H. Allen Smith Quotes

What makes us human, I think, is an ability to ask questions, a consequence of our sophisticated spoken language.

I'm insatiably curious about human nature. I feel very lucky that as a writer I get to learn so much about it just to do my job right.

I think human beings are funny, tricky things.

I love titles and organizing chains of ideas. I like that very much.

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.

Traditional academic science describes human beings as highly developed animals and biological thinking machines. We appear to be Newtonian objects made of atoms, molecules, cells, tissues, and organs.

Man is the only animal that laughs and has a state legislature.

I think I'm very interested in people, in the way our minds work and how we navigate through the experience that is life. Very interested in people's struggles and their choices and their regrets and joys. I'm very interested in the human animal.

Man is an imagining being.

The human animal has evolved as a preeminently social animal.

I'm a complete human being. I'm very emotional and loving. I feel, I hurt, I give, I take, and also I think. I analyze. I'm a sociologist, anthropologist.

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.

We are a categorically obsessed culture, where we have to compartmentalize everything in reference to another thing, like, 'What does it sound like? Does it sound like this?'

Lists have always implied social order.

Humans are kind of story-propagating creatures. If you think of how we spend our days, think of all the time you spend on entertainment. How much of your entertainment centers around stories? Most pieces of music tell stories. Even hanging out with your friends, you talk, you tell stories to each other. They're all stories. We live in stories.

I've always been someone who really watches other people, human behavior. To watch it and be able to express it through your version has always been really exciting to me.

There cannot be found in the animal kingdom a bat, or any other creature, so blind in its own range of circumstance and connection, as the greater majority of human beings are in the bosoms of their families.

Consciousness permits us to develop the instruments of culture - morality and justice, religion, art, economics and politics, science and technology. Those instruments allow us some measure of freedom in the confrontation with nature.

Isn't history ultimately the result of our fear of boredom?

I personally think we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.

The reason humans experience so much more stress than other species isn't just because we think more, but also because we think differently.

Human behavior flows from three main sources: desire, emotion, and knowledge.

It's my belief we developed language because of our deep inner need to complain.

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.

Instinct perfected is a faculty of using and even constructing organized instruments; intelligence perfected is the faculty of making and using unorganized instruments.