Bill Nye Quotes

Over the last few millennia we've invented a series of technologies - from the alphabet to the scroll to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone - that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity.

Ask, 'How are we different from the great apes?' We have culture, we have civilisation, and we have language to be celebrated as part of being human.

I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker - yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action. I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday.

What is it that really makes us, us? It's our collective intelligence. It's our ability to write things down, our language and our consciousness.

The problem is not simply that the Singularity represents the passing of humankind from center stage, but that it contradicts our most deeply held notions of being.

Nowhere more truly than in his mental capacities is man a part of nature.

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

A consciousness of history is one of the key factors that distinguishes us from other animals.

I really like investigating the things that make us human.

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.

It's been well documented how we start to believe in our virtual or digital selves more than our real selves, but it's strange to think that human behaviour hasn't really changed at all since that legend was created.

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

Civilization merely develops man's capacity for a greater variety of sensations, and ... absolutely nothing else.

Running is the heart of what it means to be human.

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 above all else mind, consciousness -- that is, he is a product of history, not of nature.

I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character... by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none.

Who are we? That is the big question. And essentially we are just an upright-walking, big-brained, super-intelligent ape.

Intuitively you want some place [such as your phone] to store phone numbers, so you have that part of your brain to do other tasks.

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

Basically we are chimpanzees with about two percent more intelligence and a little less hair.

I wonder, What is it to be human? Especially now that we are so urban. How do we remember our connection with place? What is the umbilical cord that roots us to that primal, instinctive, erotic place? Every time I walk to the edge of this continent and feel the sand beneath my feet, feel the seafoam move up my body, I think, "Ah, yes, evolution." It's there, we just forget.

Where do we come from? What are We? Where are we going?

The outsourcing of our memory to machines expands the amount of data to which we have access, but degrades our brain’s own ability to remember things.

Man is more ape than many of the apes.