Quotes & Sayings About New Species

The idea is that human culture as broadly defined
art, politics, technology, religion, and so on
evolves in much the way biological species evolve: new cultural traits arise and may flourish or perish, and as a result whole institutions can belief systems form and change. — Robert Wright

We are alive. We are human, with good and bad in us. That's all we know for sure. We can't create a new species or a new world. That's been done. Now we have to live within those boundaries . What are our choices? We can despair and curse, and change nothing. We can choose evil like our enemies have done and create a world based on hate. Or we can try to make things better. — Carol Matas

Our immigrant plant teachers offer a lot of different models for how not to make themselves welcome on a new continent. Garlic mustard poisons the soil so that native species will die. Tamarisk uses up all the water. Foreign invaders like loosestrife, kudzu, and cheat grass have the colonizing habit of taking over others' homes and growing without regard to limits. But Plantain is not like that. Its strategy was to be useful, to fit into small places, to coexist with others around the dooryard, to heal wounds. Plantain is so prevalent, so well integrated, that we think of it as native. It has earned the name bestowed by botanists for plants that have become our own. Plantain is not indigenous but "naturalized." This is the same term we use for the foreign-born when they become citizens in our country. — Robin Wall Kimmerer

Schooling as it presently exists, like science before and religion before that, is necessary to the continuation of our culture and to the spawning of a new species of human, ever more submissive to authority, ever more pliant, prepared, by thirteen years of sitting and receiving, sitting and regurgitating, sitting and waiting for the end, prepared for the rest of their lives to toil, to propagate, to never make waves, and to live each day with never an original thought nor even a shred of hope. — Derrick Jensen

In the long run, the only solution I see to the problem of diversity is the expansion of mankind into the universe by means of green technology ... Green technology means we do not live in cans but adapt our plants and our animals and ourselves to live wild in the universe as we find it ... When life invades a new habitat, she never moves with a single species. She comes with a variety of species, and as soon as she is established, her species spread and diversify further. Our spread through the galaxy will follow her ancient pattern. — Freeman Dyson

When a baby is born the mother in particular enters into a new larger relationship with the world. She has become connected to all people. She is part of keeping us on earthnot the "us" comprised of individuals but the species itself. By protecting this one baby this gift a mother accepts life's clearest responsibility. — Gavin De Becker

I'll miss you as well." He glanced at her breasts. "So much."
She laughed. "Hurry back to me then. — Laurann Dohner

Shigure:"A summer home like this by the lake, you half expect JASON to show up!"
Yuki: "There he goes again ... "
Kyo: (Thinking to himself) Jieison ... Jaysun? Now where have I heard that before?
Shigure: "'Jason' is a new species of bear. You're so ignorant, Kyo-Kun."
Kyo: "SHUT UP! I KNEW THAT!!"
Hatori:"That's not it ... "
Tohru:"Is it a foreign kind of bear?"
Hatori:" ... — Natsuki Takaya

Jesus H. Christ. I have new respect for the female of the species suddenly. — Nalini Singh

As much horror as we have always created, we are a species that keeps moving forward, seeing new sights in new ways, and enjoying the journey. — Martha Beck

I'm hoping to make a new thing for the world that remains in the mind like a new species of living thing. — Frank Auerbach

I would like to believe that there is a resolution in the human tragedy and that order can be reimposed upon the earth in the same way it occurs in the fifth act of the Elizabethan drama that supposedly mirrors our lives. My experience has been otherwise. History seldom corrects itself in its own sequence, and when we mete out justice, we often do it in a fashion that perpetuates the evil of the transgressors and breathes new life into the descendants of Cain. I would like to believe the instincts of the mob can be exorcised from the species or genetically bred out of it. But there is no culture in the history of the world that has not lauded its warriors over its mystics. Sometimes in an idle moment, I try to recall the names of five slaves out of the whole sorry history of human bondage whose lives we celebrate. I have never had much success. — James Lee Burke

The UFOs were nothing more than the collective fantasies of a stressed out society ... The world into which UFOs had appeared was one of under-the-desk siren drills against nuclear annihilation. Society had made a new myth, a communal idea of something outside a species apparently intent on dooming itself. — Thomm Quackenbush

So it is that supernatural horror is the product of a profoundly divided species of being. It is not the pastime of even our closest relations in the wholly natural world: we gained it, as part of our gloomy inheritance, when we became what we are. Once awareness of the human predicament was achieved, we immediately took off in two directions, splitting ourselves down the middle. One half became dedicated to apologetics, even celebration, of our new toy of consciousness. The other half condemned and occasionally launched direct assaults on this gift. — Thomas Ligotti

We cannot seem to help ourselves they said. Thus, the hominid spark of intelligence flares, burns everything around it, and fades. Some humans will survive the great conflagration. Thus, begins an endless cycle of destruction spiraling downward until our species is gone. We can hope that before the sun begins to become unstable (it is about half way there now) evolution can produce a new and better intelligence that will have sufficient breadth and depth to understand the ecological consequences of its actions. — Garry Rogers

He leaned into Le Voir's face with the calliper and breathed on him, holding forth on this new science of which calibration was the test; these measurements would describe classes of being and we who had provided the parameters would be fit within them. To hear him tell it, this classification of species was the hope of Man. — Claire Robertson

Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in order to survive. Today the atomic bomb has altered profoundly the nature of the world as we know it, and the human race consequently finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking. — Albert Einstein

Perhaps it won't matter, in the end, which country is the sower of the seed of exploration. The importance will be in the growth of the new plant of progress and in the fruits it will bear. These fruits will be a new breed of the human species, a human with new views, new vigor, new resiliency, and a new view of the human purpose. The plant: the tree of human destiny. — Neil Armstrong

The ordinary naturalist is not sufficiently aware that when dogmatizing on what species are, he is grappling with the whole question of the organic world & its connection with the time past & with Man; that it involves the question of Man & his relation to the brutes, of instinct, intelligence & reason, of Creation, transmutation & progressive improvement or development. Each set of geological questions & of ethnological & zool. & botan. are parts of the great problem which is always assuming a new aspect. — Charles Lyell

Other humans believed the same way they breathed: it came natural to them. The world was filled with synagogues and churches, mosques and temples, shrines to Elron and Ogko. New faiths rose and fell like breath. They bred like flies. They died like species. — Lavie Tidhar

It's impossible by micro-mutation to form any new species. — Richard Goldschmidt

Once more the legend flourished that the number of years lived constitutes some kind of temperamental bond, so that people of the same age are many minds with but a single thought, bearing one to another a close resemblance. The young were commented on as if they were some new and just discovered species of animal life, with special qualities and habits which repaid investigation. — Rose Macaulay

For soon, the dark millenium will fall, and the world will be a different place, requiring different species. Cataracts will occlude the Sun, shutting out its hateful light, and fabulous new life-forms shall flourish and struggle beneath the perpetual stars. — Alan Moore

There is nothing new about prophecies to the effect that the end of the world is near if we do not repent. What is new is that such a prophecy is now true, for two obvious reasons. First, nuclear weapons give us the means to wipe ourselves out quickly: no humans possessed this means before. Second, we already appropriate about forty per cent of the Earth's net productivity (that is, the net energy captured from sunlight). With the world's human population now doubling every forty-one years, we will soon have reached the biological limit to growth, at which point we will have to start fighting each other in deadly earnest for a slice of the world's fixed pie of resources. In addition, given the present rate at which we are exterminating species, most of the world's species will become extinct or endangered within the next century, but we depend on many species for our own life support. — Jared Diamond

In the absence of the great majority of guests, all manner of rumors came into the Shalimar Bagh, hooded and cloaked to shield themselves against the elements, and filled the empty places around the dastarkhans: cheap rumors from the gutter as well as fancy rumors claiming aristocratic parentage - an entire social hierarchy of rumor lounged against the bolsters, created by the mystery that enveloped everything like the blizzard. The rumors were veiled, shadowy, unclear, argumentative, often malicious. They seemed like a new species of living thing, and evolved according to the laws laid down by Darwin, mutating randomly and being subjected to the amoral winnowing processes of natural selection. The — Salman Rushdie

Discovering new species is a passion. A day without collecting plants is painful for me. — Corneille Ewango

After a few short years (fifteen, to be exact - brief by his count, interminable by hers), surrounded by all this vegetative rampancy, she was feeling increasingly unsure of herself. She missed the built environment of New York City. It was only in an urban landscape, amid straight lines and architecture, that she could situate herself in human time and history. As a novelist she needed this. She missed people. She missed human intrigue, drama and power struggles. She needed her own species, not to talk to, necessarily, but just to be among, as a bystander in a crowd or an anonymous witness.
But here, on the sparsely populated island, human culture barely existed and then only as the
thinnest veneer. — Ruth Ozeki

We here see in two distant countries a similar relation between plants and insects of the same families, though the species of both are different. When man is the agent in introducing into a country a new species this relation is often broken: — Charles Darwin

Nobody today is nearly smart enough to make the sorts of weapons even the poorest nations had a million years ago. Yes, and they were being used all the time. During my lifetime, there wasn't a day when, somewhere on the planet, there weren't at least three wars going on. And the Law of Natural Selection was powerless to respond to such new technologies. No female of any species, unless maybe she was a rhinoceros, could expect to give birth to a baby who was fireproof, bombproof, or bulletproo — Kurt Vonnegut

YOU are becoming a new species. The vibrations in and around you are increasing in speed. YOU are all adjusting to these higher dimensional energies (consciously and unconsciously). Without awareness of this process, you may feel lost, overwhelmed, anxious and hopeless. WITH A SHIFT OF CONSCIOUSNESS, YOU CAN THRIVE AS WELL AS CREATE YOUR FUTURE. — Elaine Seiler

Finally, our new brain needs a purpose. A purpose is expressed as a series of goals. In the case of our biological brains, our goals are established by the pleasure and fear centers that we have inherited from the old brain. These primitive drives were initially set by biological evolution to foster the survival of species, but the neocortex has enabled us to sublimate them. Watson's goal was to respond to Jeopardy! queries. Another simply stated goal could be to pass the Turing test. To do so, a digital brain would need a human narrative of its own fictional story so that it can pretend to be a biological human. It would also have to dumb itself down considerably, for any system that displayed the knowledge of, say, Watson would be quickly unmasked as nonbiological. — Ray Kurzweil

A wiser intelligence might now truthfully say of us at this point: here is a chimera, a new and very odd species come shambling into our universe, a mix of Stone Age emotion, medieval self-image, and godlike technology. The combination makes the species unresponsive to the forces that count most for its own long-term survival. — Edward O. Wilson

Gass once wrote: "Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it." Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it, but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatozoa attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the raveling cosmos. — Dan Simmons

Despite the differences between our species and cultures, there is an order that we all share. The development of a civilization is a scripted event. Minds join together to create new technologies, on its own against threats from the outside, that civilization crumbles. — Becky Chambers

You're a pig." "No, wench, I am a randy pirate. You must be referring to the Piorcuma species. They are true swine." "I really think you should talk to your doctor about prescribing new meds. I don't think the ones you're taking are strong enough. — Eve Langlais

One general theory for the origin of AIDS goes that, during the late nineteen-sixties, a new and lucrative business grew up in Africa, the export of primates to industrialized countries for use in medical research. Uganda was one of the biggest sources of these animals. As the monkey trade was established throughout central Africa, the native workers in the system, the monkey trappers and handlers, were exposed to large numbers of wild monkeys, some of which were carrying unusual viruses. These animals, in turn, were being jammed together in cages, exposed to one another, passing viruses back and forth. Furthermore, different species of monkeys were mixed together. It was a perfect setup for an outbreak of a virus that could jump species. It was also a natural laboratory for rapid virus evolution, and possibly it led to the creation of HIV. Did HIV crash into the human race as a result of the monkey trade? — Richard Preston

Who's going to keep them from wiping us out species by species? Not me. We aren't prepared for a new demographic of magic-using humans who are sadistic, power hungry, don't like Inderlanders, and see genocide as an acceptable form of communication. — Kim Harrison

The human response it calls for is truly heroic, requiring nothing short of rewiring the entire planet with a new generation of clean-energy technologies - and doing that very soon ... Are we, as a species, capable of that kind of deliberate global response? — Eban Goodstein

We can do things that are greater than ourselves. If you believe nothing exists beyond a certain boundary, then you will never test the veracity of that belief and you will never discover new possibilities....Maybe there are truly extraordinary people out there, but I'm not one of them. The most extraordinary acts are accomplished by ordinary people doing something a little extra and stepping ouiside their personal comfort zone....I often wonder how much human potential lies unrealized and untapped, how much we are limited by our own fears as well as by social, cultural, religious, and self-imposed limitations. If we can break through those, how far might we go as individuals, as a species? — Juliana Buhring

Now from science we have a new creation story, which is very alluring and very exciting. It's not about deposing all the other wisdom stories about creation that humanity has gathered, but it certainly supplements it. It offers a real universal view because it's beyond any particular religion, ethnicity, nation and so forth. As we're struggling as a species to come together as a tribe, it provides us our basic framework, because it's from creation stories that ethics derive. Today's creation story from science is that we come from 14 billion years of an organic unfolding of the universe and are connected physiologically with every being in the universe. We all share the same atoms and the same molecules. That's truly significant and important at this time in history. We're all kin, we're all interdependent. And that's the basis of compassion, which was Jesus's ultimate teaching. — David L. Felten

New Rule: Gay marriage won't lead to dog marriage. It is not a slippery slope to rampant inter-species coupling. When women got the right to vote, it didn't lead to hamsters voting. No court has extended the equal protection clause to salmon. And for the record, all marriages are "same sex" marriages. You get married, and every night, it's the same sex. — Bill Maher

We are at a turning point of revolution species. Evolution has blindly felt its way forward , now, we, the product of evolution are taking the wheel. We soon will have the ability to design and create the new human, evolution still, but guided evolution ... of course, only on computer simulation. — Michael Grant

You are an explorer, and you represent our species, and the greatest good you can do is to bring back a new idea, because our world is endangered by the absence of good ideas. Our world is in crisis because of the absence of consciousness. — Terence McKenna

I once heard about a botanist in Hawaii with a knack for finding new species by getting lost in the jungle, by going beyond what he knew and how he knew, by letting experience be larger than his knowledge, by choosing reality rather than the plan. — Rebecca Solnit

After observing mutations in fruit flies for many years, Professes Goldschmidt fell into despair. The changes, he lamented, were so hopelessly micro [insignificant] that if a thousand mutations were combined in one specimen, there would still be no new species. — Norman Macbeth

The very first thing I tell my new students on the first day of a workshop is that good writing is about telling the truth. We are a species that needs and wants to understand who we are. Sheep lice do not seem to share this longing, which is one reason they write so very little. But we do. We have so much we want to say and figure out. — Anne Lamott

A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time. — Carl Sagan

I believe in transhumanism: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny. — Julian Huxley

If education really educates, there will, in time, be more and more citizens who understand that relics of the old West add meaning and value to the new. Youth yet unborn will pole up the Missouri with Lewis and Clark, or climb the Sierras with James Capen Adams, and each generation in turn will ask: Where is the big white bear? It will be a sorry answer to say he went under while conservationists weren't looking. — Aldo Leopold

The Maoris, New Zealand's first Sapiens colonisers, reached the islands about 800 years ago. Within a couple of centuries, the majority of the local megafauna was extinct, along with 60 per cent of all bird species. — Yuval Noah Harari

When we settled our country, the dark forest was considered in some ways evil and something that you needed to plow or, later, bulldoze. We now have a new understanding of the interconnectedness of ecosystems and the need for bird flyways and why all species matter. — Douglas Brinkley

Many collectors died in process of searching for new species, and despite persistent reports that the men died from drowning, gunshot and knife wounds, snakebite, trampling by cattle, or blows in the head with blunt instruments, it is generally accepted that in each case the primary cause of death was orchid fever. — Eric Hansen

I came to regard my body in a new light. For the first time I apprehended the little mounds on my chest as teats for the suckling of young, and their physical resemblance to udders on cows or the swinging distensions on lactating hounds was suddenly unavoidable. Funny how even women forget what breasts are for.
The cleft between my legs transformed as well. It lost a certain outrageousness, an obscenity, or achieved an obscenity of a different sort. The flaps seemed to open not to a narrow, snug dead end, but to something yawning. The passageway itself became a route to somewhere else, a real place, and not merely to a darkness in my mind. The twist of flesh in front took on a devious aspect, its inclusion overtly ulterior, a tempter, a sweetener for doing the species' heavy lifting, like the lollipops I once got at the dentist. — Lionel Shriver

A new space race has begun, and most Americans are not even aware of it. This race is not [about] political prestige or military power. This new race involves the whole human species in a contest against time. — Ben Bova

A new species is being born inside each one of us. Eventually, we will all express the perceptions and values of this new species. — Gary Zukav

As a species we are always hungry for new knowledge. — Chaim Potok

No, child," Nona said. "We were victims of the faeries' pride and greed."
"Victims? Sorry, but most of you don't seem very victimish to me. What about hags, and fossegrims, and redcaps, and all the other sharp-toothed nasties" - I looked pointedly at the dragon - "in your group? I don't feel very bad for anything that's spent all those centuries preying on innocent people."
"It makes sense," Arianna said, her voice soft but thoughtful.
"What?"
"When you introduce an alien species into a new environment, it has to adapt or die out. And usually the way it adapts it by preying on the native species. Look at the dodo birds. They were fine until people came to their island with cats and dogs and pigs, then they became prey."
"You do realize you just compared our entire race to dodo birds."
She shrugged. "If they were never meant to be here in the first place, it's not their fault they had to become predators."
"Thank you, Animal Planet. — Kiersten White

The only event in the history of our species that compares with this one is Genesis. And this is a new kind of Genesis, the Genesis of our species into conscious awareness. — Gary Zukav

New mutations don't create new species; they create offspring that are impaired. — Lynn Margulis

In the index to the six hundred odd pages of Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History, abridged version, the names of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes and Newton do not occur yet their cosmic quest destroyed the medieval vision of an immutable social order in a walled-in universe and transformed the European landscape, society, culture, habits and general outlook, as thoroughly as if a new species had arisen on this planet. — Arthur Koestler

It's funny how insomnia has a way of hauling faded memories up from the cellar of the mind, unearthing buried bits of nostalgia from deep within and spreading the broken, jagged pieces out in front of you like a display of junk at a garage sale. It makes you feel cheap and guilty when you didn't do a thing in the world to kindle the dull burn in your veins or the sting in your eyes. Some nights the painful past unexpectedly pushes up through the floorboards like an ugly nightmarish weed, and by doing so, cultivates and nurtures an entirely new species of headache. — Adam Young

Humans have a tendency to complain whenever the old must give way to the new. But change is the natural way of the universe, and we must learn to embrace it rather than fear it. The very process of transformation and adaptation strengthens the species. — Frank Herbert

Parasites are not only incredibly diverse; they are also incredibly successful. There are parasitic stretches of DNA in your own genes, some of which are called retrotransposons. Many of the parasitic stretches were originally viruses that entered our DNA. Most of them don't do us any harm. They just copy and insert themselves in other parts of our DNA, basically replicating themselves. Sometimes they hop into other species and replicate themselves in a new host. According to one estimate, roughly one-third to one-half of all human DNA is basically parasitic. — Carl Zimmer

It may be underfunded and at times mismanaged, but the [Endangered Species] Act is an unprecedented attempt to delegate human-caused extinction to the chapters of history we would rather not revisit: the Slave Trade, the Indian Removal Policy, the subjection of women, child labor, segregation. The Endangered Species Act is a zero-tolerance law: no new extinctions. It keeps eyes on the ground with legal backing-the gun may be in the holster most of the time, but its available if necessary to keep species from disappearing. I discovered in my travels that a law protecting all animals and plants, all of nature, might be as revolutionary-and as American-as the Declaration of Independence. — Joe Roman

We'll all die out eventually. Humans will be gone. And all I'm saying is, when people worry about polar bears disappearing or whatever, it's like, 'Well that's life, things will come and go, we'll find new species.' — Karl Pilkington

It is natural selection that gives direction to changes, orients chance, and slowly, progressively produces more complex structures, new organs, and new species. Novelties come from previously unseen association of old material. To create is to recombine. — Francois Jacob

Those of us who consider ourselves to be somehow involved in the birthing of a new age, should discover Gaia as well. The idea of Gaia may facilitate the task of converting destructive human activities to constructive and cooperative behavior. It is an idea which deeply startles us, and in the process, may help us as a species to make the necessary jump to planetary awareness. — James Lovelock

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

The idea of decimation as a lottery converts the new iconography of the Burgess Shale into a radical view about the pathways of life and the nature of history ... May our poor and improbable species find joy in its new-found fragility and good fortune! Wouldn't anyone with the slightest sense of adventure, or the most weakly flickering respect for intellect, gladly exchange the old cosmic comfort for a look at something so weird and wonderful - yet so real - as *Opabinia*? — Stephen Jay Gould

How many of us stop short of success on purpose? How many of us sabotage our own happiness because failure, while miserable, is a fear we're familiar with? Success, however, dreams come true, are a whole new kind of terrifying, an entire new species of responsibilities and disillusions, requiring a new way to think, act and become. Why do we REALLY quit? Because it's hopeless? Or because it's possible ... — Jennifer DeLucy

You will stay with me. You will sleep here at my side and you will touch me. I am depressed but not when you stroke my chest. — Laurann Dohner

4. The falseness of an opinion is not for us any objection to it: it is here, perhaps, that our new language sounds most strangely. The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life- preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely IMAGINED world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live - that the renunciation of false opinions would be a renunciation of life, a negation of life. TO RECOGNISE UNTRUTH AS A CONDITION OF LIFE; that is certainly to impugn the traditional ideas of value in a dangerous manner, and a philosophy which ventures to do so, has thereby alone placed itself beyond good and evil. — Friedrich Nietzsche

As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form. — Charles Darwin

For successful education there must always be a certain freshness in the knowledge dealt with. It must be either new in itself or invested with some novelty of application to the new world of new times. Knowledge does not keep any better than fish. You may be dealing with knowledge of the old species, with some old truth; but somehow it must come to the students, as it were, just drawn out of the sea and with the freshness of its immediate importance. — Alfred North Whitehead

We invest far off places with a certain romance ... Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game; none of them lasts for ever. Your own life, or your bands, or even your species - might be owed to a restless few, drawn by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands, and new worlds. — Carl Sagan

It is good to keep in mind ... that nobody has ever succeeded in producing even one new species by the accumulation of micromutations. Darwin's theory of natural selection has never had any proof, yet it has been universally accepted. — Richard Goldschmidt

Diminish the mass of evils that afflict the human species, increase enjoyment and well-being. And even if the new routes opened up could prolong the average life of mankind by only a few hours, or even a few days, then the scientist, too could aspire. — Antoine Lavoisier

The old exhortations to nationalist fervor and jingoist pride have begun to lose their appeal. Perhaps because of rising standards of living, children are being treated better worldwide. In only a few decades, sweeping global changes have begun to move in precisely the directions needed for human survival. A new consciousness is developing which recognizes that we are one species. — Carl Sagan

The many species of shark hunting for food in the seawater immediately south of New Orleans that morning which was individually particular morning had a feeding frenzy, until they finally drifted away, fully replete, into their own space within the deeper waters of the Gulf. — Ian McKenzie-Vincent

How can anyone think so insanely that the human life has the same value and mankind, the same morality, independent of numbers? It is lucid to me that everytime a new child is born, the value of every human in world decreases slightly. It is obvious to me that the morality of the population explosion is wholly unlike than when man was a sparse, noble species in its beginning. — Pentti Linkola

What do you know about racing? Ronnie asked, curious. He looked fascinated, like a scientist confronted by a strange new species: dontgivadamnus from the phylum couldntcareless. — Karen Chance

first settlers were emigrants from different European nations, and of diversified professions of religion, retiring from the governmental persecutions of the old world, and meeting in the new, not as enemies, but as brothers. The wants which necessarily accompany the cultivation of a wilderness produced among them a state of society, which countries long harassed by the quarrels and intrigues of governments, had neglected to cherish. In such a situation man becomes what he ought. He sees his species, not with the inhuman idea of a natural enemy, but as kindred; and the example shows to the artificial world, that man must go back to nature for information. — Thomas Paine

There's plenty of housework to be done here on Earth, and our commitment to it must be steadfast. But we're the kind of species that needs a frontier - for fundamental biological reasons. Every time humanity stretches itself and turns a new corner, it receives a jolt of productive vitality that can carry it for centuries. — Carl Sagan

And the stone table was between them, a barrier, but there could be no barrier to the smile that was her answer. It was another new species, and Akiva thought that he could spend a thousand years with her
please
and still be discovering new species of smiles. — Laini Taylor

Each person you meet influences your mental universe in a way that has the potential to make a substantial impact upon the causality of the intellectual development of an entire species. — Abhijit Naskar

The existing order is breaking down at a very rapid rate, and the main uncertainty is whether mankind can exert a positive role in shaping a new world order or is doomed to await collapse in a passive posture. We believe a new orderwill be born no later than early in the next century and that the death throes of the old and the birth pangs of the new will be a testing time for the human species. — Richard A. Falk

I think that humans are also set up to survive. We're not as small as rats, but we make up for that by being intelligent enough to make our own hiding places and to adapt to new habitats, even if they are changing very quickly. We have an enormous population, and can afford to lose billions of people without suffering very much as a species. Indeed, some would say losing five billion people would be good for the planet - I disagree with them, but can't deny that we would do just fine if there were two billion of us or even one billion. — Annalee Newitz

Wetiko psychosis is at the very root of humanity's inhumanity to itself in all its various forms. As a species, we need to step into and participate in our own spiritual and psychological evolution, which means that we must focus our attention on and contemplate this most important topic before this virulent madness destroys us. — Paul Levy

I think, for a shy person - and I was very shy until my mid-20s - having been to an all-girls' school is not brilliant on the boyfriend front later. Because when I went to university, it was definitely like meeting a new species of people. Suddenly, at age 19, I was thinking: 'Can you speak to these people?' I was very, very nervous. — Miranda Hart

It may sound peculiar coming from an old punk rocker, but I strongly believe that governmental policies are the only viable way to administer our long-term success as a species. I guess you could say that my attitude of 'fuck the government' is still intact. But it's more a criticism of lousy government than a statement of nihilism. The truth is, when it comes to environmental protection, the government is the best way to enact a new social awareness by establishing laws by which industries have to abide. — Greg Graffin

To see the futurity of the species has always been the privilege of the intellectual elite, or of those who have learnt from them; to have the feelings of that futurity has been the distinction, and usually the martyrdom, of a still rare elite. Institutions, books, education, society, all go on training human beings for the old, long after the new has come; much more when it is only coming. — John Stuart Mill

Nothing in the natural world, no forest, no river, no insect nor leaf has any intrinsic value to men. All is worthless, utterly dispensable unless we discover some benefit to ourselves in it - even the most ardent forest lover thinks this way. Men behave as overlords. They decide what will flourish and what will die. I believe that humankind is evolving into a terrible new species and I am sorry that I am one of them. — Annie Proulx

It is the hope of those who work toward the breakout from planet Earth that the establishment of permanent, self-sustaining colonies of humans off-Earth will ... make human life forever unkillable, removing it from the endangered species list, where it now stands on a fragile Earth overarmed with nuclear weapons. Second, the opening of virtually unlimited new land areas in space will reduce territorial pressures and therefore diminish warfare on Earth itself. — Gerard K. O'Neill

How do you know Hollywood is getting serious about video games? They want to make one of their own. In 'Defiance,' the remaining humans on Earth, as well as alien species looking for a new home, find themselves settling for peace after a massive war desecrated the world and destroyed most of the alien ships along with it. — Rob Manuel

Exploration is an oft-lauded human activity, and one that resonates in the same way that music and good stories do. It's hard-wired into our species (and into many others), no doubt because it has survival value. Exploration occasionally rewards those who accept its risks, usually with new resources. — Seth Shostak

Should consumerism be the last thing we accomplish as a species, after all this evolution and the miraculous series of accidents that granted our sentience? Would that not be an utterly dull and inane end to our history? — Robert Wringham

Even those who saw only a part of the country witnessed so much that was new to them - the vast deltas, the astonishingly eroded limestone peaks, the sand-dune coastal forests, the forest mosaics and savannalike grassland. Many wrote home with vivid descriptions of the flora and fauna, the countless species they had never seen before. Many commented on the sheer luster of the place, of the seemingly infinite number of shades of green, in the rice paddies, the grasses, the palms, the rubber trees with their green oval leaves, the pine trees on faraway hills. — Fredrik Logevall

Although Nature needs thousands or millions of years to create a new species, man needs only a few dozen years to destroy one. — Victor Blanchard Scheffer

The essence of the evening was captured by a question from the audience. Someone asked: "What would it take to change your worldview?" My answer was simple: Any single piece of evidence. If we found a fossilized animal trying to swim between the layers of rock in the Grand Canyon, if we found a process by which a new huge fraction of a radioactive material's neutrons could become protons in some heretofore fantastically short period of time, if we found a way to create eleven species a day, if there were some way for starlight to get here without going the speed of light, that would force me and every other scientist to look at the world in a new way. However, no such contradictory evidence has ever been found - not any, not ever. — Bill Nye

Altruism, compassion, empathy, love, conscience, the sense of justice - all of these things, the things that hold society together, the things that allow our species to think so highly of itself, can now confidently be said to have a firm genetic basis. That's the good news. The bad news is that, although these things are in some ways blessings for humanity as a whole, they didn't evolve for the "good of the species" and aren't reliably employed to that end. Quite the contrary: it is now clearer than ever how (and precisely why) the moral sentiments are used with brutal flexibility, switched on and off in keeping with self-interest; and how naturally oblivious we often are to this switching. In the new view, human beings are a species splendid in their array of moral equipment, tragic in their propensity to misuse it, and pathetic in their constitutional ignorance of the misuse. The title of this book is not wholly without irony. — Robert Wright