Owen Barfield Quotes

By contrast with history, evolution is an unconscious process. Another, and perhaps a better way of putting it would be to say that evolution is a natural process, history a human one....

What I see in science is a lot of imagination referring to things that are fundamental to what we are. Our cells, our history, our future, our place in the universe, our lack of place in the universe. That's poetry as far as I'm concerned.

Politics is applied biology.

What an ugly beast the ape, and how like us.

Technology changes all the time; human nature, hardly ever.

Nature does not proceed in a straight line, it is rather a sprawling development.

Evolution isn't just a take-it-or-leave-it story about where we came from. It's an epic at the centre of life itself. It tells us we are part of nature in every respect.

The fact that the apes exist and that we can study them is extremely important and makes us reflect on ourselves and our human nature. In that sense alone, you need to protect the apes.

The stream of time sweeps away errors, and leaves the truth for the inheritance of humanity.

It is clear that this essential Christian doctrine gives a new value to human nature, to human history and to human life which is not to be found in the other great oriental religions.

None of us can claim to be fair and square in love - and I'm definitely not a hypocrite! Humans are built to evolve with time. It depends on the nature of the relationship you share with a person. It is there today, tomorrow it may be gone; c'est la vie.

Statistics vary, but in less than seven years there won't be a single cell left in any of our bodies that's the same as it is today. This means that any human being who 'wants' to change is like a mountain river wanting to reach the valley floor. It's a done deal; that's what mountain rivers do, and 'changing' should be our first nature.

We imagine that human nature doesn't change. We like to say that but I don't think it's true because we have, in the course of the centuries, altered ourselves.

Man is a creative retrospection of nature upon itself.

Psychology keeps trying to vindicate human nature. History keeps undermining the effort.

Repeal the Missouri Compromise - repeal all compromises - repeal the Declaration of Independence - repeal all past history, you still cannot repeal human nature. It will be the abundance of man's heart that slavery extension is wrong; and out of the abundance of his heart, his mouth will continue to speak.

Of course, nobody would deny the importance of human beings for theological thinking, but the time span of history that theologians think about is a few thousand years of human culture rather than the fifteen billion years of the history of the universe.

I'm a paleoanthropologist, and my job is to define man's place in nature and explore what makes us human.

I believe that evolution is a true account of nature, but I think we should try to escape it or transcend it in our society.

I think... the history of civilization is an attempt to codify, classify and categorize aspects of human nature that hardly lend themselves to that process.

Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.

Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren't even mammals.

There is little history in the study of nature, and there is little nature in the study of history.

O man, of whatever country you are, and whatever your opinions may be, behold your history, such as I have thought to read it, not in books written by your fellow creatures, who are liars, but in nature, which never lies

History is the zoology of the human race.