Certainly the first true humans were unique by virtue of their large brains. It was because the human brain is so large when compared with that of a chimpanzee that paleontologists for years hunted for a half-ape, half-human skeleton that would provide a fossil link between the human and the ape.

Dance music is no longer a simple Donna Summer beat. It’s become a whole language that I find fascinating and exciting. Eventually, it will lose the dance tag and join the fore of rock.

Humanity at the centre of the primates, Homo sapiens, in humanity, is the end-product of a gradual work of creation, the successive sketches for which still surround us on every side.

I suppose we need not go mourning the buffaloes. In the nature of things, they had to give place to better cattle, though the change might have been made without barbarous wickedness.

I’m here as a product of process of evolution, which doesn’t make very many exceptions. And which rates life relatively cheaply.

It is hard for the ape to believe he descended from man.

A Religion of Evolution: that, when all is said and done, is what Man needs ever more explicitly if he is to survive and ‚superlive,‘ as soon as he becomes conscious of his power to ultra-hominize himself and of his duty to do so.

Publishing is in a kind of Jurassic age.

Sometimes what works 40 years ago doesn’t work today.

In less than a hundred years, we have found a new way to think of ourselves. From sitting at the center of the universe, we now find ourselves orbiting an average-sized sun, which is just one of millions of stars in our own Milky Way galaxy.

It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

Creationists make it sound as though a ‚theory‘ is something you dreamt up after being drunk all night.

You listen to Charlie Parker or John Coltrane before they found their voice, they sounded different. And when you listen to them after they found their voice on their instruments, they sound more confident and in control. Artists have that, too.

Every human being is under construction from conception to death.

The chimpanzee study was – well, it’s still going on, and I think it’s taught us perhaps more than anything else to be a little humble; that we are, indeed, unique primates, we humans, but we’re simply not as different from the rest of the animal kingdom as we used to think.

Man is a wingless animal with two feet and flat nails.

Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge – the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them.

What’s dangerous is not to evolve.

In the 1960s, people were trying to get away from the pop song format. Tracks were getting longer, or much, much shorter.

Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet – the only one in the whole Milky Way – with a century of transportation whoopee.

Everybody should have a fair deal; everybody should have the chance to life in this world. If we were evolved as human beings, we would hopefully be able to alleviate suffering in the world.

Everywhere on Earth, at this moment, in the new spiritual atmosphere created by the appearance of the idea of evolution, there float, in a state of extreme mutual sensitivity, love of God and faith in the world: the two essential components of the Ultra-human.

Democracy as a system has evolved into something that Thomas Jefferson didn’t anticipate.

I can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

I don’t want to just revolve. I want to evolve. As a man, as a human, as a father, as a lover.

Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.

Baseball changes through the years. It gets milder.

Human nature is not totally fixed, but on any realistic scale, evolutionary processes are much too slow to affect it.

The difference between humans and other mammals is that we know how to accessorize.

And while the law of competition may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department.

I think New York has evolved in my work just the way the city has.

There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.

The thing that’s been really surprising about the evolution of Facebook is – I think then, and I think now – that if we didn’t do this, someone else would have done it.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

If you think back to the beginning of cell phones, laptops or really any new technology, it’s always expensive.

One must change one’s tactics every ten years if one wishes to maintain one’s superiority.

Books are sharks… because sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.

The first step in the evolution of ethics is a sense of solidarity with other human beings.

Science arose from poetry… when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends.

Men do change, and change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn, and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass.

I had been told from school onwards that the best definition of a human being was man the tool-maker – yet I had just watched a chimp tool-maker in action. I remember that day as vividly as if it was yesterday.

It has actually been suggested that warfare may have been the principle evolutionary pressure that created the huge gap between the human brain and that of our closest living relatives, the anthropoid apes. Whole groups of hominids with inferior brains could not win wars and were therefore exterminated.

To say that Christ is the term and motive force of evolution, to say that he manifests himself as ‚evolver,‘ is implicitly to recognize that he becomes attainable in and through the whole process of evolution.

It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value.

Jobs are a centuries-old concept created during the Industrial Revolution. Despite the reality that we’re now deep in the Information Age, many people are studying for, or working at, or clinging to the Industrial Age idea of a safe, secure job.

Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

Someday, the capitalist system will disappear in the United States, because no social class system has been eternal. One day, class societies will disappear.

Transformation literally means going beyond your form.

The fact that the colors in the flower have evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; that means insects can see the colors. That adds a question: does this aesthetic sense we have also exist in lower forms of life?

America is not nearly done. We’re only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows… what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants – if they survive that long – will see.

Since the beginning, it was just the same. The only difference, the crowds are bigger now.

The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

Is evolution a theory, a system, or an hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true.

You don’t have the same mentality as you did five years ago – even one year. People are always changing, and I believe that everyone deserves the space to change and for people to recognize their change.

Fashion is made to become unfashionable.

The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.

The march of the human mind is slow.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

The over-all point is that new technology will not necessarily replace old technology, but it will date it. By definition. Eventually, it will replace it. But it’s like people who had black-and-white TVs when color came out. They eventually decided whether or not the new technology was worth the investment.