Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome - people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons.
Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.
Some Christians see the biblical teaching on homosexuality as reflecting the culture and times in which the Bible was written and not reflecting God's eternal perspective on homosexual people. Others believe these scriptures represent God's timeless will for how human beings practice intimacy.
To become self-aware, people must be allowed to hear a plurality of opinions and then make up their own minds. They must be allowed to say, write and publish whatever they want. Freedom of expression is the most basic, but fundamental, right. Without it, human beings are reduced to automatons.
There are two Americas - separate, unequal, and no longer even acknowledging each other except on the barest cultural terms. In the one nation, new millionaires are minted every day. In the other, human beings no longer necessary to our economy, to our society, are being devalued and destroyed.
For thousands of years, human beings have been obsessed with beauty, truth, love, honor, altruism, courage, social relationships, art, and God. They all go together as subjective experiences, and it's a straw man to set God up as the delusion. If he is, then so is truth itself or beauty itself.
Doing things like playing music, something that's so natural and basic to human function, running around in nature, eating delicious food. These things are intrinsic in basic, primordial to human beings, so that's sort of a way to return to a blank canvas, allowing my true personality to return.
Greed has been with human beings forever. We have a number of things in our species that you would call 'the dark side,' and greed is one of them. If you don't put certain structures in place or restrictions on those parts of our being that come from that dark place, then it gets out of control.
The story of Noah, like other stories in the first 11 chapters of Genesis, are archetypal. Noah's story tells us that human beings have an inherent tendency towards violence both towards their fellow human beings and towards the creation itself. The story tells us that this violence grieves God.
Whereas religious prayers sing of peace and harmony, religion has divided human beings through an atrocious history of enmity and bloodshed. Yet, behind the veil of superficiality and hypocrisy, I always believed in the inherent beauty of God that lies at the essence of all true spiritual paths.
When I first envisioned 'Funny Games' in the mid-1990s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American cinema, its violence, its naivety, the way American cinema toys with human beings. In many American films, violence is made consumable.
There is no 'ultimate goal of therapy.' Thinking there is some ultimate or universal goal of therapy is one of the most fundamental errors of our field. To me, that concept is rather arrogant, as if therapists were some kind of spiritual experts who knew what human beings are supposed to be like.
With the royal family, you don't want to see them as people because it takes the sheen off. They're distant; you can idealize them. But there's room to have compassion for people and see them as human beings. Just because they're royalty, it doesn't mean they don't love or feel loss or feel pain.
When two human beings get together, they're co-present, there is built into it a certain responsibility we have for each other, and when people are co-present in family relationships and other relationships, that responsibility is there. You can't just turn off a person. On the Internet, you can.
If you make something, it's an artifact. It's something that somebody or some corporate entity has caused to come into being. A great many human beings have thought about each of the artifacts that surround us. Different degrees of intelligence and attention have been brought to bear on anything.
I stumbled onto the best profession to heal my childhood: the only one that lets you release and express whatever is ugly and messy and beautiful about your life. We're in the business of creating human beings. The more we spew, and the more honestly we do it, the better. Try that on Wall Street.
We don't need any more regulation from government. You don't need overarching moralism to tell you how to live because human beings actually have a pretty well-developed moral center. The more government intrudes on the basic decisions you make, the further away you get from your natural morality.
In point of fact, I'm not sure there are too many comedies with laugh tracks anymore. Most of what you hear is live studio audience laughing as a show is filmed. If this prompts you to wonder who those actual human beings are who are laughing at some of this stuff, that is a mystification I share.
A rat race is for rats. We're not rats. We're human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement.
Phoenix is an interesting example. Drive around and see the golf courses everywhere, and you see people's big green lawns. And you live in a desert! I've always remarked about the capacity of human beings to look at somewhere and move there because of its uniqueness and its beauty and then change it.
I think that now that we are seeing multimedia types of productions with videos and pictures and human beings performing the acts that animals used to perform, such as in Cirque du Soleil and other traveling troops, there is no need to parade animals around anymore in cages for personal gratification.
But human beings fall easily into despair, and from the very beginning we invented stories that enabled us to place our lives in a larger setting, that revealed an underlying pattern, and gave us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life had meaning and value.
When you cut human beings down to size, we're really quite simple creatures; food, shelter, warmth, light, heat and you build it up from there really until you finally go Gucci shoes or whatever it is or whatever your consumer desires are. All those desires are ultimately, they're about gratification.
I don't know how to put this, but to some people, the NFL is basically modern-day slavery. Don't get me wrong - we get paid a lot of money. There's a sense of 'shut up and play,' that this is entertainment for other people. Then, when we go out in public, we're like zoo animals. We're not human beings.
We are all human beings, and we all have insecurities, but it's about being healthy and happy with yourself. I'm not perfect, and I will indulge in pizza and sweets on occasion. The goal is to make the majority of your decisions good for your body. So listen to your body, and treat it like your temple.
We have all kinds of limitations as human beings. I mean we can't see the whole electromagnetic spectrum; we can't see the very small; we can't see the very far. So we compensate for these short comings with technological scaffoldings. The microscope allows us to extend our vision into the micro-sphere.
We write for the same reason that we walk, talk, climb mountains or swim the oceans - because we can. We have some impulse within us that makes us want to explain ourselves to other human beings. That's why we paint, that's why we dare to love someone - because we have the impulse to explain who we are.
My mother, a teacher, encouraged me to use my creativity as an actual way to make a living, and my father, a Mississippi physician, did two things. First, he taught me that all human beings should be treated equally because no one is better than anyone else, and he never pressured me to become a doctor.
It sounds strange to say it, but you can be in a war zone and have a lot of fun. Even though war is essentially pain on all sides, human beings have the capacity to enjoy themselves. The soldiers are mostly young people, full of enthusiasm and energy, and that's an exciting thing for an old guy like me.
Human beings are born solitary, but everywhere they are in chains - daisy chains - of interactivity. Social actions are makeshift forms, often courageous, sometimes ridiculous, always strange. And in a way, every social action is a negotiation, a compromise between 'his,' 'her' or 'their' wish and yours.
My father always taught by telling stories about his experiences. His lessons were about morality and art and what insects and birds and human beings had in common. He told me what it meant to be a man and to be a Black man. He taught me about love and responsibility, about beauty, and how to make gumbo.
No matter how civilized we are and how much society has curbed violent behavior. Human beings still have the same genes they had 10,000 years ago. Our bodies are designed to have a certain amount of physical stress and violence in them. We're designed to run from jaguars and fight to defend our territory.
The problem is, and I'm just as guilty of this, a lot of people see their follower count increase and mistake that for friendships. It's great to have followers, especially if you want to sell albums, promote shows, or promote your friends, but you still need to get outside and talk to other human beings.
Even though everybody's lives are different, in general we're all human beings, and we go through the same things: disappointments, the pleasures of life, life and death. That's always been a really big part of the show to me, making sure the audience feels connected, and that carries through to the album.
As human beings, we are vulnerable to confusing the unprecedented with the improbable. In our everyday experience, if something has never happened before, we are generally safe in assuming it is not going to happen in the future, but the exceptions can kill you and climate change is one of those exceptions.
We've seen the worst that human beings are capable of. We've seen what happens when leaders abandon common decency in favor of rage and hate. Through the lens of history, the Holocaust happened yesterday, the civil rights movement was this morning, so we are not as out of the woods as we might have thought.
It is the forces of the universe that make human beings fall ill. Having learnt to recognize how sun qualities and moon qualities live in plants, animals and minerals, we discover how we can find counterforces and also individual natural forces that point us towards medicines for specific internal illnesses.
If you look at the Earth without architecture, it's sometimes a little bit unpleasant. So there is this basic human need to do shelter in the broadest sense of the word, whether it's a movie theater or a simple log cabin in the mountains. This is the core of architecture: To provide a space for human beings.
We in the United States believe in the protection of minorities; we recognize the contributions that they can make and the leadership that they can provide; and we do not believe that any people - whether majority or minority, or individual human beings - are 'expendable' in the cause of theory or of policy.
One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.
It is rather fantastic to realize that the laws of physics can describe how everything was created in a random quantum fluctuation out of nothing, and how over the course of 15 billion years, matter could organize in such complex ways that we have human beings sitting here, talking, doing things intentionally.
What you don't want is for violence and gore to become more important than character and structure. A lot of slasher movies from the eighties were only focused on violence and gore, which robs the human beings in the story of any empathetic reaction from the audience, and instead makes them cheer for the gore.
In a single generation, the Internet has given to virtually every person on the face of the earth the ability to communicate with fellow human beings on virtually any topic, at any time, and in every nook and cranny on the globe. This magnificent invention has done this without succumbing to government control.
I have always thought that pandas, in evolutionary terms, are the most sophisticated animals in the world. They cannot look after themselves; they are useless at reproducing. But to compensate, they have managed to persuade the most advanced creatures on the planet - human beings - to care for their every need.
Nature is not simply a technical or economical resource, and human beings are not mere numbers. To suggest that one can somehow align all the squabbling institutions of science, environmental management, government and diplomacy in an alliance of convenience to regulate the global climate seems to me optimistic.
'Moonlight' undoes our expectations as viewers, and as human beings, too. As we watch, another movie plays in our minds: real-life footage of the many forms of damage done to black men, which can sometimes lead them to turn that hateful madness on their own kind, passing on the poison that was their inheritance.
As human beings, we are the only organisms that create for the sheer stupid pleasure of doing so. Whether it's laying out a garden, composing a new tune on the piano, writing a bit of poetry, manipulating a digital photo, redecorating a room, or inventing a new chili recipe - we are happiest when we are creating.
As we have sought through the centuries to define ourselves as human beings and as nations through the prisms of history and literature, no small part of that effort has drawn us to the subject of war. We might even say that the humanities began with war and from war, and have remained entwined with it ever since.
ABC's intelligently hilarious sitcom 'Modern Family' depicts a gay-male marriage in which both partners are refreshingly dimensional, believable human beings. The writers dare to make them flawed and thus fully delineated, but they're not flawed in the silly, stereotypical ways that once dominated such portrayals.
My parents are both very funny but they're also relatively soft-spoken, normal human beings while I'm just a lunatic. I don't know where this loud, ballsy, hammy ridiculousness came from. I'm just glad I followed my goals and my parents did too. It's not like we even had a plan when I dragged my mom to Los Angeles.