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[T]he only species on earth which prides itself on its intelligence is the only one with the intelligence necessary, and possibly sufficient, to render itself extinct tomorrow.

— Lewis White Beck

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Source: Lewis White Beck, "Extraterrestrial Intelligent Life" in Extraterrestrials Science and Alien Intelligence ( Regis Jr., Edward. Ed., 1985), Part III, pp. 9-10
Source quality: Precise citation Points to a specific work with a page, chapter, date or similar locator, so you can look it up.

More by Lewis White Beck

It is not my place to tell you whether there is indefeasible ignorance of ultimate reality. I am ignorant of whether there is or is not. But you should think of these things because there are no things more important, though there are no questions more difficult or less answerable. But one's whole life may be changed if one changes his mind about these questions.

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Intelligence

More quotes by Lewis White Beck

If you believe that you are not a machine, but that I am (then) I do not know why you are reading this book".

In order to know and to act, it is necessary both to see and to think.

Lewis White Beck Essays on Kant and Hume (1978)

Whatever plausibility the machine theory has- and it has much plausibility and is a rich model for psychology and neurology- it gains by being associated with a self-exemption clause.

The quest for other, and better, forms of life, society, technology, ethics, and law may not reveal that they are actually elsewhere; but it may in the long run help us to make some of them actual on earth.

Myth, religion and now science-fiction with their tales of benevolent and malevolent extraterrestrial beings are commentaries on the human condition. I believe even responsible scientific speculation and expensive technology of space exploration in search for other life are the peculiarly modern equivalent of angeology and Utopia or of demonology and apocalypse.

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Like every 'intellectual', a philosophy teacher is a petty bourgeois. When he opens his mouth, it is petty-bourgeois ideology that speaks: its resources and ruses are infinite.

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Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Lewis White Beck (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.