Louise Leakey Quotes

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

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

This growth in the number, speed of formation, permanence, delicacy and complexity of associations possible for an animal reaches its acme in the case of man.

What gives it its human character is that the individual through language addresses himself in the role of the others in the group and thus becomes aware of them in his own conduct.

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.

Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason

What makes us human is that we ask questions. All the animals have interests, instincts and conceptions. All the animals frame for themselves an idea of the world in which they live. But we alone question our surroundings.

I'm interested in how we understand ourselves in our relatioships and how we define ourselves.

If there is any characteristic that is distinctly human, it is the capability for reflective self-consciousness.

We become full human agents, capable of understanding ourselves, and hence of defining our identity, through our acquisition of rich human languages of expression.

Man is a recording animal.

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.

A man's ethnic identity has more to do with a personal awareness than with geography.

Man is multiplied by the number of languages he possesses and speaks.

There are no human beings whose sense of social identity is fully and exclusively given for themselves by the membership of the working (or any other) class

Language turned apes like us into civil creatures.

I realised that people respond to banal things. They don't accept their own history, not participating in acceptance within their own being.

We are a very, very unusual species.

If what distinguishes us from other species is speech, then poetry, which is the supreme linguistic operation, is our anthropological - indeed, genetic - goal.

Our deep desires define us, really.

Play the role as a human being... human beings are three-dimensional.

Our dream is to one day uncover the essence of what makes us human.

My goal is to be able to fill out one of those forms that asks 'Who are you?' and be able to just put 'Human being,' you know?

Obviously the idea of being human is a very human idea.

I've been taught through life experience that, like, I'd better open my mouth and quickly define myself in a new space and with new people because, if I don't, I will be defined.