“On the scale of worlds--to say nothing of stars or galaxies--humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.”
“A blade of grass is a commonplace on Earth; it would be a miracle on Mars. Our descendants on Mars will know the value of a patch of green. And if a blade of grass is priceless, what is the value of a human being?”
“You’re an interesting species. An interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.”
“The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.”
“For I felt that without a common bond uniting men, without a continuous current of shared thought and feeling circulating through the social system, like blood coursing through the body, there could be no living worthy of being called human.”
“A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.”
“One great part of every human existence is passed in a state which cannot be rendered sensible by the use of wideawake language, cutanddry grammar and goahead plot.”
“At the very moment that humans discovered the scale of the universe and found that their most unconstrained fancies were in fact dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milky Way Galaxy, they took steps that ensured that their descendants would be unable to see the stars at all.”
“For a million years humans had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of the vault of heaven. In the last few thousand years they began building and emigrating to the cities. ”
“If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? ”
“We all have human feelings, emotions, and thoughts. If we don’t spend time with the Lord, we become dominated by them. But when we spend time with God, our unforgiveness, doubt, lust, hate, anxiety, and sadness becomes forgiveness, faith, purity, love, peace, and joy. ”
“I don’t mean to be rude, but I think it is ridiculous to have ears on the sides of one’s head. It certainly looks ridiculous. You ought to take a peek in the mirror some day and see for yourself.”
“Why did the English language have so few words for green? Every leaf and every tree had its own shade of green. Another example of how far Nature was still ahead of humans. ”
“People, shadows, good, bad, Heaven, Hell: all of these were names, labels, that was all. Humans had created these opposites: Nature recognized no opposites. Even life and death weren’t opposites in Nature: one was merely an extension of the other.”
“Humans had it really easy. They were big and slow, but they didn’t have to live in damp burrows waiting for daft old women to let the fire go out. They went wherever they wanted and they did whatever they liked. The whole world belonged to them.”
″‘You is trying to change the subject,’ the Giant said sternly. ‘We is having an interesting babblement about the taste of the human bean. The human bean is not a vegetable.‘”
″‘Ah, but they is not killing their own kind,’ the BFG said. ‘Human beans is the only animals that is killing their own kind.’
‘Don’t poisonous snakes kill each other?’ Sophie asked. She was searching desperately for another creature that behaved as badly as the human.
‘Even poisnowse snakes is never killing each other,’ the BFG said.”
“Most humans manage to squander their free time, as free time makes them dysfunctional, lazy, and unmotivated—the busier they get, the more active they are at other tasks.”
“Humans are not sleeping the way nature intended. The number of sleep bouts, the duration of sleep, and when sleep occurs has all been comprehensively distorted by modernity.”
“Humans are not the protagonists of this planet’s story. If there is a main character, it is life itself, which makes of earth and starlight something more than earth and starlight. But in the age of the Anthropocene, humans tend to believe, despite all available evidence, that the world is here for our benefit.”
“On earth, Sky Mother created humans, her children of blood and bone. In the heavens she gave birth to the gods and goddesses. Each would come to embody a different fragment of her soul.”
“And now they’ve got to change their minds about the world. It’s different from what they’ve learned. It’s a world where humans take the first place. Human beings master them. They have to obey. Humans are the most important of all. But they’ll soon learn.”
“Humans are fundamentally good, they say. And that may well be true. But you can’t make it too easy on them, those good humans. Otherwise they might go bad all of a sudden.”
“The tree was a friend to all, and it had one human friend, who as a child had seen it first when trailing in summer after her father hunting the otters of the brook.”
“Humans then encounter a malevolent and superior alien species called the Qu. The Qu’s religion motivates them to remake the universe through genetic engineering. A short war follows in which humanity is defeated. ”
“They were lucky enough to own a young married couple of humans named Mr. and Mrs. Dearly, who were gentle, obedient, and unusually intelligent—almost canine at times.”