Human beings are the only animal that thinks they change who they are simply by moving to a different place. Birds migrate but it's not quite the same thing.

As human beings we do change grow adapt perhaps even learn and become wiser.

As human beings we are vulnerable to confusing the unprecedented with the improbable. In our everyday experience if something has never happened before we are generally safe in assuming it is not going to happen in the future but the exceptions can kill you and climate change is one of those exceptions.

At best the family teaches the finest things human beings can learn from one another generosity and love. But it is also all too often where we learn nasty things like hate rage and shame.

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

I think Whitman more than any other poet possessed the gift of revealing to others the beauty of everything around us the beauty of nature the beauty of human beings.

My father always taught by telling stories about his experiences. His lessons were about morality and art and what insects and birds and human beings had in common. He told me what it meant to be a man and to be a Black man. He taught me about love and responsibility about beauty and how to make gumbo.

When I say that human beings are just gene machines one shouldn't put too much emphasis on the word 'just.' There is a very great deal of complication and indeed beauty in being a gene machine.

Let us change our traditional attitude to the construction of programs. Instead of imagining that our main task is to instruct a computer what to do let us concentrate rather on explaining to human beings what we want a computer to do.

I think my attitude to human beings has changed since leaving prison.