Home > Topic > the human capacity
1 " I'm always amazed at the human capacity to not make fundamental changes, but instead merely adapt. I see these pictures of people in Beijing and New Delhi, walking around with masks on, because you can't walk outside your house and breathe? If you can't breathe?…If that's not the cue to make a fundamental change, I don't know what is! "
― Bill Maher
2 " Evolution is messy. Oftentimes our brains evolve more quickly than our capacity to love. Science has unlocked many mysteries of the universe by harnessing the human capacity for critical thinking, logic, and observation. Butwithout a spiritual science to help the heart keep pace, disaster is often the outcome. Rather than clean sources of energy, we develop atomic bombs. Rather than medicines that heal we develop biological and chemical weapons. Rather than technologies that allow us to share ideas and communicate, wefind ourselves more isolated and lonely than ever. Yoga, meditation, and other mystical practices are the spiritual counterpoint to western science. One unlocks the mind, the other opens the heart; and together they reveal humanity’s true potential. "
3 " There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed- "
― Abraham Verghese , Cutting for Stone
4 " every thought that deviates from the officially prescribed and permanently changing line is already suspect, no matter in which field of human activity it occurs. Simply because of their capacity to think, human beings are suspects by definition, and this suspicion cannot be diverted by exemplary behavior, for the human capacity to think is also a capacity to change one's mind. "
― Hannah Arendt , The Origins of Totalitarianism
5 " Narration, after all, isn’t just a literary function. It represents the human capacity to tell stories in such a manner that they yield meaning. Television replaced this concerted quest for meaning with a frantic pursuit of wonder. "
― Steve Almond
6 " if everything that is happening in the world is traceable to our inability to understand what is happening in the world. If there is such a thing as original sin, it's the human capacity to get everything wrong, right from the beginning and all the way up to now, and that's what the old storytellers have been telling us, including the Creek Indians who told this story along with every other tribe on earth. "
― Gerald Hausman , The American Storybag
7 " Quite possibly the only infinite power in the universe may be the human capacity for self-deception. "
― Michelle Templet
8 " There’s never a right or wrong side in a divorce case, but, given the human capacity for hate, the breakup of a legal relationship so tied to emotion often brought out the worst in people. "
― Kenneth Eade , Decree of Finality (Brent Marks Legal Thrillers #8)
9 " A refusal on the part of psychiatrists and therapists to validate the horrors of their patients' tortured past implies a refusal to take seriously the unconscious psychological mechanisms that individuals need to use to protect themselves from the unspeakable. Such a denial is, however, no longer ethical, for it is in the human capacity to dissociate that lies part of the secret of both childhood abuse and the horrors of the Nazi genocide, both forms of human violence so often carried out by 'respectable' men and women. "
― , From Pain to Violence: The Traumatic Roots of Destructiveness
10 " We don't even know how strong we are until we are forced to bring that hidden strength forward. In times of tragedy, of war, of necessity, people do amazing things. The human capacity for survival and renewal is awesome. "
― Isabel Allende
11 " Scientists attach great importance to the human capacity for spoken language. But we also have a parallel track of nonverbal communication, which may reveal more than our carefully chosen words, and sometimes be at odds with them. "
