Norman McLaren Quotes

Why go to a machine when you could go to a human being?

Technology is teaching us to be human again.

But I think 'Love, Actually' has a very realistic view of human nature in line with the latest scientific evidence. The opening scene, where Hugh Grant's character talks about the arrivals gate at Heathrow, is about friendship and connection, it's about who we really are as a species.

We take our bearings, daily, from others. To be sane is, to a great extent, to be sociable.

Can we ignore what is going on around us, can we disconnect ourselves, our own material situation, our spiritual selves, who we are, can we disconnect that from history and the social context of our lives? The older I get, the more I'm convinced that we cannot, that we are social creatures.

It's wonderful to move forward technologically, but we cannot forget that we are human beings who thrive on relationships, who thrive on interconnectivity, who thrive on sharing your feelings and emotions.

Nature makes only dumb animals. We owe the fools to society.

I remain a humanist. We are a very curious race.

Computers are magnificent tools for the realization of our dreams, but no machine can replace the human spark of spirit, compassion, love, and understanding.

Men was formed for society, and is neither capable of living alone, nor has the courage to do it.

I think technology really increased human ability. But technology cannot produce compassion.

The community of masses of human beings has produced an order of life in regulated channels which connects individuals in a technically functioning organisation, but not inwardly from the historicity of their souls.

The human heart is the same the world over.

I have no confidence in the system of isolation. It does not answer in social life for individuals, nor in politics for nations. Man is a social animal.

It is a curious thing: man, the centre and creator of all science, is the only object which our science has not yet succeeded in including in a homogeneous representation of the universe. We know the history of his bones, but no ordered place has yet been found in nature for his reflective intelligence.

I am a great enthusiast and early adopter of technology, but sometimes I wonder whether the inexorable integration of technology in our lives could diminish some of our quintessential human capacities, such as compassion and cooperation.

It is easier to treat people as objects to be manipulated if you have never learned any other way to see them.

I am definitely a person who firmly believes in the human touch and in the importance of people.

We are awakening from the dream of isolation, from the dream of loneliness, and it's a terrible shock.

Society would be a charming affair if we were only interested in one another.

Man is, at one and the same time, a solitary being and a social being. As a solitary being, he attempts to protect his own existence and that of those who are closest to him, to satisfy his personal desires, and to develop his innate abilities. As a social being, he seeks to gain the recognition and affection of his fellow human beings, to share in their pleasures, to comfort them in their sorrows, and to improve their conditions of life.

Man is known to be a selfish, as well as a social being.

So long as a man remains a gregarious and sociable being, he cannot cut himself off from the gratification of the instinct of imparting what he is learning, of propagating through others the ideas and impressions seething in his own brain, without stunting and atrophying his moral nature and drying up the surest sources of his future intellectual replenishment.

It's just a natural part of being a social creature and being a human being.

The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.