Species Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

No one is shallow and vulgar forever; sooner or later the whole species likes to be profound.

The evolution of the brain not only overshot the needs of prehistoric man, it is the only example of evolution providing a species with an organ which it does not know how to use.

Arthur Koestler

In short, Europe's colonization of Africa had nothing to do with differences between European and African peoples themselves, as white racists assume. Rather, it was due to accidents of geography and biogeography—in particular, to the continents' different areas, axes, and suites of wild plant and animal species. That is, the different historical trajectories of Africa and Europe stem ultimately from differences in real estate.

If you look at a tree and think of it as a design assignment, it would be like asking you to make something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, provides habitat for hundreds of species, accrues solar energy's fuel, makes complex sugars and food, changes colors with the seasons, creates microclimates, and self-replicates.

William McDonough

Because it is clear from the fossil record that almost every species that has ever existed is extinct; extinction is the rule, survival is the exception.

Music... is... a core element of our species, an activity that paved the way for more complex behaviors such as language, large-scale cooperative undertakings, and the passing down of important information from one generation to the next.

I am no longer misled, therefore, by the mechanism of revolutions: it is as necessary to our species, as the waves to the stream, that it becomes not a stagnant pool. The genius of humanity blooms in continually renovated youth.

Johann Gottfried Herder

None of the observations are more in point, as bearing on the doctrine of what Hooker terms 'creation by variation,' than the great extent to which the internal characters and properties of plants, or their physiological constitution are capable of being modified, while they exhibit externally no visible departure from the normal form.... When several of these internal or physiological modifications are accompanied by variation in size, habits of growth, colour of the flowers, and other external characters, and these are found to be constant in successive generations, botanists may well begin to differ in opinion as to whether they ought to regard them as distinct species or not.

A preface is a species of literary luxury, where an author, like a lover, is privileged to be egotistical.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

What do I mean by the Generation of Greatness?
I mean that in this age, in this country, there is an opportunity for the development of man's intellectual, cultural, and spiritual potentialities that has never existed before in the history of our species. I mean not simply an opportunity for greatness for a few, but an opportunity for greatness for the many.

The tendency of life is not the preservation of the species, but solely the preservation of each individual organism, as long as it is in existence at all, and is able to carry on its life processes.

In all mammalian species that have so far been carefully studied, the rate at which their members engage in the killing of conspecifics is several thousand times greater than the highest homicide rate in any American city.

What were several fewer species of animals compared with a hundred-mile advance and another medal on another general?

Perhaps our greatest distinction as a species is our capacity, unique among animals, to make counter-evolutionary choices.

Experiments with a simple little machine, designed to mimic certain elementary features of animal behavior... Consisting only of two vacuum tubes, two motors, a photoelectric cell and a touch contact, all enclosed in a tortoise-shaped 'shell, the model was a species of artiﬁcial creature which could explore its surroundings and seek out favorable conditions. It was named Machine speculatrix.

William Grey Walter

As a member of a self-interpreting species, one that fights to keep disharmony at a remove, I'm inclined to mention my tenderhearted attentions as a single parent before I get around to the fact that I hit their mother when we were together.

I think I know the real reason.
Which is?
Alcohol in the dust clouds. Goddamn stuff is everywhere. Any lousy species ever invents the telescope and the spectroscope and starts looking in between the stars, what do they find? He knocked the glass on the table. Loads of stuff, but much of it alcohol. He drank from the glass. Humanoids are the galaxy's way of trying to get rid of all that alcohol.

Genetics is the study of similarity between relatives, and the problem of human genetics is that, in a species with a family and social structure and a taboo against manipulating individual life histories experimentally, there is a confounding between the similarity of relatives that arises from biological causes and the similarity that arise from social causes.

Richard Lewontin

I suppose that, after the passion of love, water rights have caused more trouble than anything else to the human species.

Alice Steinbach

It is not always the magnitude of the differences observed between species that must determine specific distinctions, but the constant preservation of those differences in reproduction.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

This Journal, then, is a depository for every species of political sophistry and personal calumny. There is no abuse or corruption that does not there find a jesuitical palliation or a bare-faced vindication. There we meet the slime of hypocrisy, the varnish of courts, the cant of pedantry, the cobwebs of the law, the iron hand of power. Its object is as mischievous as the means by which it is pursued are odious.

William Hazlitt

Every mystery ever solved had been a puzzle from the dawn of the human species right up until someone solved it.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

I don't believe in God, said the captain. I wouldn't care to believe in anyone who could make such a stinking lousy species as the one you belong to.

Musical instruments are among the oldest human-made artifacts we have found.... Music predates agriculture in the history of our species.

It is the preservation of the species, not of individuals, which appears to be the design of Deity throughout the whole of nature.

Mary Wollstonecraft