Hominid and human evolution took place over millions and not billions of years, but with the emergence of language there was a further acceleration of time and the rate of change. — William Irwin Thompson
Language changes and moves in a different direction evolving all the time. Where a lot of people see deterioration, I see expressive development — David Crystal
Language is an anonymous, collective and unconscious art; the result of the creativity of thousands of generations. — Edward Sapir
Man invented language to satisfy his deep need to complain. — Lily Tomlin
Time changes all things; there is no reason why language should escape this universal law — Ferdinand De Saussure
Perhaps of all the creations of man language is the most astonishing. — Lytton Strachey
A language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. ... Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind. — Wade Davis
Language is the armory of the human mind, and at once contains the trophies of its past and the weapons of its future conquests. — Samuel Taylor Coleridge
It's my belief we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain. — Jane Wagner
Language is not a genetic gift, it is a social gift. Learning a new language is becoming a member of the club -the community of speakers of that language. — Frank Smith
Evolution of mankind is paralleled by the increase and expansion of consciousness. — Albert Hofmann
Language is a city to the building of which every human being brought a stone. — Ralph Waldo Emerson
I believe that the brain has evolved over millions of years to be responsive to different kinds of content in the world. Language content, musical content, spatial content, numerical content, etc. — Howard Gardner
Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations. — Edward Sapir
Evolution Of Man Quotes
The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness, and 'consciousness' cannot evolve unconsciously. The evolution of man is the evolution of his will, and 'will' cannot evolve involuntarily. — G. I. Gurdjieff
Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. — Terry Pratchett
It is curious how there seems to be an instinctive disgust in Man for his nearest ancestors and relations. If only Darwin could conscientiously have traced man back to the Elephant or the Lion or the Antelope, how much ridicule and prejudice would have been spared to the doctrine of Evolution. — Havelock Ellis
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
The mutual-aid tendency in man has so remote an origin, and is so deeply interwoven with all the past evolution of the human race, that is has been maintained by mankind up to the present time, notwithstanding all vicissitudes of history. — Peter Kropotkin
The evolution of man is slow. The injustice of men is great. — Oscar Wilde
Is it really credible that random processes could have constructed a reality...which excels in every sense anything produced by the intelligence of man? — Michael Denton
A warm smile is the universal language of kindness.
I'm the product of 6 million years of evolution? Come on, man. I crawled out of a swamp yesterday. — Peter Steele
What is required is faith. Man has body, life and mind but that is not all that constitutes man. He has risen to the mind as a result of evolution. Now a higher consciousness will be evolved - this I call Supermind. It is the instrument of the Divine Consciousness, the Truth-Consciousness. — Sri Aurobindo
Freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds which follows from the advance of science. — Charles Darwin
We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation. — Carl Sagan
Human Evolution Quotes
Self-actualizing people have a deep feeling of identification, sympathy, and affection for human beings in general. They feel kinship and connection, as if all people were members of a single family. — Abraham Maslow
I think that in human evolution it has never been as necessary to have this substance LSD. It is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be. — Albert Hofmann
You are a powerful, unlimited and eternal soul who is here to enjoy the experience of creativity and contribute to humanity's evolution. — Timothy Leary
Life will give you whatever experience is the most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness.
The power to control evolution, to affect how species change, will be in the hands of humans. — Jennifer Doudna
The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings. — Albert Schweitzer
In 1920 [H.G. Wells] described human history as becoming more and more a race between education and catastrophe. — Joel Garreau
No matter the economy of the jungle, the lion will never eat grass.
If fructose sounds dangerous, it can be, but only in fast and large doses. For most of human evolution the only big, rapidly digestible source of fructose that our ancestors could acquire was honey. — Daniel Lieberman
The time evolution of human condition approximated as a Gaussian is more that of expanding variance than that of moving mean. — Andrej Karpathy
The Bhagavad-Gita is the most systematic statement of spiritual evolution of endowing value to mankind. It is one of the most clear and comprehensive summaries of perennial philosophy ever revealed; hence its enduring value is subject not only to India but to all of humanity. — Aldous Huxley
For the first time in human evolution, the individual life is long enough, and the cultural transformation swift enough, that the individual mind is now a constituent player in the global transformation of human culture. — William Irwin Thompson
Theory Of Evolution Quotes
Take the rose—most people think it very beautiful: I don’t care for It at all. I prefer the cactus, for the simple reason that it has a more interesting personality. It has wonderfully adapted itself to its surroundings! It is the best illustration of the theory of evolution in plant life. — Charles Proteus Steinmetz
The theory of evolution by cumulative natural selection is the only theory we know of that is in principle capable of explaining the existence of organized complexity. — Richard Dawkins
Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles. — James D. Watson
Never make fun of someone who speaks broken English. It means they know another language.
In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment. — Charles Darwin
We have long been seeking a different kind of evolutionary process and have now found one; namely, the change within the pattern of the chromosomes. ... The neo-Darwinian theory of the geneticists is no longer tenable. — Richard Goldschmidt
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. — Charles Darwin
The language of friendship is not words, but meanings.
The theory of evolution, like the theory of gravity, is a scientific fact. — Neil deGrasse Tyson
My theory of evolution is that Darwin was adopted. — Steven Wright
The fact of evolution is the backbone of biology, and biology is thus in the peculiar position of being a science founded on an improved theory, is it then a science or faith? — Charles Darwin
Nowhere was Darwin able to point to one bona fide case of natural selection having actually generated evolutionary change in nature....Ultimately, the Darwinian theory of evolution is no more nor less than the great cosmogenic myth of the twentieth century. — Michael Denton
Human Language Quotes
We may have different religions, different languages, different colored skin, but we all belong to one human race. — Kofi Annan
There is only one caste... the caste of humanity. There is only one religion... the religion of love. There is only one language... the language of the heart. — Sathya Sai Baba
In my games I have sometimes found a combination intuitively simply feeling that it must be there. Yet I was not able to translate my thought processes into normal human language. — Mikhail Tal
Love will find its way through all languages on its own.
The specifically human capacity for language enables children to provide for auxiliary tools in the solution of difficult tasks, to overcome impulsive action, to plan a solution to a problem prior to its execution, and to master their own behavior. — Lev S. Vygotsky
Nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says, ‘It can’t be done.’ — Eleanor Roosevelt
It gives a message to people of love... it does not matter what's the colour of your skin, what language do you speak, what religion do you believe in. It is that we should all consider each other as human beings and we should respect each other. — Malala Yousafzai
It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
In Náhuatl, the language of the Aztec world, one key word for poet was 'tlamatine,' meaning 'the one who knows,' or 'he who knows something.' Poets were considered 'sages of the word,' who meditated on human enigmas and explored the beyond, the realm of the gods. — Edward Hirsch
Language, that most human invention, can enable what, in principle, should not be possible. It can allow all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes. — Oliver Sacks
Abusive language and swearing are a legacy of slavery, humiliation, and disrespect for human dignity, one’s own and that of other people. — Leon Trotsky
What you wear is how you present yourself to the world, especially today, when human contacts are so quick. Fashion is instant language. — Miuccia Prada
Language Development Quotes
A new, a vast, and a powerful language is developed for the future use of analysis, in which to wield its truths so that these may become of more speedy and accurate practical application for the purposes of mankind than the means hitherto in our possession have rendered possible. — Ada Lovelace
If debugging is the process of removing software bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in. — Edsger Dijkstra
Kindness is a language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
Any fool can write code that a computer can understand. Good programmers write code that humans can understand. — Martin Fowler
When you grow up in a family of languages, you develop a kind of casual fluency, so that languages, though differently colored, all seem transparent to experience. — David Antin
Code never lies, comments sometimes do. — Ron Jeffries
All great things start as one small thing.
When debugging, novices insert corrective code; experts remove defective code. — Richard E. Pattis
One’s visual language is not something that manifests overnight. It develops organically over a life-time. The shifts can be so subtle as to be virtually imperceptible and, at times, will come to fruition so rapidly, and with such force, that the profundity is all-consuming. That is life’s work. — Dan Winters
The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late. — Seymour Cray
Computer scientists have so far worked on developing powerful programming languages that make it possible to solve the technical problems of computation. Little effort has gone toward devising the languages of interaction. — Donald A. Norman
Biological Evolution Quotes
Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. — Theodosius Dobzhansky
If the origin of life is the origin of evolution & nothing comes before life then we are indeed stuck. I don’t think we need to be. Let’s shed the dogma, ego, & closed minds & ask the question clearly. How do we detect the onset of evolution BEFORE biology? — Lee Cronin
The consciousness of lucid dreaming is a cultural evolution. It's something that we are talking about and learning about, not biological evolution. — Stephen LaBerge
Civilization began the first time an angry person cast a word instead of a rock.
I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time a rare, complicated, and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution , where the wave of life bursts into individual, sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment... only to vanish forever. — Alan Watts
These systems are the product of evolution, optimized by evolution for a world which no longer exists; it is not surprising then that, however capable our cognitive apparatus is, it too often fails when challenged by tasks completely alien to its biological roots. — Annie Jacobsen
So in my freshman year at the University of Alabama, learning the literature on evolution, what was known about it biologically, just gradually transformed me by taking me out of literalism and increasingly into a more secular, scientific view of the world. — E. O. Wilson
If the history-deniers who doubt the fact of evolution are ignorant of biology, those who think the world began less than ten thousand years ago are worst than ignorant, they are the deluded to the point of perversity. — Richard Dawkins
All scientists agree that evolution has occurred-that all life comes from a common ancestry, that there has been extinction, and that new taxa, new biological groups, have arisen. The question is, is natural selection enough to explain evolution? Is it the driver of evolution? — Lynn Margulis
Our task now is to resynthesize biology; put the organism back into its environment; connect it again to its evolutionary past; and let us feel that complex flow that is organism, evolution, and environment united. The time has come for biology to enter the nonlinear world. — Carl Woese
Evolution is the creation-myth of our age. By telling us our origin it shapes our views of what we are. It influences not just our thought, but our feelings and actions too, in a way which goes far beyond its official function as a biological theory. — Mary Midgley
Origin Of Man Quotes
Accept your place in the sun as it was originally before the creation of this world... The black man is the first and last, maker and owner of the universe. — Elijah Muhammad
Just being a woman is God's gift. The origin of a child is a mother, a woman. She shows a man what sharing, caring, and loving is all about. That is the essence of a woman. — Sushmita Sen
Rights are not gifts from one man to another, nor from one class of men to another. It is impossible to discover any origin of rights otherwise than in the origin of man; it consequently follows that rights appertain to man in right of his existence, and must therefore be equal to every man. — Thomas Paine
Mr. Lincoln was not only a great President, but a great man - too great to be small in anything. In his company I was never in any way reminded of my humble origin, or of my unpopular color. — Frederick Douglass
Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. — Oscar Wilde
It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness. — Herman Melville
If slavery be a sin, it is not yours. It does not rest on your action for its origin, on your consent for its existence. It is a common law right to property in the service of man; its origin was Divine decree. — Jefferson Davis
In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researches. Psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation. Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history. — Charles Darwin
Suppose Mozart had tried to be original? It would have been like a man at the North Pole trying to walk north, and this is true of all of the rest of us. Striving after originality takes you far away from your true self, and makes your work mediocre. — Keith Johnstone
The eye of the heart, though closed in fallen man, is able to take in a glimmering of light and this is faith. But anyway of living causes a covering like rust to accumulate over the heart so that it cannot sense the Divine origin of Allah's message. — Martin Lings
Evolution Biology Quotes
Does the evolutionary doctrine clash with religious faith? It does not. It is a blunder to mistake the Holy Scriptures for elementary textbooks of astronomy, geology, biology, and anthropology. — Theodosius Dobzhansky
Biology is the science. Evolution is the concept that makes biology unique. — Jared Diamond
Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups. — Stephen Jay Gould
Biological evolution is too slow for the human species. Over the next few decades, it's going to be left in the dust. — Ray Kurzweil
The central problem of biological evolution is the nature of mutation, but hitherto the occurrence of this has been wholly refractory and impossible to influence by artificial means, although a control of it might obviously place the process of evolution in our hands. — Hermann Joseph Muller
The evidence for evolution pours in, not only from geology, paleontology, biogeography, and anatomy, but of course from molecular biology and every other branch of the life sciences. — Daniel Dennett
Evolutionary biologists have been able to pretend to know how complex biological systems originated only because they treated them as black boxes. Now that biochemists have opened the black boxes and seen what is inside, they know the Darwinian theory is just a story, not a scientific explanation. — Phillip E. Johnson
The evolution of sex is the hardest problem in evolutionary biology. — John M. Smith
Darwinan evolution is limited to the biological aspect but before that happened the molecules themselves had to evolve to enable this further (biological) evolution. — Jean-Marie Lehn
Evolution has just been dealt its death blow. After reading Origins of Life with my background in chemistry and physics, it is clear that biological evolution could not have occurred. — Richard Smalley
As evolutionary time is measured, we have only just turned up and have hardly had time to catch breath, still marveling at our thumbs, still learning to use the brand-new gift of language. Being so young, we can be excused all sorts of folly and can permit ourselves the hope that someday, as a species, we will begin to grow up. — Lewis Thomas
This evolution may compromise Java's claim of being simpler than C++, but my guess is that the effort will make Java a better language than it is today. — Bjarne Stroustrup
The formation of different languages and of distinct species and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel. — Charles Darwin
Evolution explains our biological evolution, but human beings are very unique creatures. As the Dobzhansky said, all animals are unique; humans are the uniquest. And that uniqueness of being human, language, art, culture, our dependency on culture for survival, comes from the combination of traditional biological evolution. — Donald Johanson
Evolution teaches us the original purpose of language was to ritualize men's threats and curses, his spells to compel the gods; communication came later. — Gene Wolfe
In the broadest sense, evolution is merely change, and so is all-pervasive; galaxies, languages, and political systems all evolve. Biological evolution ... is change in the properties of populations of organisms that transcend the lifetime of a single individual. — Douglas J. Futuyma
There are a couple of watersheds in human evolution. Most people are comfortable thinking about tool use and language use as watersheds. But the ability to play non-zero-sum games was another watershed. — Jonathan Haidt
Our own genomes carry the story of evolution, written in DNA, the language of molecular genetics, and the narrative is unmistakable. — Kenneth R. Miller
Memetics provides a new approach to the evolution of language in which we apply Darwinian thinking to two replicators, not one. On this theory, memetic selection, as well as genetic selection, does the work of creating language. — Susan Blackmore
Words have a genealogy and it's easier to trace the evolution of a single word than the evolution of a language. — Daniel Dennett
If we compel the composer to write in terms of what the listener is able to hear, we flirt with the danger of freezing the evolution of musical language, whose progressive development comes about through transgressions of a given era's perceptual habits." — Jean-Jacques Nattiez
Transformation of language through psychedelic drugs is a central factor of the evolution of the social matrix of the rest of the century. — Terence McKenna
I'm not an escapist, but the value of language is that it can create places that did not exist before. And so language for me doesn't reflect the world, it extends the world, so that it becomes larger and more fantastic and less mired in this school shooting bullshit. It actually builds a future - that's how evolution occurs. — Blake Butler
We can move no faster than the evolution of our language, and this is certainly part of what the psychedelics are about: they force the evolution of language. — Terence McKenna
In order for architecture to experience its ongoing evolution as a language, there has to be a lot of adjusted copies between how architects draw, think, engage bylaws and constraints. — Jimenez Lai
In this twenty-first century, there's no one like Sharona Muir who can write, in bright accurate language, animals real or imaginary in an updated bestiary that riffs on evolution, extinction, and what it means to be human among other species. We need this view, and you'll be right there with her on every page of Invisible Beasts. — John Felstiner
Space and force pervade language. Many cognitive scientists (including me) have concluded from their research on language that a handful of concepts about places, paths, motions, agency, and causation underlie the literal or figurative meanings of tens of thousands of words and constructions, not only in English but in every other language that has been studied. — Steven Pinker
Fifteen hundred years is ample time in which to lose mutual comprehension. Iceland was colonized by the Norwegians at the end of the ninth century AD. Today's Icelanders, with considerable effort, can understand people from the Scandinavian peninsula, but the Scandinavians hardly understand the Icelanders. A thousand years is the minimum time span for a language to change so much that it becomes incomprehensible. — Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza
The bicameral mind with its controlling gods was evolved as a final stage of the evolution of language. And in this development lies the origin of civilization. — Julian Jaynes
We started off with physical evolution and got our form. Then we somehow developed language, which meant cultural evolution could race so we could change our behavior really quickly instead of over hundreds and hundreds of years. And then comes moral evolution, which means we're not frightfully far along with people. And maybe we end up with a spiritual evolution, which is this connectedness with the rest of the life forms on the planet. — Jane Goodall
Owing to the imperfection of language the offspring is termed a new animal, but it is in truth a branch or elongation of the parent; since a part of the embryon-animal is, or was, a part of the parent; and therefore in strict language it cannot be said to be entirely new at the time of its production; and therefore it may retain some of the habits of the parent-system. (1794) — Erasmus Darwin
Evolution is a theory in a special philosophical sense of science, but in terms of ordinary laymen's use of language, it's a fact, .. Evolution is a fact in the same sense that it's a fact that the Earth is round and not flat, [that] the Earth goes round the Sun. Both those are also theories, but they're theories that have never been disproved and never will be disproved. — Richard Dawkins
It seems inconceivable that a species of human could possess fully modern language and not be fully modern in all other ways, too. For this reason, the evolution of language is widely judged to be the culminating event in the emergence of humanity as we know it today. — Richard Leakey
Literacy, written language is a very late acquisition in terms of human evolution. — Jean Berko Gleason
There are a lot of guys out there with skills who have not contributed to the evolution of the instrument. It's about more than that...it's an emotive language, an aesthetic. Skill is an aspect, but it's what you do with that skill, or say with that skill, that matters. — Vinnie Colaiuta
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