Danny Hillis Quotes

The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities.

Kubrick's vision seemed to be that humans are doomed, whereas Clarke's is that humans are moving on to a better stage of evolution.

Finds progress, man's distinctive mark alone, Not God's, and not the beast's; God is, they are, Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be.

We can take some gratification at having come a certain distance in just a few thousand years of our existence as language users, but it should be a deeper satisfaction, even an exhilaration, to recognize that we have such a distance still to go.

I want to talk about the nature of human beings or how we're evolving as a race.

The individual is at the apex of his species' past, at the entrance to its future.

It is through science that we understand the world around us, and by understanding the world around us, we not only contribute to ourselves, our family, to our communities, etc. - you also contribute to the basic development and evolution of humanity.

What makes us human depends on what place on our evolutionary path we're talking about. If you go back six million years ago, what makes us human is that we were walking upright. That's all. If you go to 2.6 million years ago, it's the fact that we're designing and making stone tools.

Is the human race a universal constructor?

At some time in their careers, most good historians itch to write a history of the world, endeavor to discover what makes humanity the most destructive and creative of species.

We keep thinking that the human is evolving. No, the human has evolved to its extent. What's happening now is the organization of humans: just like cells organize to form people, people are organizing to form humanity.

Till now man has been up against Nature; from now on he will be up against his own nature.

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.

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.

Stone Age. Bronze Age. Iron Age. We define entire epics of humanity by the technology they use.

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.

The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces - in nature, in society, in man himself.

The torrent of centuries rolling over the human race, has continually brought new perfections, the cause of which, ever active though unseen, is found in the demands made by our senses, which always in their turns demand to be occupied.

Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, on the day the first book was written.

No theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been.

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.

As humans become civilized, the survival rate of the lazy, botched and dim-witted grow in inverse proportion to the productive segment since nature can no longer remove them from the species.

The history of the race, from infancy through its stages of barbarism, heathenism, civilization, and Christianity, is a process of suffering, as the lower principles of humanity are gradually subjected to the higher.

… the action of natural selection upon Man has ... been essentially diminished through the operation of social conditions

The opening of space to human development and settlement is the most important activity of the human species. From hope to health, from wonder to wealth, the environment, and the very act of living, space is the future.