Human Place Quotes

One of the things that was kind of shocking for humans... was to come to terms with was the fact that, hey, we may not be the center of the universe.

We seem to forget that innovation doesn't just come from equations or new kinds of chemicals, it comes from a human place. Innovation in the sciences is always linked in some way, either directly or indirectly, to a human experience.

The human's place in the universe will be set in the scheme of evolution, the product of our biological inheritance.

The Earth does not belong to us: we belong to the Earth.

Man is not above nature, but in nature.

Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.

It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.

The pretended physical philosophy of modern days strips Man of all his moral attributes, or holds them of no account in the estimate of his origin and place in the created world.

I believe everyone should have a broad picture of how the universe operates and our place in it. It is a basic human desire. And it also puts our worries in perspective.

But that Franklin trip changed me profoundly. As I believe wilderness experience changes everyone. Because it puts us in our place. The human place, which our species inhabited for most of its evolutionary life. That place that shaped our psyches and made us who we are. The place where nature is big and we are small.

I think very early on, my sisters and I understood the value of nature and what it can do for us, and that we are part of nature. Even if we are all seemingly intelligent beings and we're at the top of the food chain, that doesn't mean that we have to remove ourselves from nature.

What the fossil record does do is to force us to contemplate our place on the planet. We are but one species of several hominids that inhabited Planet Earth, and like our distant cousins who went extinct fairly recently, our time on Planet Earth is also finite.