Species Distinction Quotes

Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.

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.

There is no safe standard to tell man from animals.

It doesn’t bother you that your canine brethren are being paraded around show rings like slaves?” “My canine brethren?” I said. “I don’thave any canine brethren.” “How can you say that! You’re a werewolf.” “That’s right. I’m a werewolf, not a poodle. What makes you think I have any kinship with dogs?

What Plato was really asking was perhaps why a horse was a horse, and not, for example, a cross between a horse and a pig.

What is there about the notion of a person, at law, that makes every living member of the species Homo sapiens a person, irrespective of their mental capacities, but excludes every nonhuman animal - again, irrespective of their mental capacities?

Man is not the most majestic of the creatures; long before the mammals even, the dinosaurs were far more splendid. But he has what no other animal possesses: a jigsaw of faculties, which alone, over three thousand million years of life, made him creative. Every animal leaves traces of what he was. Man alone leaves traces of what he created.

It was always understood that plants and animals, though completely contrasted in their higher representatives, approached each other very closely in their lower and simpler forms. But they were believed not to blend.

The difference between humans and Neanderthals is .004 percent of gene code. That's how big the difference is, one species to another.

There has always been a tendency to classify children almost as a distinct species.

You wouldn't consider all the bipeds you pass on the street human beings simply because they walk upright and carry their young in their bellies nine months! It is obvious how many of them are fish or sheep, worms or angels, how many are ants, how many are bees!

The most perfect ape cannot draw an ape; only man can do that; but, likewise, only man regards the ability to do this as a sign of superiority.

Human freedom is not an illusion; it is an objective phenomenon, distinct from all other biological conditions and found in only one species - us.

Hereafter we shall be compelled to acknowledge that the only distinction between species and well-marked varieties is, that the latter are known, or believed to be connected at the present day by intermediate gradations whereas species were formerly thus connected.

What makes us different from other species is our capacity for compassion and empathy with the struggles of other people.

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

Time is numbered only to man.

No distinction in kind rather than degree between ourselves and the chimps? No distinction? Seriously, folks? Here is a simple operational test: the chimpanzees invariably are the one behind the bars of their cages.

It may be argued that to know one kind of beetle is to know them all. But a species is not like a molecule in a cloud of molecules-it is a unique population.

The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life.

Let's say intelligence is your ability to compose poetry, symphonies, do art, math and science. Chimps can't do any of that, yet we share 99 percent DNA. Everything that we are, that distinguishes us from chimps, emerges from that one-percent difference.

I like dogs because they are not humans.

The ruling British elite are like animals--not only in their morality, but in their outlook on knowledge. They are clever animals, who are masters of the wicked nature of their own species, and recognize ferally the distinctions of the hated human species. Nonetheless, obsessively dedicated to being such animals, they can not [sic] assimilate those qualities unique to true human beings.

We haven't been able yet to determine in terms of genes what makes a human being a human and not another mammal.

Let animals live like animals; let humans live like humans. That's my whole philosophy in a sentence.