Any reading not of a vicious species must be a good substitute for the amusements too apt to fill up the leisure of the labouring classes.
I'm working in this very complex set of issues having to do with who we are as a species and how much we can do to the Earth before it starts to buckle under. My work can easily read as an indictment, but I don't see it as that simple a problem.
Taking care of our families isn't just about putting food on the table today. It's about ensuring that our children and grandchildren will have a habitable world where they can get to know various species of sea turtles.
It turns out that the God whose word will stand forever does not exist to insure our fantasies that we will not have to die as individuals or as a species. Such a God, moreover, does not invite us to presume we can comprehend God's creation.
What we're most aware of in 'Eight-Legged Freaks' is how similar it is to other movies, a recombinant mutated species itself, the product of the crossbreeding of the suffering-from-gigantism movies of the 1950s and the 1990 B-picture classic 'Tremors.'
Must whales and dolphins be subjected to deafening noise that will cause more than 3.5 million instances of temporary and/or permanent hearing loss? For species that depend on hearing for survival - to find food, migrate, and communicate - any hearing loss could be catastrophic. As one scientist noted, a deaf whale is a dead whale.
Star Trek's genial premise is that the cosmos is flush with intelligent species, and our descendants will interact with them face-to-face, thanks to warp drive and some winsome space cadets.
We're all born storytellers. It's part of the species. But, more specifically, I suppose a particular combination of sensitivity and trauma made me a writer: an essential disquiet with reality, which required exploration through portrayal.
People are still very uncomfortable with the idea that humans are not specially created species. I believe we are a fantastic species. But we are not created specially. That's very hard for people to accept in their day-to-day routine.
We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.
Animals need to understand other species, if only to prey on them or escape from them.
Like all animals, human beings have always taken what they want from nature. But we are the rogue species. We are unique in our ability to use resources on a scale and at a speed that our fellow species can't.
I do think we're an endangered species. But that we do have a plan to save the rainforest.
There is no reason to teach an ape to become human. There are many reasons to teach some apes and some humans to transition the worlds between the species boundaries, especially when our genetics are so similar as to make us 'siblings.' It is the way to learn how we become that which we are.
But it really wasn't until three to four years later, when we had an opportunity in the lab to make very detailed observations, and comparisons with other fossil discoveries, that we realized she was a new species of human ancestor.
If the world population continues to increase at the same rate, we will destroy the species.
I think we're going to move from a Homo sapiens into a Homo evolutis:... a hominid that takes direct and deliberate control over the evolution of his species, her species and other species.
I think when you think of death as being part of the life cycle and recognize that death is an inevitability for our species because the world has to be renewed with each death, then the hope becomes when it is renewed it will be renewed by people on whom I have had some influence for good.
'Humanity' is a name not merely for a species but also for a quality.
Where do we say that a cell became a blade of grass, which became a starfish, which became a cat, which became a donkey, which became a human being? There's a real lack of evidence from change from actual species to a different type of species.
Coral reefs represent some of the world's most spectacular beauty spots, but they are also the foundation of marine life: without them many of the sea's most exquisite species will not survive.
If my grandchildren were to look at me and say, 'You were aware species were disappearing and you did nothing, you said nothing', that I think is culpable. I don't know how much more they expect me to be doing, I'd better ask them.
When you think about it, if the fittest always won, all forests should be completely homogeneous. One species should supplant all others as the most superior competitor. But it doesn't happen that way. Nor does it happen that way in the marketplace.
Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.
We're a fast-moving, needy species.
A man reserves his true and deepest love not for the species of woman in whose company he finds himself electrified and enkindled, but for that one in whose company he may feel tenderly drowsy.
I think a few hundred years from now we'll start having the 'posthuman' era of different species.
Dogs who live in each other's company are calm and pragmatic, never showing the desperate need to make known their needs and feelings or to communicate their observations, as some hysterical dogs who know only the company of our species are likely to do.
The astounding variety of foods on offer in the modern supermarket obscures the fact that the actual number of species in the modern diet is shrinking. For reasons of economics, the food industry prefers to tease its myriad processed offerings from a tiny group of plant species, corn and soybeans chief among them.
We don't need to clear the 4 to 6 percent of the Earth's surface remaining in tropical rain forests, with most of the animal and plant species living there.
The intuitive connection children feel with animals can be a tremendous source of joy. The unconditional love received from pets, and the lack of artifice in the relationship, contrast sharply with the much trickier dealings with members of their own species.
Human beings never think for themselves; they find it too uncomfortable. For the most part, members of our species simply repeat what they are told - and become upset if they are exposed to any different view.
The purpose of farming is to deprive other species of the land and sequester it for our own use. But by perfecting the art of monoculture, it has become too easy for us to exterminate everything else, leaving no wild plants, no food for insects, and a barren land for birds.
In previous generations, there was purpose; you had to die, but there was God, and literature and culture would go on. Now, there is no God, and our species is imminently doomed, so there is no purpose. We get up, raise families, have bank accounts, fix our teeth and everything else. But really, there is utterly no purpose except to be alive.
It struck me what we should be trying to do was pluck the egg from the ovary and fertilise it in the laboratory. We could do this in animals increasingly... this was the way to go in the human species.
I'm an animal rights activist because I believe we won't have a planet if we continue to behave toward other species the way we do.
