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.

Beauty is also submitted to the taste of time, so a beautiful woman from the Belle Epoch is not exactly the perfect beauty of today, so beauty is something that changes with time.

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

I’ve written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.

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.

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

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

Trap is new. It didn’t start yesterday, but when I was 5, it didn’t exist – not even in the U.S. I’ve evolved with the music.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?

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.

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

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

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

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

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it’s a very poor scheme for survival.

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.

I don’t like celebrity programmes – but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.

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

War will never cease until babies begin to come into the world with larger cerebrums and smaller adrenal glands.

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.

When we started, a lot of bands sounded really different from one another.

Acorns were good until bread was found.

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.

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

Evolution has ensured that our brains just aren’t equipped to visualise 11 dimensions directly. However, from a purely mathematical point of view it’s just as easy to think in 11 dimensions, as it is to think in three or four.

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.

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?

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

I read the ‚Old Testament‘ all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read ‚The Origin Of Species‘, hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense.

I do not look upon these United States as a finished product. We are still in the making.

The earth’s crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.

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.

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

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.

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.

Beauty is the bait which with delight allures man to enlarge his kind.

Man, unlike anything organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

The year 2100 will see eugenics universally established. In past ages, the law governing the survival of the fittest roughly weeded out the less desirable strains. Then man’s new sense of pity began to interfere with the ruthless workings of nature. As a result, we continue to keep alive and to breed the unfit.

Thought once awakened does not again slumber; unfolds itself into a System of Thought; grows, in man after man, generation after generation, – till its full stature is reached, and such System of Thought can grow no farther, but must give place to another.

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.

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.

A process which led from the amoeba to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress though whether the amoeba would agree with this opinion is not known.

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.

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

We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.

People are more aware now of cities and of different ways of life. I suppose the writing I do is a bit in the past, and I’m not sure it’s the kind of writing I would do if I were starting now.

What’s dangerous is not to evolve.

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.

I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point?

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

What religion a man holds, to what race he belongs, these things are not important; the really important thing is this knowledge: the knowledge of God’s plan for men. For God has a plan, and that plan is evolution.

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.

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn’t take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.

The world moves, and ideas that were once good are not always good.

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

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

Every human being is under construction from conception to death.