We have to ask, ‘How can we break a huge challenge like sending humans to Mars into a series of doable, affordable steps? How can we break that problem down into chunks in order to keep making progress?’
Humans are not the fastest or the strongest animals on the planet, but when it comes to survival, we have had the unique advantage of being clever.
We humans have an abyss inside us. The more power people have, the greater the danger.
Well, he’s not going to get any nicer. He’s a genocidal racist maniac. He’s one of these people who thinks the world was a great place when Voldemort ruled the world. He’s particularly offended by mixed-blood Mudbloods, the product of wizards and humans. So I hope he goes into therapy.
The vampires in the ‘VAMPS’ series judge each other as harshly as they judge humans, and basically, vampires don’t get along very well. So you’ve got a culture that’s from cradle to grave like the worst high school you’ve ever been in.
The work on ants has profoundly affected the way I think about humans.
I wrote ‘Airborn’ after completing three books about bats. I loved my bats, but what a treat it was to write about humans again. They could eat food other than midges and mosquitoes, they wore clothing, they slept in beds – all this struck me as wonderfully novel.
White people are potential humans – they haven’t evolved yet.
I think humans are just hard-wired to process people’s faces and understand meaning and expression at such a more granular level than other types of communication.
All these experiments I’ve done over the years with technology have been asking whether I can tell stories that affect humans in a deeper way than I could without the technology.
People still kill in the name of religion. We haven’t evolved to the point where we’re one tribe called humans.
I kind of feel like we’re all humans; we all live on this planet. I kind of always wish there was more of a partnership – a really healthy relationship between people, working together to do things and make it good and change.
I can watch endless humans get killed, but if I see a movie and they kill a dog, I practically want to walk out.
From an egotistical point of view, I’m always interested in roles that push me as a person. I’m interested in humans as animals and as products of society.
The notion of humans as inherently rational beings has been not only trashed in economics, but trashed in all the best research on moral decision-making.
I feel like for me the lyric writing really comes from just what’s going on in my heart and that’s what consumes me; think a lot of our heart is relationships. Not just with boyfriend or girlfriend but all your relationships in your life with other people and our interactions with other humans.
I was so fanatical about trying to save wildlife… I was unable to accept that we couldn’t solve this problem of thousands of years, of wherever humans operated, the environment deteriorated.
NASA’s Office of Commercial Exploration has been concerned about protecting the landing zones where humans first walked on the Moon, and one of my colleagues, ecologist Margaret Race, has been part of their deliberations.
One of the big questions in the climate change debate: Are humans any smarter than frogs in a pot? If you put a frog in a pot and slowly turn up the heat, it won’t jump out. Instead, it will enjoy the nice warm bath until it is cooked to death. We humans seem to be doing pretty much the same thing.
In the old days, people shared music; they didn’t care who made it. A song would be owned by a village, and anyone could sing it, change the words, whatever. That is how humans treated music until the late 19th century. Now, with the Internet, we are going back to having tribal attitudes towards music.
So many times, genuine health workers and genuine NGO folks are really just trying to help other humans in whatever capacity they can. But they are perceived as being CIA, and therefore, it blocks their effectiveness.
Certainly the first true humans were unique by virtue of their large brains. It was because the human brain is so large when compared with that of a chimpanzee that paleontologists for years hunted for a half-ape, half-human skeleton that would provide a fossil link between the human and the ape.
We’ll engage in pretty extreme violence in the world but, you know, the one thing that comes to humans as easily as eating or breathing or sleeping, is sex.
Imaginative empathy is one of the great gifts that humans have, and it means that we can live more than one life. We can picture what it would be like from another perspective.
Although humans see reality in colour, for me, black and white has always been connected to the image’s deeper truth, to its most hidden meaning.
I don’t believe that human beings can achieve ultimate enlightenment, because humans have flaws.
A major impediment to economic advancement around the world is the fact that the vast majority of humans are unbanked.
The history of agriculture is the history of humans breeding seeds and animals to produce traits we want in our crops and livestock.
Can you imagine being Leonardo Da Vinci in the 1400s trying to describe his ideas for machines that would allow humans to fly to the average person of his time? This is hundreds of years before the invention of electricity, the internal combustion engine, and many other things we take for granted today.
About 15,000 years ago, humans colonised America, wiping out in the process about 75% of its large mammals. Numerous other species disappeared from Africa, from Eurasia, and from the myriad islands around their coasts. The archaeological record of country after country tells the same sad story.
Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now.
This is the kingdom of God on the earth. Because of that, it has a power beyond any other endeavor in which humans can engage. That power depends on the faith of those called to serve in it.
It’s a fallacy, long rebuffed by science, that humans use only about 10% of their brainpower. But it is true about most summer movies. Pouring their wizardry into special effects and well-choreographed fights, warm-weather action films rarely challenge the viewer with grand notions or beautifully baffling imagery.
Normally I avoid movies where the aliens look like humans. It’s cheesy.
Humans are very imaginative animals.
I don’t need to have my convictions confirmed by a show of numbers. However, being among people in front of a band leads me to believe that all is not lost, that humans, now and then, can communicate on a higher level than the political and the practical.
Why did humans lose their body hair? Why did they start walking on their hind legs? Why did they develop big brains? I think that the answer to all three questions is sexual selection.
We keep thinking that the human is evolving. No, the human has evolved to its extent. What’s happening now is the organization of humans: just like cells organize to form people, people are organizing to form humanity.
All the Chinese have to do is fly around the Moon and back, and they’ll appear to have won the return to the Moon with humans. They could put one person on the surface of the Moon for one day and he’d be a national hero.
Instead of looking at individual buildings, it makes more metaphorical sense to think of New York as one enormous chunk of masonry that has been cut up and carved away. It says, ‘This is the ultimate polis, through which humans move like nematodes.’
When humans become gods, when our wings grow so great as to beat about the very edges of the earth, no one can answer but us.
‘Humans of New York’ did not result from a flash on inspiration. It grew from five years of experimenting, tinkering, and messing up.
We can do genetics. We can do experiments on fruit flies. We can do experiments on yeast. It’s not so easy to do experiments on humans. So, in fact, it helps us, to interpret our own genetic code, to have the genetic code of the other species.
I was a huge Muppet fan growing up. I want to bring it back to the early ’80s Muppet movies, when the scripts could have been performed by humans.
Humans aren’t as good as we should be in our capacity to empathize with feelings and thoughts of others, be they humans or other animals on Earth.
The quicker we humans learn that saving open space and wildlife is critical to our welfare and quality of life, maybe we’ll start thinking of doing something about it.
Food production has affected the environment more than any other activity humans have engaged in. Humanity devotes more land to food production than anything else – roughly a third of the surface area of the earth, much of which was once forest but has been converted by humans into farms or grazing lands.
Knowledge is now accepted as the best we humans can do at the moment, but with the hope that we will turn out to be wrong – and thus to advance our knowledge. What’s happening to networked knowledge seems to make it much closer to the scientific idea of what knowledge is.
We humans can get used to anything. It really is remarkable. The problem is that we often use this glorious ability of ours to stay stuck in mediocrity. Oh, the years we waste adapting to lousy marriages, soul-sucking jobs, being friends with people who are rude to waitresses.
