Anthropocentrism Quotes

“Nobody enjoys the company of others as intensely as someone who usually avoids the company of others.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“We owe a huge debt to Galileo for emancipating us all from the stupid belief in an Earth-centered or man-centered (let alone God-centered) system. He quite literally taught us our place and allowed us to go on to make extraordinary advances in knowledge.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“You cannot be truly humble, unless you truly believe that life can and will go on without you.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“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.”
― Julio Cortázar, Around the Day in Eighty Worlds

“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.”
― Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects

“To walk attentively through a forest, even a damaged one, is to be caught by the abundance of life: ancient and new; underfoot and reaching into the light. But how does one tell the life of the forest? We might begin by looking for drama and adventure beyond the activities of humans. Yet we are not used to reading stories without human heroes. This is the puzzle that informs this section of the book. Can I show landscape as the protagonist of an adventure in which humans are only one kind of participant? Over the past few decades many kinds of scholars have shown that allowing only human protagonists into our stories is not just ordinary human bias. It is a cultural agenda tied to dreams of progress through modernization. There are other ways of making worlds. Anthropologists have become interested, for example, in how substance hunters recognize other living beings as persons, that is protagonists of stories. Indeed, how could it be otherwise? Yet expectations of progress block this insight. Talking animals are for children and primitives. Their voices silent, we imagine wellbeing without them. We trample over them for our advancement. We forget that collaborative survival requires cross-species coordinations. To enlarge what is possible we need other kinds of stories, including adventures of landscapes.”
― Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

“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?”
― Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures

“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.”
― Michael Denton, Nature's Destiny: How the Laws of Biology Reveal Purpose in the Universe

“Human beings are important only to the survival of the human race.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Civilization has turned human beings into the worst thing to ever happen to planet earth.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Our arrogance as a species is only a few degrees away from us claiming that we invented, not discovered, fire.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Humans are trash.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Because of human pollution and overpopulation, the birth of a human being, like the death of a tree, is, to planet earth, a tragedy.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, P for Pessimism: A Collection of Funny yet Profound Aphorisms

“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...”
― Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan: A Novel

“Orcas may not be very intelligent humans, but humans are really stupid orcas”
― David Neiwert, Of Orcas and Men: What Killer Whales Can Teach Us

“What is unfair is, not life, but our demanding—as microscopic a part of life and as unnecessary to life as we are—that life happen as per our desires, which are always selfish … and almost always petty.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, P for Pessimism: A Collection of Funny yet Profound Aphorisms

“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).”
― David Hume, The Natural History of Religion

“One of the main goals of culture and religion is to make us fail to realize or remember that humans, too, are animals.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“The will to live is as intense in a weed as it is in a human.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“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.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“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.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, F for Philosopher: A Collection of Funny Yet Profound Aphorisms

“But the machine man, driving a dead tractor on land he does not know and love, understands only chemistry; and he is contemptuous of the land and of himself. When the corrugated iron doors are shut, he goes home, and his home is not the land.”
― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

“The anthropocentrism of most political philosophy is, to put it mildly, a massive failure.”
― Magnus Vinding, Reasoned Politics

“It is rather remarkable that the whole apparatus of nucleosynthesis, generation of long-lived radioactive elements, and the chemical constants that determine the freezing point of water and the properties of the silicate weathering reactions have conspired to permit the operation of the silicate weathering thermostat. The ‘anthropic’ principle would state that of all possible Universes, things have worked out this way because a Universe has to have something near these characteristics in order to allow us to be here to notice such things. A less anthropic—and probably more humble—view is that we evolved to take advantage of this particular characteristic of our Universe, and that other forms of life could evolve to make use of other geochemically stabilized habitats.”
― Raymond T. Pierrehumbert, Planetary Systems: A Very Short Introduction

“[A]s we know from the increasingly urgent issue of climate change, the environment changes as a result of human intervention, bearing the effects of our own powers to destroy the conditions of livability for human and non-human life-forms. This is yet another reason why a critique of anthropocentric individualism will turn out to be important to the development of an ethos of nonviolence in the context of an egalitarian imaginary.”
― Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind

“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”
― Anthony J. Nocella II, Animals and War: Confronting the Military-Animal Industrial Complex

“In a post-Enlightenment 'scientific' context, to challenge the axiom of human exceptionalism is to indulge in anthropomorphism, because while we might think we see manifestations of personhood in animal others, what we are really doing is attributing human characteristics to animals. This is because only humans can be persons.”
― Samantha Hurn, Humans and Other Animals: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Human-Animal Interactions

“The world began without man and will end without him”
― Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

“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.”
― Mira Grant, Into the Drowning Deep

“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.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures