Quote

At this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up, what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future.

Lewis Thomas

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Lewis Thomas
Age: 80 †
Born: 1913
Born: November 25
Died: 1993
Died: December 3
Medical Writer
Naturalist
Physician
Poet
Writer
Flushing
Long Island
Growing
Infancy
Future
Luck
Right
Species
Needs
Evolution
Childhood
Early
Simply
Stage

More quotes by Lewis Thomas

Image
We still think of human disease as the work of an organized, modernized kind of demonology, in which the bacteria are the most visible and centrally placed of our adversaries. We assume that they must somehow relish what they do.
Lewis Thomas
Image
We hanker to go on, even in the face of plain evidence that long, long lives are not necessarily pleasurable in the kind of society we have arranged thus far. We will be lucky if we can postpone the search for new technologies for a while, until we have discovered some satisfactory things to do with the extra time.
Lewis Thomas
Image
We owe our lives to the sun... How is it, then, that we feel no gratitude?
Lewis Thomas
Image
The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology.
Lewis Thomas
Image
The greatest single achievement of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule DNA.
Lewis Thomas
Image
We're as clever as we think we are, but we'll be a lot cleverer when we learn to use not just one brain but to pool huge numbers of brains. We're at a level technologically where we can share information and think collectively about our problems. We do it in science all the time - there's no reason why we can't do it in other endeavors.
Lewis Thomas
Image
A multitude of bees can tell the time of day, calculate the geometry of the sun's position, argue about the best location for the next swarm. Bees do a lot of close observing of other bees maybe they know what follows stinging and do it anyway.
Lewis Thomas
Image
If you want to use a cliche you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society.
Lewis Thomas
Image
Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise.
Lewis Thomas
Image
It hurts the spirit, somehow, to read the word environments, when the plural means that there are so many alternatives there to be sorted through, as in a market, and voted on.
Lewis Thomas
Image
Medical knowledge and technical savvy are biodegradable. The sort of medicine that was practiced in Boston or New York or Atlanta fifty years ago would be as strange to a medical student or intern today as the ceremonial dance of a !Kung San tribe would seem to a rock festival audience in Hackensack.
Lewis Thomas
Image
The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance
Lewis Thomas
Image
We need science, more and better science, not for its technology, not for leisure, not even for health or longevity, but for the hope of wisdom which our kind of culture must acquire for its survival.
Lewis Thomas
Image
We spend our time sending messages to each other, talking and trying to listen at the same time, exchanging information. This seems to be our most urgent biological function it is what we do with our lives.
Lewis Thomas
Image
The human mind is not meant to be governed, certainly not by any book of rules yet written it is supposed to run itself, and we are obliged to follow it along, trying to keep up with it as best we can.
Lewis Thomas
Image
If we have learned anything at all in this century, it is that all new technologies will be put to use, sooner or later, for better or worse, as it is in our nature to do.
Lewis Thomas
Image
If we are to be destroyed we will do it ourselves by warfare with thermonuclear weaponry.
Lewis Thomas
Image
I can say, if I like, that social insects behave like the working parts of an immense central nervous system: the termite colony is an enormous brain on millions of legs the individual termite is a mobile neurone.
Lewis Thomas
Image
It is the very strangeness of nature that makes science engrossing. That ought to be at the center of science teaching. There are more than seven-times-seven types of ambiguity in science, awaiting analysis. The poetry of Wallace Stevens is crystal-clear alongside the genetic code.
Lewis Thomas
Image
The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.
Lewis Thomas