Only Human (by Eduardo Galeano)

Darwin told us we are cousins of the apes, not the angels. Later on, we learned we emerged from Africa's jungle and that no stork ever carried us from Paris. And not long ago we discovered that our genes are almost identical to those of mice.  Now we can't tell if we are God's masterpiece or the devil's bad joke.

We puny humans:
Exterminators of everything,
hunters of our own,
creators of the atom bomb, the hydrogen bomb, and the neutron bomb, which is healthiest of all bombs since it vaporizes people and leaves objects intact,
We, the only animals who invent machines,
the only ones who live at the service of the machines they invent,
the only ones who devour their home,
the only one who poison the water they drink and the earth that feeds them,
the only ones capable of renting or selling themselves, or renting or selling their fellow humans,
the only ones who kill for fun,
the only ones who torture,
the only ones who rape.

And also
the only ones who laugh,
the only ones who daydream,
the ones who make silk from the spit of a worm,
the ones who find beauty in rubbish,
the ones who discover colors beyond the rainbow,
the ones who furnish the voices of the world with new music,
and who create words so that
neither reality nor memory will be mute.

(Eduardo Galeano, Excerpt from Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone)