A Quote by David Suzuki

Humans are distinguished from other species by a massive brain that enables us to imagine a future and influence it by what we do in the present. By using experience, knowledge and insight, our ancestors recognized they could anticipate dangers and opportunities and take steps to exploit advantages and avoid hazards.

David Suzuki

Quote Topics

Experience Future Knowledge Advantages Ancestors Anticipate Avoid Brain Could Dangers Distinguished Enables Exploit Hazards Humans Imagine Influence Insight Massive Opportunities Other Our Present Recognized Species Steps Take Us Using

Quote Author

David Suzuki
Canadian - Scientist
Born: March 24, 1936

Is he a dread genetic determinist, or a dread environmental determinist? He is neither, of course, for both these species of bogeyman are as mythical as werewolves. By increasing the information we have about the various causes of the constraints that limit our current opportunities, he has increased our powers to avoid what we want to avoid, prevent what we want to prevent. Knowledge of the roles of our genes, and the genes of the other species around us, is not the enemy of human freedom, but one of its best friends.

Daniel Dennett

We are always looking ahead to anticipate what next, and our unique innovation architecture enables us to take an innovation-led approach to help our clients invent the future.

Pierre Nanterme

Imagine for a moment your own version of a perfect future. See yourself in that future with everything you could wish for at this very moment fulfilled. Now take the memory of that future and bring it here into the present. Let it influence how you will behave from this moment on.

Deepak Chopra

Clearly, we are a species that is well connected to other species. Whether or not we evolve from them, we are certainly very closely related to them. A series of mutations could change us into all kinds of intermediate species. Whether or not those intermediate species are provably in the past, they could easily be in our future.

George M. Church

The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species.

Carl Sagan

I've never really understood how people cannot value the future, or think that the world is going down a fast slippery slope of degradation. No, I don't think so; this is just what it's going to take to wake us up, and allow us to do what our ancestors did. You know, our ancestors brought us here by tooth and claw. A lot of people perished, a lot of pre-humans perished. Life has never been easy. Why should it be easy for us?

Gordon Hempton

Sickness is the natural state in which we humans reside. We occasionally fall into brief brackets of health, only to return to our fevers, our infections, our rapid, minute mutations, which take us toward death even as they evolve us, as a species, into some ill-defined future.

Lauren Slater

Fragility of modern world leaves me with the idea we'd better anticipate what's going on. We take our right steps today and now. And we'd better avoid, that we are overdependent on, let's say, the internet.

Werner Herzog

The improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man's existence: as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.

Henry David Thoreau

Man can only be certain about the present moment. But is that quite true either? Can he really know the present? Is he in a position to make any judgment about it? Certainly not. For how can a person with no knowledge of the future understand the meaning of the present? If we do not know what future the present is leading us toward, how can we say whether this present is good or bad, whether it deserves our concurrence, or our suspicion, or our hatred?

Milan Kundera

Our ancestors are looking for us even if we're not looking for them. And by our ancestors I mean our bloodlines and the ancestors of the place where we live and our spiritual kin who go beyond our biological families. We could be walking around carrying an entire ancestral history of the wrong kind for us.

Robert Moss

Humans are an infant species, a mere 150,000 years old. But, armed with a massive brain, we've not only survived, we've used our wits to adapt to and flourish in habitats as varied as deserts, Arctic tundra, tropical rainforests, wetlands and high mountain ranges.

David Suzuki

The liberties of our country, the freedoms of our civil Constitution are worth defending at all hazards; it is our duty to defend them against all attacks. We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors. They purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure and blood. It will bring a mark of everlasting infamy on the present generation – enlightened as it is – if we should suffer them to be wrested from us by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them by the artifices of designing men.

Samuel Adams

In the age of revolution it is not knowledge that produces new wealth, but insight - insight into opportunities for discontinuous innovation. Discovery is the journey; insight is the destination. You must become your own seer.

Gary Hamel

There is an obvious evolutionary explanation for the scarcity of altruistic saints: Without a strong predilection for their own interests, our ancestors would have been unlikely to survive, reproduce, and give their own offspring a chance of doing the same. Now conditions have changed and for most of us, surviving and reproducing isn't such a struggle but we still carry the genes of our ancestors and they influence - not determine, but influence - our behavior.