Andreas Gursky Quotes

We are human, and nothing is more interesting to us than humanity.

There is another very specific quality which distinguishes them [man from animals], and which will admit of no dispute. This is the faculty of self-improvement, which, by the help of circumstances, gradually develops all the rest of our faculties, and is inherent in the species as in the individual: whereas a brute is, at the end of a few months, all he will ever be during his whole life, and his species, at the end of a thousand years, exactly what it was the first year of that thousand.

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

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.

Man is a child of his environment.

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

I find humans tremendously interesting.

The farther a society progresses, the more clearly the individual becomes the antithesis of the group.

Evil is not to be traced back to the individual but to the collective behavior of humanity.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

We cannot understand our humanity just by studying individuals.

Man makes his own history, but he does not make it out of the whole cloth; he does not make it out of conditions chosen by himself, but out of such as he finds close at hand.

Man's society is an ecology that forces adaptation to it.

If the ideas of any particular man are determined by his environment, then the ideas of humanity, in their historical development, are determined by the development of the social environment, by the history of social relationships.

There are nearly 7 billion people on this planet, so there are a lot of characters to play.

We are a very, very unusual species.

I really like investigating the things that make us human.

As Americans, we're raised with this idea of, 'We're number one.' As an individual, you absorb and you consume until you skyrocket to the top with your money and your whatever. That's not my philosophy. My philosophy is quite the opposite in that there's limited space, we have limited resources, and so it's not about the individual.

I always had an interest in seeing people within their environments.

I don't really believe in the idea of the individual.

We became Homo sapiens not that long ago, from the scientific perspective, and we've retained a lot of our beast nature. We've done all these amazing things in terms of our knowledge base and technology, and now we're flying around and using the Internet. But we're still very animalistic.

In a non-supernatural universe, there's just character, and it's humanity and human beings and how they relate to each other.

Every transformation of humanity has rested upon deep stirrings and intuitions, whose rationalized expression takes the form of a new picture of the cosmos and the nature of the human.

It is no longer possible to escape men. Farewell to the monsters, farewell to the saints. Farewell to pride. All that is left is men.