East's in this lifetime. This is my third year in Nagasaki, and I have work enough for another three, or six. During the court embassy I can see landscapes no European botanist ever saw. My seminarians are keen young men
with one young woman
and visiting scholars bring me specimens from all over the empire. — David Mitchell

In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues. — Thomas B. Macaulay

Human beings may be miserable specimens, in the main, but we can learn, and, through learning, become decent people. — Orson Scott Card

In such a world as ours the idle man is not so much a biped as a bivalve; and the wealth which breeds idleness, of which the English peerage is an example, and of which we are beginning to abound in specimens in this country, is only a sort of human oyster bed, where heirs and heiresses are planted, to spend a contemptible life of slothfulness in growing plump and succulent for the grave-worms' banquet. — Horace Mann

Darwin was one of our finest specimens. He did superbly what human beings are designed to do: manipulate social information to personal advantage. The information in question was the prevailing account of how human beings, and all organisms, came to exist; Darwin reshaped it in a way that radically raised his social status. When he died in 1882, his greatness was acclaimed in newspapers around the world, and he was buried in Westminster Abbey, not far from the body of Isaac Newton. Alpha-male territory. — Robert Wright

In 2006, the Vogelstein team revealed the first landmark sequencing effort by analyzing thirteen thousand genes in eleven breast and colon cancers. (Although the human genome contains about twenty thousand genes in total, Vogelstein's team initially had tools to assess only thirteen thousand.) In 2008, both Vogelstein's group and the Cancer Genome Atlas consortium extended this effort by sequencing hundreds of genes of several dozen specimens of brain tumors. As of 2009, the genomes of ovarian cancer, pancreatic cancer, melanoma, lung cancer, and several forms of leukemia have been sequenced, revealing the full catalog of mutations in each tumor type. Perhaps — Siddhartha Mukherjee

Te is thus the natural miracle of one who seems born to be wise and humane, comparable to what we call "perfect specimens" of flowers, trees, or butterflies - though sometimes our notions of the perfect specimen are too formal. Thus Chuang-tzu enlarges on the extraordinary virtue of being a hunchback, and goes on to suggest that being weird in mind may be even more advantageous than being weird in body. He compares the hunchback to a vast tree which has grown to a great old age by virtue of being useless for human purposes because its leaves are inedible and its branches twisted and pithy.5 Formally healthy and upright humans are conscripted as soldiers, and straight and strong trees are cut down for lumber; wherefore the sage gets by with a perfect appearance of imperfection, such as we see in the gnarled pines and craggy hills of Chinese painting. — Alan W. Watts

Oh yes, the Klitschkos. They got to learn how to fight. Period. But I'll tell you one thing - they're great human specimens. And I'd be happy to be able to work with them. If they chose to work with me. They had an opportunity when they got free of Peter Kohl - they didn't come to me. You know, I'm with who's with me. And I really don't care what fighter it is. I would be happy to promote them..Who could beat Vitali? Rahman could beat Vitali. His style is suited to beat Vitali ... — Don King

It seems more than a little patronizing for Westerners to lament the loss of the good old days when life in the Khumbu was so much simpler and more picturesque. Most of the people who live in this rugged country seem to have no desire to be severed from the modern world or the untidy flow of human progress. The last thing Sherpas want is to be preserved as specimens in an anthropological museum. — Jon Krakauer

I don't think that people should wear dresses two sizes too small. I just think that sexiness is better left to the imagination. It's just more tasteful. — Rachel Zoe

I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit, the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence, look again at the extra employment a new country added to our dominions gives. — Cecil Rhodes

The crowds that queued for snacks and knick-knacks, the constant stream of passengers recorded by the closed-circuit TVs, were wondrous proof of the sheer variety of human specimens, except that they were presumed to be identically faithless inside, duty-free in every sense of that word. — Michel Faber

The human condition is not perfect. We are not perfect specimens, any of us. We're not robots. — Michael Ovitz

I'm so proud to have worked in this movie, Brokeback Mountain, a movie that once again showed us that love is what makes us all very similar in spite that that we can be so different too. — Gustavo Santaolalla

Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo - obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other. — Angela Davis

The human mind cannot go beyond the gift of God, the Holy Ghost. To suppose that art can go beyond the finest specimens of art that are now in the world is not knowing what art is; it is being blind to the gifts of the spirit. — William Blake

Darwin Award. That's not a real award, it's a joke. They give them to people who die doing something so stupid that it counts as a service to humanity. — Gregg Dunnett