James Branch Cabell Quotes

Unlike the animal, God has given man the faculty of reason.

Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.

I think the one thing humans are is language wizards.

There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them.

There's one thing that shows up on all of the lists of what makes us human: language. Our ability to share our thoughts and complex information with others far surpasses all the barks, squeaks and growls of our animal friends.

I'm interested in the way language is used to navigate the world around us.

The desire to take medicine is perhaps the greatest feature which distinguishes man from animals.

Man, of all the animals, is probably the only one to regard himself as a great delicacy.

Some languages expand not only your ability to speak to different people but what you're able to think.

Man's achievements rest upon the use of symbols

Now I speak English.

Man is the only animal who is prone to insanity.

Language is one of the fundamental principles of human understanding. It is the way we interact with each other and how we grasp the world we live in. Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.

The uniqueness of humans has been claimed on many grounds, but most often because of our tool-making, culture, language, reason and morality. We have them, the other animals don't, and -- so the argument goes -- that's that.

Our reverence for the nobility of manhood will not be lessened by the knowledge that man is in substance and in structure, one with the brutes; for he alone possesses the marvellous endowment of intelligible and rational speech whereby he has slowly accumulated and organized the experience which is almost wholly lost with the cessation of individual life in other animals; so that he now stands raised above it as on a mountain-top, far above the level of his humble fellows, and transfigured from his grosser nature by reflecting, here and there, a ray from the infinite source of truth.

Man is the only animal to borrow tools.

Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms.

I haven't seen any claim that Piraha lacks recursion, that is, that there are a finite number of sentences or sentence frames. If that's so, it would mean that the speakers of this language aren't making use of a capacity that they surely have, a normal situation; plenty of people throughout history would drown if they fall into water.

The only thing that separates us from the animals... is we have pornography.

The faculty of self-help is that which distinguished man from animals; that it is the Godlike element, or holds within itself the Godlike element, of his constitution.

What is it that distinguishes man from animals? It is not his upright posture.

No one seriously doubts that if Piraha children are brought up in Boston they'll be speaking Boston English, that is, that the capacities are present, unlike other animals, as far as is known. There's no challenge to the theory - not mine, but everyone's - that the human language faculty provides the means for generation of an infinite array of structured expressions.

It is not speech or tool making that distinguishes us from other animals, it is imagination....Of what use are speech sounds and tools without an inspiration toward perfectibility, without a sense that we can create or construct a history.

This is the most exciting part of being human. It is using our brains in the highest way. Otherwise we are just healthy animals

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare, it is simply disgraceful.