Species Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Very little comes easily to our poor, benighted species (the first creature, after all, to experiment with the novel evolutionary inventions of self-conscious philosophy and art). Even the most obvious, accurate, and natural style of thinking or drawing must be regulated by history and won by struggle. Solutions must therefore arise within a social context and record the complex interactions of mind and environment that define the possibility of human improvement.

Stephen Jay Gould

The [film] business is run by men, and they're basically interested in their own species, and they're not so interested in women belonging to the human race. It's not that there's a conspiracy. There's a rising mediocrity, and women are the victims of it.

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.

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.

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

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

Alice Steinbach

I had now to select that mode of the primitive which is distinctive of your own species, a mode characterized by repressed sexuality, excessive self-regard, and an intelligence which is both rudimentary and in bondage to unruly cravings.

Every species has a dinner date as part of courting ritual. A woman who won't let you pay for dinner is rejecting your courtship. She may think she's playing fair, or that she's being a feminist, but a very deep level, she knows that she's crossing you off her list of possibilities.

Jennifer Crusie

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

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

Don't assume that a species is intelligent because it produces intelligent individuals.

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

Eliezer Yudkowsky

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

I have carefully measured the proboscis of a specimen of [Neococytius] cluentius from South America in the collection of the British Museum, and find it to be nine inches and a quarter long! One from tropical Africa ([Xanthopan] morganii) is seven inches and a half. A species having a proboscis two or three inches longer could reach the nectar in the largest flowers of Angræcum sesquipedale, whose nectaries vary in length from ten to fourteen inches. That such a moth exists in Madagascar may be safely predicted; and naturalists who visit that island should search for it with as much confidence as astronomers searched for the planet Neptune - and they will be equally successful!

Alfred Russel Wallace

We are approaching a more fluid state. I have talked about cultural boiling. The idea of the phase-transition period which, in fractal mathematics, is the chaotic flux between one state and another. …Culturally, and as a species, we are approaching a phase-transition. I don't know quite what that means, on a human level.

I am talking about the general psychological health of the species, man. He needs the existence of mysteries, not their solution.

It is not man who is the enemy of the human species. It is the irrational; it is the spiritual when it is divorced from the material; from the lesson in one beating heart or one bleeding vein.

And you came back to Lyrian?" Galloran said in disbelief. "Believe it or not, I came through the same hippopotamus that brought me here the first time. Jumped into the tank on purpose. I wanted to keep others from wasting their time pursuing the Word. And I couldn't ditch Rachel." Galloran smiled. "Truly, you are possessed by that species of madness that begets heroism.

People marvel at … things only because they rarely happen; but the causes for these are as apparent as for others … For example, at night a fearful man who sees a wolf in the fields, or a cat in his room, will immediately assert and judge that it is an enemy or a devil … because he fixes his imagination on these and fears them. And a person devout and rapt [in ecstasy] will judge that it is an angel … A vigorous imagining of a retained species, then, together with a small external appearance or with an imbalance of some internal disposition … produces marvelous appearances in healthy as well as in sick people.

Humans lived for several million years as fully wild beings: only in the last 10, 000 did we invent agriculture; only in the last couple of centuries did we invent industry. We are a species that has spent 99 per cent of its history as hunter-gatherers. We haven't had time for our unconscious minds and our unconscious needs to have changed. If you like, our souls have not changed, and this is true whether or not we believe that we have them.

After studying idiot bosses for more than two decades, I finally understand why females in certain species eat their young.

In reality, all communication that debilitates females also debilitates males, for if any system diminishes a part of the species, it diminishes all of it.

Bobbye D. Sorrels

Gems, in fact, are a species of mineral flowers; they are the blossoms of the dark, hard mine; and what they want in perfume, they make up in durability.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Differences in reaction to toxic substances vary considerably between species so that the value of these tests remains doubtful. Although thalidomide was extensively tested on animals in several countries, its terrible properties were not discovered. Conversely, penicillin, the greatest medical discovery of the century, was not extensively tested on animals before its miraculous therapeutic qualities were demonstrated in human patients. If it had been fully tested on animals its high toxicity for guinea pigs would have almost certainly prevented its clinical use.

Richard D. Ryder