Human Priorities Quotes

People are spending way too much time thinking about climate change, way too little thinking about AI.

Culture is the tacit agreement to let the means of subsistence disappear behind the purpose of existence.

Health, money. That's what people worried about in the 14th century as much as today. I find it so much more interesting than the supposed activities of kings, queens, generals.

I think architectural appreciation would be a minor occupation after a nuclear war. People would just be happy to have something to eat.

A society that feels itself too poor to afford the preservation of wilderness is not worthy of the name civilization.

If people looked at the stars each night, they'd live a lot differently. When you look into infinity, you realize that there are more important things than what people do all day.

We live thetime that a match flickers; we pop the corkof a ginger-beer bottle, and the earthquake swallows us on the instant. Is it not odd, is it not incongruous, is it not, in the highest sense of human speech, incredible, that we should think so highly of the ginger-beer, and regard so little the devouring earthquake?

A man seldom thinks with more earnestness of anything than he does of his dinner.

Women—one half the human race at least—care fifty times more for a marriage than for a ministry.

It is astonishing how much more people are interested in lengthening life than improving it.

The world is not flat, and PCs are not, in the hierarchy of human needs, in the first five rungs.

People will always choose more money over more sex.

And yet we knew, for a certainty, that when first emissaries of Earth went walking among the planets, Earth's other sons would be dreaming not about such expeditions but about a piece of bread.

The ordinary surroundings of life which are esteemed by men (as their actions testify) to be the highest good, may be classed under the three heads — Riches, Fame, and the Pleasures of Sense: with these three the mind is so absorbed that it has little power to reflect on any different good.

If we continue to set human borders and the economy as our highest priorities, we will never come to grips with the destructiveness of our activities and institutions.

How prompt we are to satisfy the hunger and thirst of our bodies; how slow to satisfy the hunger and thirst of our souls!

The impression forces itself upon one that men measure by false standards, that everyone seeks power, success, riches for himself, and admires others who attain them, while undervaluing the truly precious thing in life.

But I felt that most of us in the world today gave priority to our personal interests.

Quite often when you help poor people, they don't think about the environment. They think about survival.

The whole problem with people is they don't know what matters and what doesn't.

The most important thing is that man should be the measure of all structures, including economic structures, and not that man be made to measure for those structures. The most important thing is not to lose sight of personal relationships - i.e., the relationships between man and his co-workers, between subordinates and their superiors, between man and his work, between this work and its consequences.

Man is the animal that intends to shoot himself out into interplanetary space, after having given up on the problem of an efficient way to get himself five miles to work and back each day.

As long as the human race is able to concern itself with more than mere survival, soccer will have its place.

I would not question the sincerity of vegetarians who take little interest in Animal Liberation because they give priority to other causes; but when nonvegetarians say that "human problems come first" I cannot help wondering what exactly it is that they are doing for human beings that compels them to continue to support the wasteful, ruthless exploitation of farm animals.

Spoiled is when humans put their pet's comfort before their own.