At Least Know This Quotes

“We have magnificent brains—and use them to believe nonsense and behave as fools. . . . We are enslaved to delusions and too often the servants of subconscious biases. . . . Our great challenge is to use our brains to overcome our brains.”
― Guy P. Harrison, At Least Know This: Essential Science to Enhance Your Life

“Language connects us to people not only in the present but also throughout history. Through language, oral and written, we join minds, network, and amplify our intelligence.”
― Guy P. Harrison, At Least Know This: Essential Science to Enhance Your Life

“When we transitioned to a species that relies so heavily on cognitive abilities, we became the most powerful and profoundly weird creatures of all time. Right now, more than 7.6 billion people carry inside their heads a three-pound blob of magic, an electrochemical storm of genius and creative madness that is unprecedented and unsurpassed in this planet’s 4.5 billion years of natural history. This is who humans became long ago, and this is who you are now. You are one more unique link in a long, living chain of fantastic inventiveness and brilliant imagination.”
― Guy P. Harrison, At Least Know This: Essential Science to Enhance Your Life

“Every person is a collective, a vast and complex gathering of interdependent life. Any description of ‘human’ must acknowledge these intimate strangers. Our bond with microbes is such that they are not so much riders, parasites, and assistants as part human. And we, it’s becoming increasingly clear, may need to begin thinking of ourselves as part microbe.”
― Guy P. Harrison, At Least Know This: Essential Science to Enhance Your Life

“In attempting to know, we engage in grand and meaningful acts. We use our human brains as time machines, to see and learn from the distant past and to travel forward thousands, millions, and billions of years. This young, patchwork organ that evolved to help ancient primates find food and water, maintain group relationships, achieve sexual intercourse, and imagine the next best tool now carries us to the very ends of the universe and beyond.”
― Guy P. Harrison, At Least Know This: Essential Science to Enhance Your Life

“Racism is an avoidable culture clash masquerading as inescapable biological warfare.”
― Guy P. Harrison, At Least Know This: Essential Science to Enhance Your Life

“Find joy in existence. We live in good times. Now is somewhere between the beginning and the end of everything. . . . Collectively and individually, we must never stop exploring, imagining, experimenting, learning, and solving problems. This should not be difficult for any of us, because it is only human to do these things. This is who we are. It was the way of those remarkable Africans not so long ago in prehistory, and it can be your way now. The closer you look, the more you will see. The more you learn, the more alive and awake you will become.”
― Guy P. Harrison, At Least Know This: Essential Science to Enhance Your Life

“Our ancestors made the unusual leap from prey to predator, from scavenger to master, by analyzing threats, talking about them, sharing ideas with others, and then trying out those ideas.”
― Guy P. Harrison, At Least Know This: Essential Science to Enhance Your Life