Words matter. These are the best Sapiens Quotes from famous people such as Henry Rollins, Melvin Van Peebles, Andrew Weil, Joyce Carol Oates, John Muir, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
We are misery-making machines! Homo sapiens has perfected the art of causing suffering. Pain is humankind’s collective GDP.
The key to empowerment is no more complicated than what Jesse Jackson said, ‘We are somebody.’ But the ‘We are somebody’ I would like to be in the larger sense: not just the urban African-American but homo sapiens in general – We are somebody.
Each day as I travel through downtown Tucson, I am amazed at how quickly the most ancient of human behaviors have changed. For as long as there have been Homo sapiens – roughly 200,000 years – people have filled their lives principally with two activities: talking directly with other people, and doing physical things.
Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals.
We became Homo sapiens not that long ago, from the scientific perspective, and we’ve retained a lot of our beast nature. We’ve done all these amazing things in terms of our knowledge base and technology, and now we’re flying around and using the Internet. But we’re still very animalistic.
My book, ‘Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda,’ is a gay love story. It’s also a story about friendship. Quite honestly, it’s also probably a 320-page product placement for Oreos.
Since the rise of Homo sapiens, human beings have been the smartest minds around. But very shortly – on a historical scale, that is – we can expect technology to break the upper bound on intelligence that has held for the last few tens of thousands of years.
Homo sapiens, you and me, we are basically the same as people 10,000 years ago. The next revolution will change that.
Our African ancestors were the first to engage in breathing. By that logic, I think by breathing today, we are engaging in cultural appropriation of the first Homo sapiens. And so the only way I will ask you to stop being racist is to suffocate – to stop breathing.
We are probably one of the last generations of Homo sapiens.
If you think about it, every single species is endangered. Homo sapiens at the front of the line, mosquitoes and lawyers at the back.
We are placed in the genus of Homo, which is Latin for man – Homo sapiens: supposedly wise men. I sometimes think – wonder – whether we really are wise men.
Until about 30,000 years ago, there were at least five other species of humans on the planet. Homo Sapiens, our ancestors, lived mainly in East Africa, and you had the Neanderthal in Europe, Homo Erectus in part of Asia, and so forth.
I’m vegan, though not completely religious about it. While writing ‘Sapiens,’ I became familiar with how we treat animals in the meat and dairy industries. I was so horrified that I didn’t want to be a part of it anymore.
There’s no particular evidence that any of the lower mammals or any of the other animals have any interest in aesthetics at all. But Homo sapiens does, always has and always will.
No matter how inured you get to atrocities, you’re still always stunned and shocked by how cruel and wasteful Homo sapiens can be.
I will always admit immediately to what’s obvious, which is that Homo sapiens is inherently erotic or inherently sensual from birth.
Solving the climate crisis is the greatest and most complex challenge that homo sapiens have ever faced. The main solution, however, is so simple that even a small child can understand it. We have to stop our emissions of greenhouse gases.
When we look for the origins of all humanity today, let’s not just look at Europe, because I think Africa was the cradle, the crucible that created us as Homo sapiens.
The right question to ask from a Darwinian prospective is what was it about bipedalism that was so advantageous? Why did it lead to a – why did that adaptation ultimately lead to a species Homo sapiens that has come to dominate the planet today with six and a half billion people?
Think of all the different features from Asian to African to Aboriginal to Caucasian. But we are all within the same species, Homo Sapiens.
We, Homo sapiens, destroyed the majority of the large mammalian species in North America and Australasia just over 10,000 years ago. We, Homo sapiens, now are destroying the other species that presently exist on this planet at a rate of about 15,000 to 20,000 per year.
Humanity at the centre of the primates, Homo sapiens, in humanity, is the end-product of a gradual work of creation, the successive sketches for which still surround us on every side.
Every species becomes extinct; at some point, we will go extinct. The question is, as Homo sapiens, are we going to be able to adapt to the change that we’re actually part of? We’re causing such dramatic changes to the planet, so yes, you do stop and think, ‘I wonder where we’re headed.’
I don’t think you can impose limits on science because the very nature of homo sapiens is that he – she – is an inquisitive species. You can’t control science. You have to control the effects of science.
Humans have existed only for the last 0.001 percent of cosmic time. All of which says that – unless the Homo sapiens brain is the one-and-only instance of cogitating machinery – nearly all the intelligence that’s out there is beyond our level. And that intelligence is more than just a little bit beyond.
Homo sapiens, the only creature endowed with reason, is also the only creature to pin its existence on things unreasonable.
Having raised humanity above the beastly level of survival struggles, we will now aim to upgrade humans into gods and turn Homo sapiens into Homo deus.
Homo sapiens does its best to forget the fact, but it is an animal.
The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it.
Ever since the Second World War, television signals (as well as FM radio and radar) have served as Homo sapiens’ emissaries into deep space. High-frequency, high-power broadcasts have filled an Earth-centered bubble more than 60 light-years in radius with signals.
Homo sapiens is a social being, and our well-being depends to a large extent on the quality and depth of our social and family relations – and in the last 200 years, they have been disintegrating.
Perhaps the most mysterious of all mammals is the male Homo sapiens. Indeed, many anthropologists classify the group as a subspecies.
With the exception of certain rodents, no other vertebrate except Homo sapiens habitually destroys members of his own species.
