Some spread wings to fly and some spread their roots

There are only two lasting bequests we can hope to give our children. One of these is roots, the other, wings. —Hodding Carter, 1953 (the earliest version of this quote.) Later, we have seen: "Good parents give their children Roots and Wings." --Jonas Salk and “Give the ones you love wings to fly, roots to come back and reasons to stay.” —Dalai Lama XIV

These lovely quotes use roots and wings as metaphors for the goals of child rearing. Roots mean a connection to love and home, a sound foundation for the future. Wings mean to fly away and become independent, while exercising the values they have learned while perhaps discovering new values for themselves.

I think the quote listed in the question is unpleasant glurge, because it implies that many have only one of two critical requirements for living. They will either be stuck in the mud, unable to be independent and think for themselves, or they’ll be flapping around aimlessly without any basic foundation of values to guide them. In other words, the interpretation is that a quote can be incorrectly re-quoted in such a way as to screw up the meaning of the original quote.

We would most likely have bat-like wings and similar bodies as bats. Since we are day dwellers, it is likely our eyesight would be our main sense. Our bones would be hollow and fragile, and our arm (wing) muscles strong. It now depends if we were quadrupedal or hexapedal (separate arms and wings). If we were quadrupedal, we would have problems on handling things, but if we were hexapedal, that would be just neat. Our houses would be high and large, so we could fly in and move around. Tenements would be high so we could simply fly in. I would go to work by flying.

If humans evolved to have wings we would be unrecognizable as a species. We evolved the specific way we did because of the threats present in the environments we made our habitats in. If we were a flying species our bodies would have had to go through a lot of modifications in order for us to work effectively as flying creatures. Literally everything about us would be so different that it would be a stretch to think of the resultant creatures as human.

Now, if we're going the fantasy route here, where you mean we evolved to have wings coming out of our backs, like the traditional images of angels, it would be a different matter. Firstly, the wings would be useless and vestigial at best. We have neither the muscle mass nor the proper structures in our backs to facilitate using the wings in any meaningful way. Let's say then that we developed muscle and tendons and the proper joints and foundations in our shoulder blades to make it so we can move the wings.

Well, first, the weight would be very difficult. Hopefully the muscles we developed are strong enough to constantly hold the wings to our backs and not cause them to tear away from our bodies if we attempted to stretch them out. Honestly, due to placement, weight and the relatively small surface area in which the wings are joined to our bodies, this concept of them tearing from us is the most likely.

Ignoring that though, let's tackle the next problem: weight. Not the weight of the wings this time, but our own weight. We aren't built light enough for flight. Birds have highly specialized hollow bone structures designed to make them weigh less and thus be able to take off. Heavy objects, like airplanes, have to reach a certain speed to take off, in which they have literally forced the speed and change in pressure above and below the wings of the plane to make it so take off is possible. Humans cannot run fast enough to make this happen, and also, this method really only applies to fixed wing flight.

The next problem we face is that when you consider our body structures, wings on our backs, or even in place of our arms, could never work. In superhero comics and cartoons when you see a winged character in flight their back ends are level with their flying body. In a character like Superman, who flies through alien means, this is fine. In a character like Hawkgirl, it makes no sense. If we flew by wings mounted on our backs, our bodies wouldn't lift on their own. Our legs would be dangling down towards the Earth, making us fly in a constant awkward 7 shape. This is hardly aerodynamic. Then there is the question of energy and food consumption.

Flying manually would require a great deal of energy to maintain. Due to the awkward shape of our bodies during flight, we'd never be able to conserve energy like an albatross by locking our wings and gliding. We would constantly have to be flapping our wings hard enough and fast enough to maintain flight. Also, the higher you fly, the thinner the air. On top of the energy required to maintain flight, the lesser oxygen would make it doubly hard to maintain such an exertion for any amount of time. These are just the faults that come to me off the top of my head. I have always wanted wings and to be able to fly, but without magic to support the act, the concept of a human with wings being able to fly is just not feasible with out body formation and requirements. Cheers!