Quotes Tagged "humanity"

Science explained people, but could not understand them.

The answer to the riddle posed by identity groups is that they are one entity and their identity is that of their ideal. There can be no shared identity among people, as each person is unique.

A self is not consciousness and a self is not life. A self is the unique positioning of an individual relative to society. Self is a wholly social creation.

The field of psychology has been less than successful at explaining human behaviour. It has been far less successful at establishing a normative ideal for human development.

Psychologists and philosophers created a world where anxiety, fear and struggle are the norm, where happiness and peace are impossible to attain or available only to the most adept after long torment, and where existence is, above all, futile. In this world, people must constantly struggle with and repress what is supposedly their true nature for an end that is, at best, an abstract morality. Any outside assistance is impossible as all interpersonal interactions are also a continual existential struggle. Every outside person can only be the subject or the subjugated in this world, and all love is simply object desire. Existence here has no joy, no connection and no purpose. The happy ending is death.

It is possible that those strange sentient beings of the far-future cold universe will find contemplating a warm universe such as ours not very pleasant, much as a nocturnal creature shuns daylight. But the more speculative amongst them may look back to our universe and to the Earth as an ideal world full of sunshine and a supply of adequate energy to last for billions of years, a dream world which will have passed away never to return. And what do we human beings do with this ideal dream world of ours? We oppress each other, build nuclear weapons for each other's destruction, and plunder the resources of the Earth!

THE DEVIL TEACHES THERMODYNAMICS My second law, your second law, ordains that local order, structures in space and time, be crafted in ever-so-losing contention with proximal disorder in this neat but getting messier universe. And we, in the intricate machinery of our healthy bodies and life-support systems, in the written and televised word do declare the majesty of the zoning ordinances of this Law. But oh so smart, we think that we are not things, like weeds, or rust, or plain boulders, and so invent a reason for an eternal subsidy of our perfection, or at least perfectibility, give it the names of God or the immortal soul. And while we allow the dissipations that cannot be hid, like death, and — in literary stances — even the end of love, we make the others just plain evil: anger, lust, pride — the whole lot of pimples of the spirit. Diseases need vectors, so the old call goes out for me. But the kicker is that the struts of God's stave church, those nice seven, they're such a tense and compressed support group that when they get through you're really ready to let off some magma. Faith serves up passing certitude to weak minds, recruits for the cults, and too much of her is going to play hell with that other grand invention of yours, the social contract. Boring Prudence hangs around with conservatives, and Love, love you say! Love one, leave out the others. Love them all, none will love you. I tell you, friends, love is the greatest entropy-increasing device invented by God. Love is my law's sweet man. And for God himself, well, his oneness seems too much for natural man to love, so he comes up with Northern Irelands and Lebanons... The argument to be made is not for your run-of-the-mill degeneracy, my stereotype. No, I want us to awake, join the imperfect universe at peace with the disorder that orders. For the cold death sets in slowly, and there is time, so much time, for the stars' light to scatter off the eddies of chance, into our minds, there to build ever more perfect loves, invisible cities, our own constellation.

Everything is Circumstantial.

Sustainability is no longer about doing less harm to our environment. It's about doing more good towards our Planet Earth, Humanity, and future generations (Andres Vicente Durandeau Lalanne, Founder of the Ubuntu Group Ltd.)

I am a very bad scientist. I will do anything to make a human being feel better, even if it's unscientific.

We are set irrevocably, I believe, on a path what will take us to the stars - unless in some monstrous capitulation to stupidity and greed, we destroy ourselves first.

Science proceeds through constant questioning and analyzing the predominant scientific laws and modifying them if necessary. If science, as the most advanced tool in the hands of rational humanity can have the guts to change itself based on the needs of the time and society, why can’t religion as the most influential tool in the hands of divine humanity, modify itself?

The New York Times was here, CNN, they were all holding their stories until the dates came back. And I was thinking maybe they'll come back at 20,000 years ago maybe even 25,000 years ago, and I'll be out of here clean. This is going to be easy. But the date that came back was 50,000--ancient beyond all imagining and right at the limits of radiocarbon. Since then we have OSL-dated the deposit and those dates also came back in the range of 50,000. So we've got it dated two ways, but still the skeptics keep saying that what we've found can't be a human site and that our artifacts must be works of nature because they're so different from the artifacts found at other sites. To which my response is: 'Well... you've never dug a 50,000-year-old site in America, right? There's a first time for everything.

Humans don’t have programming.” “Yes you do. You have too much of it. Conflicting programs, none of it interfacing properly, all calling different functions at the same time—or the same function for contradictory reasons. Yet you ignore it sometimes. That is not a flaw. It is what makes you you.

The evidence presented by the ancient maps appears to suggest the existence in remote times, before the rise of any of the known cultures, of a true civilization, of a comparatively advanced sort, which either was localized in one area but had worldwide commerce, or was, in a real sense, a worldwide culture. This culture, at least in some respects, may well have been more advanced than the civilizations of Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, and Rome. In astronomy, nautical science, mapmaking and possibly ship-building, it was perhaps more advanced than any state of culture before the 18th Century of the Christian Era. It was in the 18th Century that we first developed a practical means of finding longitude. It was in the 18th Century that we first accurately measured the circumference of the earth. Not until the 19th Century did we begin to send out ships for purposes of whaling or exploration into the Arctic or Antarctic Seas. The maps indicate that some ancient people may have done all these things.

Man is bound to follow the exploits of his scientific and inventive mind and to admire himself for his splendid achievements. At the same time, he cannot help admitting that his genius shows an uncanny tendency to invent things that become more and more dangerous, because they represent better and better means for wholesale suicide. In view of the rapidly increasing avalanche of world population, we have already begun to seek ways and means of keeping the rising flood at bay. But nature may anticipate all our attempts by turning against man his own creative mind, and, by releasing the H-bomb or some equally catastrophic device, put an effective stop to overpopulation. In spite of our proud domination of nature we are still her victims as much as ever and have not even learnt to control our own nature, which slowly and inevitably courts disaster.

Humans are the most important entity in the universe … only to most people.

If our ethical code makes a purely arbitrary distinction between humans and all other species, then we have a code based on naked selfishness devoid of any higher principle.

We celebrate our ability to create machines that move as man, yet we take for granted the miracle that is the human body.

We are a species which is naturally moved by curiosity, the only one left of a group of species (the genus Homo) made up of a dozen equally curious species. The other species in the group have already become extinct; some, like the Neanderthals, quite recently, roughly thirty thousand years ago. It is group of species which evolved in Africa, akin to the hierarchical and quarrelsome chimpanzees -- and even more closely akin to the bonobos, the small, peaceful, cheerfully egalitarian and promiscuous type of chimps. A group of species which repeatedly went out of Africa in order to explore new worlds, and went far: as far, eventually, as Patagonia -- and as far, eventually, as the moon. It is not against our nature to be curious: it is in our nature to be so.