Home > Topic > only humans
1 " Time: her heart wretched. What a useless thing, her mind growled. Only humans would be so arrogant and so stupid as to count down their own deaths. "
2 " If only humans could die like the autumn leaves, with a splash of beauty and the promise of another season. "
― Shana Chartier
3 " A symptom," Brendan said, as if love were a disease only humans could catch. But there was something like fondness or respect in his voice. " You're both fools. "
4 " Dullness. Only humans could have invented it. What imaginations they had. "
― Terry Pratchett , Hogfather (Discworld, #20; Death, #4)
5 " Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us. "
― Carl Sagan
6 " Some animals could see in the dark, but it was only humans who deliberately sought out every possible route into the darkness of our own interiors. "
― Viet Thanh Nguyen , The Sympathizer
7 " The human brain has a natural ability, inherent in its mechanism, to work on many levels, in a process of constant promptings, in a type of self-preservation.If only humans understood...Most ignore it. "
― Amanda Dubin , Assassins Wall
8 " To talk of humans as 'transcendent' is not to ascribe to them spiritual properties. It is, rather, to recognize that as subjects we have the ability to transform our selves, our natures, our world—an ability denied to any other physical being. In the six million years since the human and chimpanzee lines first diverged on either side of Africa's Great Rift Valley, the behaviour and lifestyles of chimpanzees have barely changed. Human behaviour and lifestyles clearly have. Humans have learnt to learn from previous generations, to improve upon their work, and to establish a momentum to human life and culture that has taken us from cave art to quantum physics and the conquest of space. It is this capacity for constant innovation that distinguishes humans from all other animals. All animals have an evolutionary past. Only humans make history. "
9 " Any ape can reach for a banana, but only humans can reach for the stars. "
― V.S. Ramachandran , The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human
10 " Only humans can hurt one another, Ada thought; only humans falter and betray one another with a stunning, fearsome frequency. As David's family had done to him; as David had done to her. And Ada would do it too. She would fail other people throughout her life, inevitably, even those she loved best. "
― Liz Moore , The Unseen World
11 " If a potato can produce vitamin C, why can't we? Within the animal kingdom only humans and guinea pigs are unable to synthesize vitamin C in their own bodies. Why us and guinea pigs? No point asking. Nobody knows. "
― Bill Bryson , At Home: A Short History of Private Life
12 " If an earth with no other creatures but only humans would be possible, it would be unbearably boring! "
― Mehmet Murat ildan
13 " Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first.I say that information doesn't deserve to be free.Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it's even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?...Information is alienated experience. "
14 " Faced with an ecological crisis whose roots lie in this disengagement, in the separation of human agency and social responsibility from the sphere of our direct involvement with the non-human environment, it surely behoves us to reverse this order of priority. I began with the point that while both humans and animals have histories of their mutual relations, only humans narrate such histories. But to construct a narrative, one must already dwell in the world and, in the dwelling, enter into relationships with its constituents, both human and non-human. I am suggesting that we rewrite the history of human-animal relations, taking this condition of active engagement, of being-in-the-world, as our starting point. We might speak of it as a history of human concern with animals, insofar as this notion conveys a caring, attentive regard, a 'being with'. And I am suggesting that those of us who are 'with' animals in their day-to-day lives, most notably hunters and herdsmen, can offer us some of the best possible indications of how we might proceed. "
― Tim Ingold , The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill
15 " Life gets boring with only humans to talk to. "
― Terry Pratchett , The Long Utopia (The Long Earth #4)
16 " The Greeks used to say that gods and animals were born whole. It is only humans who need to develop, that they become complete only with the help of a community. It’s the state of that community that can turn a human into a god or a beast.” She dropped the bee into the terrarium and returned it slowly to the table. “Maybe that’s bullshit. I happen to like the beasts. "
― , Orient
17 " Only humans can voice the adoration and plea that goes up silently from the rest of creation, and only humans can withhold their voices from it. "
― , From Beholding to Becoming: Praying Through the Life of Christ
