{"quotes":[{"text":"No existing form of anthropoid ape is even remotely related to the stock which has given rise to man.","author":"Henry Fairfield Osborn","tags":["anthropoid","apes","biology","evolution","homo-sapiens","human-evolution","humans","man","primates","relation","science"],"id":8478,"author_id":"Henry+Fairfield+Osborn"},{"text":"We have come to look at our planet as a resource for our species, which is funny when you think that the planet has been around for about five billion years, and Homo sapiens for perhaps one hundred thousand. We have acquired an arrogance about ourselves that I find frightening. We have come to feel that we are so far apart from the rest of nature that we have but to command.","author":"Marston Bates","tags":["arrogance","command","earth","homo-sapiens","nature","planet","resource","science"],"id":45608,"author_id":"Marston+Bates"},{"text":"My simple explanation of why we human beings, the most advanced species on earth, cannot find happiness, is this: as we evolve up the ladder of being, we find three things: the first, that the tension between the range of opposites in our lives and society widens dramatically and often painfully as we evolve; the second, that the better informed and more intelligent we are, the more humble we have to become about our ability to live meaningful lives and to change anything, even ourselves; and consequently, thirdly, that the cost of gaining the simplicity the other side of complexity can rise very steeply if we do not align ourselves and our lives well.","author":"Dr Robin Lincoln Wood","tags":["adaptation","anthropacy","autognosis","autonomies","autopolesis","biosphere","british-","complex","difficult","earths-future","economist","evolution","finding-happiness","finding-well-being","future-humanity","good-life","good-life-examples","heaven","hell","holarchy","homo-sapiens","human-condition","human-development","humanity","imperfect-adaptation","inspirational","integral-philosopher","ken-wilber","men-empowerment","opposites-attract","paradise","post-modern-philosopher","self-creation","self-help","self-knowledge","species","thriving","unhappiness","well-being","women-empowerment"],"id":60842,"author_id":"Dr+Robin+Lincoln+Wood"},{"text":"An evolutionary perspective of our place in the history of the earth reminds us that Homo sapiens sapiens has occupied the planet for the tiniest fraction of that planet's four and a half thousand million years of existence. In many ways we are a biological accident, the product of countless propitious circumstances. As we peer back through the fossil record, through layer upon layer of long-extinct species, many of which thrived far longer than the human species is ever likely to do, we are reminded of our mortality as a species. There is no law that declares the human animal to be different, as seen in this broad biological perspective, from any other animal. There is no law that declares the human species to be immortal.","author":"Richard E. Leakey","tags":["accident","biology","earth","evolution","fossil-record","fossils","history","homo-sapiens","mortality","science"],"id":91242,"author_id":"Richard+E.+Leakey"},{"text":"The most preposterous notion that Homo sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history.","author":"Robert A. Heinlein","tags":["absurd","adoration","creation","dream","evidence","expenses","fantasy","flattery","history","homo-sapiens","industry","lord","lord-god","petulant","prayers","preposterous","ruler","universe"],"id":100301,"author_id":"Robert+A.+Heinlein"},{"text":"Perhaps if zoologists would contemplate the wide variations presented by many plants of indubitably one and the same species, and the still wider diversities of long cultivated races from an original stock, they would find more than one instructive parallel to the case of the longest domesticated of all species, man.","author":"Asa Gray","tags":["animals","biology","domestication","homo-sapiens","man","plants","races","science","species","variation","zoology"],"id":108387,"author_id":"Asa+Gray"},{"text":"The biblical account of the origin of the cosmos in Genesis, for example, posits that a god created the physical universe particularly with human beings in mind, and so unsurprisingly placed the Earth at the center of creation.Modern cosmological knowledge has refuted such an account. We are living in the golden age of cosmology: More has been discovered about the large-scale structure and history of the visible cosmos in the last 20 years than in the whole of prior human history. We now have precise knowledge of the distribution of galaxies and know that ours is nowhere near the center of the universe, just as we know that our planetary system has no privileged place among the billions of such systems in our galaxy and that Earth is not even at the center of our planetary system. We also know that the Big Bang, the beginning of our universe, occurred about 13.7 billion years ago, whereas Earth didn’t even exist until about 10 billion years. ","author":"Tim Maudlin","tags":["atheism","biblical","big-bang","cosmology","creation-myth","earth","evolution","galileo","galileo-galilei","genesis","homo-sapiens","mythology","science","universe"],"id":109392,"author_id":"Tim+Maudlin"},{"text":"For him the tragedy of Homo sapiens is that the least fit to survive breed the most.","author":"John Fowles","tags":["children","darwin","homo-sapiens","tragedy"],"id":136603,"author_id":"John+Fowles"},{"text":"If a single cell, under appropriate conditions, becomes a man in the space of a few years, there can surely be no difficulty in understanding how, under appropriate conditions, a cell may, in the course of untold millions of years, give origin to the human race.","author":"Herbert Spencer","tags":["analogy","biology","cell","common-ancestor","embryology","evolution","heredity","homo-sapiens","human","millions-of-years","origin","science","understanding","universal-common-ancestor"],"id":140505,"author_id":"Herbert+Spencer"},{"text":"O my brave Almighty Human, with the ever-effulgent flow of courage, conscience and compassion, turn yourself into a vivacious humanizer, and start walking with bold footsteps while eliminating racism, terminating misogyny, destroying homophobia and all other primitiveness that have turned humanity into the most inhuman species on earth.","author":"Abhijit Naskar","tags":["character-building","differentiation","discrimination","global-harmony","harmony","homo-sapiens","human","humanism","humanist","humanist","humanitarian","humanitarian-efforts","humanitarian-intervention","humanitarianism","inspirational","inspirational","inspiring","leaders","leadership","love-and-kindness","misogyny","motivational","pearls-of-wisdom","philosophy","power-of-the-mind","prejudices","racism","religious-diversity","religious-harmony","religious-tolerance","religious-toleration","sage","sage-sayings","service-to-humanity","service-to-mankind","service-to-others","social-reform","stereotyped-prejudices","stereotypes","thinker","thinkers"],"id":157645,"author_id":"Abhijit+Naskar"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":22,"pages":3,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}