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Anthropocentrism Quotes

Browse 42 quotes about Anthropocentrism.

Anthropocentrism Quotes

“It necessarily follows that chance alone is at the source of every innovation, and of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among many other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. And nothing warrants the supposition - or the hope - that on this score our position is ever likely to be revised. There is no scientific concept, in any of the sciences, more destructive of anthropocentrism than this one.”

FactsScienceHopeChanceEvidenceTestsInnovationObservationBiologyHypothesisFactBiosphereAnthropocentrismCentral Concept
Book:Chance and necessity: an essay on the natural philosophy of modern biology
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“You all know the argument from design: everything in the world is made just so that we can manage to live in the world, and if the world was ever so little different, we could not manage to live in it. That is the argument from design. It sometimes takes a rather curious form; for instance, it is argued that rabbits have white tails in order to be easy to shoot. I do not know how rabbits would view that application.”

GodDesignRabbitsAnthropocentrism
Book:Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects
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“We human beings regard ourselves as (or compare ourselves to) animals only when it suits us.”

PeopleHumansPersonsHumorFunnyReligionHumanityHuman BeingsAnimalHumourCivilizationCreaturesHumanJokesSpeciesIgnorantCompareHuman RaceSatireCivilizedAnimalsAphorismPrimitiveJokeVulgarConvenienceConvenientAphorismsHomo SapiensWildBarbarismHeathenBarbaricAphoristAphoristsCreatureUncivilizedAnthropocentrismSavageSuitBarbarianExpedienceNeanderthalCivilizeAnthropocentricBarbarousExpedientBrutishCompare ToLikenLiken ToUncultivated
Author:Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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“People were so oversensitive to the supposed overfishing of sharks. As if it wasn't the height of hubris to decide that humanity needed to be put into the position of custodian to the height of apex predators. God had made man to fight and defeat his other creations. Why else would he have made his chosen children physically weak, but mentally strong? In the battle between man and shark, the shark should always have won. That it didn't, proved only that man was intended to be victorious and that he should be allowed to kill whatever he could before he, in turn, was killed.”

HumanityDominationSharksHubrisNatural OrderExceptionalismAnthropocentrismMoral Ambiguity
Book:Into the Drowning Deep
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“Nobody enjoys the company of others as intensely as someone who usually avoids the company of others.”

LonelyWarmAloneIsolationFriendlySolitaryIntrovertLonerOpenMisanthropyLonesomeOutgoingRecluseAntisocialGregariousSociableLone WolfMisanthropeSecludedForthcomingFriendlessExtrovertAnthropocentrismHermitAffableIsolateWithdrawnReclusiveAsceticAnthropocentricAmicableApproachableResponsiveSecludeUnsociableGenialCloisteredCompanionableCordialHermiticCommunicativeUnaccompaniedAnchoressAnchoriteBy OneselfChummyClubbyCompanionlessConvivialEremiteHail Fellow Well MetIncommunicadoMaraboutOn One S OwnSolitarianSolitudinarianTroglodyte
Author:Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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“Believing in God makes one humble … and arrogant: those who do give their actions and their abilities way less credit than they really deserve, and are inevitably left with the unshakable belief that they are way more important to life than they actually are.”

GodSpiritualityAtheismHumilityHumbleArroganceFree WillPessimismArrogantAnthropocentrism
Book:F for Philosopher: A Collection of Funny Yet Profound Aphorisms
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“But the many are there. You've got to do something about them." "You've got to do something about them," Mr. Propter agreed. "But at the same time, there are circumstances in which you can't do anything. You can't do anything effective about any one if he doesn't choose or isn't able to collaborate with you in doing the right thing. For example, you've got to help people who are being killed off by malaria. But in practice you can't help them if they refuse to screen their windows and insist on taking walks near stagnant water in the twilight. It's exactly the same with the diseases of the body politic You've got to help people if they're under the menace of sudden revolution or slow degeneration. You've got to help. But the fact remains, nevertheless, that you can't help if they persist in the course of behaviour which originally got them into their trouble. For example, you can't preserve people from the horrors of war if they won't give up the pleasures of nationalism. You can't save them from slumps and depressions so long as they go on thinking exclusively in terms of money and regarding and regarding money as the supreme good. You can't avert revolution and enslavement if they will identify progress with the increase of centralization and prosperity with the intensifying of mass production. You can't preserve them from their collective madness and suicide if they persist in paying divine honours to ideals which are merely projections of their own personalities - in other words, if they insist on worshiping themselves...”

PoliticsSocietyCapitalismArroganceNationalismModernismEgoismAnthropocentrismBody PoliticReligious Superiority
Book:After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
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“Keiller finds extinction looming everywhere – species dying off at a far faster rate than scientists had thought possible only a few years ago. The emphasis on extinction means that the concerns of Robinson in Ruins rhyme with the preoccupations that have emerged in speculative realist philosophy, which has focused on the spaces prior to, beyond and after human life. In some respects, the work of philosophers such as Ray Brassier and Tim Morton re-stages the old confrontation between human finitude and the sublime which was the former subject of a certain kind of landscape art. But where the older sublime concentrated on local natural phenomenon such as the ocean or volcanic eruptions which could overwhelm and destroy the individual organism or whole cities, speculative realism contemplates the extinction, not only of the human world, but of life and indeed matter itself. The prospect of ecological catastrophe means that disjunction between the lived time of human experience and longer durations is now not just a question of metaphysical contemplation, but a matter of urgent political concern, as one of Robinson’s touchstones, Fredric Jameson, noted. ‘[A]s organisms of a particular life span,’ Jameson writes in his essay ‘Actually Existing Marxism’, we are poorly placed as biological individuals to witness the more fundamental dynamics of history, glimpsing this or that incomplete moment, which we hasten to translate into the alltoo-human terms of success or failure. But neither stoic wisdom nor the reminder of a longer-term view are really satisfactory responses to this peculiar existential and epistemological dilemma, comparable to the science-fictional one of beings inhabiting a cosmos they do not have organs to perceive or identify. Perhaps only the acknowledgement of this radical incommensurability between human existence and the dynamic of collective history and production is capable of generating new kinds of political attitudes; new kinds of political perception, as well as of political patience; and new methods for decoding the age as well, and reading the imperceptible tremors within it of an inconceivable future. Amongst its requiem for neoliberal England, Robinson in Ruins gives us some intimations of those imperceptible tremors and inconceivable futures.”

PhilosophyHopeLonelinessAnthropocentrismPolitcsPoltical Science
Book:Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures
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“There is no life without the conditions of life that variably sustain life, and those conditions are pervasively social, establishing not the discrete ontology of the person, but rather the interdependency of persons, involving reproducible and sustaining social relations, and relations to the environment and to non-human forms of life, broadly considered. This mode of social ontology (for which no absolute distinction between social and ecological exists) has concrete implications for how we re-approach the issues of reproductive freedom and anti-war politics. The question is not whether a given being is living or not, nor whether the being in question has the status of a “person”; it is, rather, whether the social conditions of persistence and flourishing are or are not possible. Only with this latter question can we avoid the anthropocentric and liberal individualist presumptions that have derailed such discussions.”

LifeSocialIndividualismPersonhoodAnthropocentrismButlerSocial Ontology
Book:Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?
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“The global power's domination of the rest of the world mirrors the hegemony of the human race over other living creatures. Now, it is not clear how this 'superiority' of the human species over all the others would be given up. Indifference to politics is said to be due to the disintegration of the social bond. In fact, it is quite the opposite. It is the wide scope for action within civil society and the intensification of communication networks - together with the promotion of a freedom whose perpetual benefits we enjoy, but of which we no longer have the concept - that create the absenteeism from oneself and from others of which political absenteeism is merely a symptom.”

ImperialismAnthropocentrismAbsenteeism
Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“We dwell in homes or work in sites that once displaced animals, we pay federal taxes that legalize the slaughter of animals for profit or pleasure, we travel in cars with leather seats over roads unfenced to prevent roadkill, we attend schools that allow animal experiments in biology classes, we take drugs once tested on animals, we buy newspapers that carry adds for the meat, egg, dairy and fur industries, we shop in stores that profit from the sale of animal products, we vote for politicians who pass laws favoring the meat, dairy, egg and hunting lobbies, we pay the salaries of federal and state judges who interpret a constitution that says nothing about the welfare or rights of animals and we embrace religions that give humans dominion over animals; and it’s a rare sermon where the sacredness of animals is sounded. ~ Colman McCarthy”

AnimalsCommodificationAnthropocentrismHuman Animal RelationsHuman ExceptionalismInterspecies InequalitySystemic Exploitation
Book:Animals and War: Confronting the Military-Animal Industrial Complex
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“Anthropomorphism is usually thought of as an illusion that arises like a blister in soft human minds: untrained, undisciplined, unhardened. There are good reasons for this: when we humanise the world, we may prevent ourselves from understanding the lives of other organisms on their own terms. But are there things this stance might lead us to pass over – or forget to notice?”

FungiAnthropocentrismAnthropomorphismFungusMycology
Book:Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures
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“There is an universal tendency amongst mankind to conceive all beings like themselves, and to transfer to every object those qualities, with which they are familiarly acquainted, and of which they are intimately conscious. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us. Hence the frequency and beauty of the prosopopoeia in poetry, where trees, mountains and streams are personified, and the inanimate parts of nature acquire sentiment and passion. (Section 3, paragraph 2).”

MaliceFallacyPersonificationAnthropocentrismTransferenceAnthropomorphismPersonify
Book:The Natural History of Religion
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“Is the term for the human species clearly defined? There is no authoritative definition of 'species'. The boundaries between biological populations are, by definition, fluid. If this wasn't the case, evolution could never have taken place – the principle is change, not being static. In particular, the often quoted criterion, that two different species cannot produce 'fertile offspring' is not consistent with reality. Primates produce fertile offspring, often not only between different species (white-handed gibbon and capped gibbon, hamadryas baboons and olive baboons) but also between different defined genera (such as the hanuman langur [Semnopithecus] and the Nilgiri langur [Presbytis]) and, this happens in the wild. The boundary between the 'species' human and other primates is therefore arbitrary from a biological point of view. There is no 'special characteristic feature' that could justify such a boundary. […]”

SpeciesBiologyDefinitionAnthropocentrismGenusBiocentrism
Book:The Dog and his Philosopher: A Call for Autonomy and Animal Rights
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“You cannot be truly humble, unless you truly believe that life can and will go on without you.”

LifeBelieveImportantHumorQuotesBeliefHumilityHumourImportanceQuoteProfoundHumbleArroganceThoughtfulSatireThought ProvokingSincereDeepInsightfulAphorismArrogantModestyModestQuotationsBeliefsMaximsSayingsSincerelyAdagesProverbsAphorismsMake You ThinkAxiomsAdageProverbSatiricalSayingEpigramsLife Goes OnQuotationGnomeMaximEpigramGnomesProvoke ThoughtMade Me ThinkAxiomDictumDictumsReallyAnthropocentrismTrulyAnthropocentric
Author:Mokokoma Mokhonoana
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“In the discoveries of science the harmony of the spheres is also now the harmony of life. And as the eerie illumination of science penetrates evermore deeply into the order of nature, the cosmos appears increasingly to be a vast system finely tuned to generate life and organisms of biology very similar, perhaps identical, to ourselves. All the evidence available in the biological sciences supports the core proposition of traditional natural theology - that the cosmos is a specially designed whole with life and mankind as a fundamental goal and purpose, a whole in which all facets of reality, from the size of galaxies to the thermal capacity of water, have their meaning and explanation in this central fact. Four centuries after the scientific revolution apparently destroyed irretrievably man's special place in the universe, banished Aristotle, and rendered teleological speculation obsolete, the relentless stream of discovery has turned dramatically in favor of teleology and design, and the doctrine of the microcosm is reborn. As I hope the evidence presented in this book has shown, science, which has been for centuries the great ally of atheism and skepticism, has become at last, in the final days of the second millennium, what Newton and many of its early advocates had so fervently wished - the "defender of the anthropocentric faith.”

SciencePurposeNewtonTheismIntelligent DesignAnthropocentrismFine TuningIsaac NewtonIdAnthropic PrincipleTeleology
Book:Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe
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“In the twentieth century nothing can better cure the anthropocentrism that is the author of all our ills than to cast ourselves into the physics of the infinitely large (or the infinitely small). By reading any text of popular science we quickly regain the sense of the absurd, but this time it is a sentiment that can be held in our hands, born of tangible, demonstrable, almost consoling things. We no longer believe because it is absurd: it is absurd because we must believe.”

ScienceBeliefAbsurdity20th CenturyMacroScaleAnthropocentrismMicro
Book:Around the Day in Eighty Worlds
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“I have a serious question." "I will give a serious answer." "Can a god be killed?" The humor drained from Roman's face. "Well, that depends on if you're a pantheist or a Marxist." "What's the difference?" "The first believes that divinity is the universe. The two are synonymous and nonexistent without each other. The second believes in anthropocentrism, seeing man in the center of the universe, and god as just an invention of human conscience. Of course, if you follow Nietzsche, you can kill God just by thinking about him.”

IfsThinkingMenGivingFirstsBelieveHumansWellsTwoFacesUniverseCoursesDifferencesAnswersSeeingSeriousDependsConscienceInventionDivinityMarxistDrainedCenter Of The UniverseAnthropocentrism
Author:Ilona Andrews
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“Humanity may destroy the possibilities for life on earth unless the freedom and power that we have acquired are channeled in new creative directions by a spiritual awareness and moral commitment that transcend nationalism, racism, sexism, religious sectarianism, anthropocentrism, and the dualism between human culture and nature. This is the great issue for the 1990s and the twenty-first century.”

FirstsHumansMayEarthSpiritualHumanityCultureReligiousMoralCreativeIssuesCenturyAwarenessPossibilityRacismCommitmentTwentiesContemplationNationalismSexismSectarianismSpiritual AwarenessDualismAnthropocentrism
Author:Steven Clark Rockefeller
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