#human

A wonderful area for speculative academic work is the unknowable. These days religious subjects are in disfavor, but there are still plenty of good topics. The nature of consciousness, the workings of the brain, the origin of aggression, the origin of language, the origin of life on earth, SETI and life on other worlds...this is all great stuff. Wonderful stuff. You can argue it interminably. But it can't be contradicted, because nobody knows the answer to any of these topics. ↗

— Michael Crichton

#brain #conjecture #consciousness #darwinism #evolution

The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless. ↗

— Anais Nin

#child #confronted #created #father #fatherless

When you get down to the bottom of it, only about half of what we remember really happened. We tend to modify things to make ourselves look better in our own eyes and in the eyes of others. Then, if what we did wasn't really very admirable, we tend to forget that it ever happened. A normal human being's grasp on reality is very tenuous at best. Our imaginary lives are usually much nicer. ↗

— David Leigh Eddings

#science #science

Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave. ↗

— Frederick Douglass

#human-rights #politics #slavery #suffrage #knowledge

[T]hose who are in a position of strength have a responsibility to protect the weak. ↗

— Thomas Cushman

#intervention #iraq #iraq-war #liberalism #iraq

We who bore the mark might well be considered by the rest of the world as strange, even as insane and dangerous. We had awoken, or were awakening, and we were striving for an ever perfect state of wakefulness, whereas the ambition and quest for happiness of the others consisted of linking their opinions, ideals, and duties, their life and happiness, ever more closely with those of the herd. They, too, strove; they, too showed signs of strength and greatness. But as we saw it, whereas we marked men represented Nature's determination to create something new, individual, and forward-looking, the others lived in the determination to stay the same. For them mankind--which they loved as much as we did--was a fully formed entity that had to be preserved and protected. For us mankind was a distant future toward which we were all journeying, whose aspect no one knew, whose laws weren't written down anywhere. ↗

— Hermann Hesse

#hermann-hesse #humanity #life

The human brain starts working the moment you are born and never stops until you stand up to speak in public. ↗

— George Jessel

#brain #human #human brain #moment #never

A surging, seething, murmuring crowd of beings that are human only in name, for to the eye and ear they seem naught but savage creatures, animated by vile passions and by the lust of vengeance and of hate. ↗

— Baroness Orczy

#beings #creatures #crowd #ear #eye

Whichever theory we adopt to give a rational explanation of human existence, that theory must take into account and explain the mental nature we see at work in all modern communities. ↗

— Arthur Keith

#adopt #communities #existence #explain #explanation

Further, Japan is the second largest donor in Iraq after the United States, with over $5 billion dollars for humanitarian, infrastructure and reconstruction projects. ↗

— Michael K. Simpson

#billion #dollars #donor #further #humanitarian