Quotes About Humanity

For Goddsakes, am I, who carries an entire world within me, a body?

You are summoned for no reason other than that you are a Jew, as if Jew were a mass term comparable, say, to water or salt. Here is a bit of water, we say, and any sample of it will do. All water manifests itself the same interchangeable water properties. That a Nazi should think this way about Jews is not in the least surprising. Mass terms, mass murders, mass graves: they are all of a piece.

Kindness and gentleness never had a gender, and neither did empathy.

I look over at my hero shelf and see Philip Levine, Rainer Maria Rilke, Virginia Woolf, Shunryu Suzuki, Adrienne Rich, Pablo Neruda, Subcomandante Marcos, Eduardo Galeano, James Baldwin. These books are, if they are instructions at all, instructions in extending our identities out into the world, human and nonhuman, in imagination as a great act of empathy that lifts you out of yourself, not locks you down into your gender. ("80 Books No Woman Should Read")

We make ourselves large or small, here or there, in our empathies.

There are good and great books on the Esquire list, though even Moby-Dick, which I love, reminds me that a book without women is often said to be about humanity, but a book with women in the foreground is a woman's book.

Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met.

It's tempting to ask why if you fed your neighbors during the time of the earthquake and fire, you didn't do so before or after.

Discrimination is training in not identifying or empathizing with someone because they are different in some way, in believing the differences mean everything and common humanity nothing.

The unexamined life is not worth living, as the aphorism goes, but perhaps an honorable and informed life requires examining others' lives, not just one's own. Perhaps we do not know ourselves unless we know others. And if we do, we know that nobody is nobody.

The evolutionary argument for altruism could draw from [Victor] Frankl to argue that we need meaning and purpose in order to survive, and need them so profoundly we sometimes choose them over survival.

Silence is what allows people to suffer without recourse, what allows hypocrisies and lies to grow and flourish, crimes to go unpunished. If our voices are essential aspects of our humanity, to be rendered voiceless is to be dehumanized or excluded from one's humanity. And the history of silence is central to women's history.

Stories like yours and worse than yours are all around, and your suffering won't mark you out as special, though your response to it might.

The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity, so there's another kind of success in becoming conscious that matters and that is up to you and nobody else and within your reach.

Opportunistic theft and burglary are, historically, rare in American disasters, rare enough that many disaster scholars consider it one of the "myths" of disaster. Some such opportunism happened in Katrina. The first thing worth saying about such theft is who cares if electronics are moving around without benefit of purchase when children's corpses are floating in filthy water and stranded grandmothers are dying of heat and dehydration?

Even if we can't completely comprehend, we might care.

as a shout-out to one of the more unpleasant men who have explained things to me: Dude, if you're reading this, you're a carbuncle on the face of humanity and an obstacle to civilization. Feel the shame.

The sheer differentness of the past, the reminder that everything changes, has always felt liberatory to me; to know that this moment will pass is freeing. There have been, there will be, other ways to be human. But the loss that is not gradual evolution but evition and erasure is not liberatory at all.

The sheer differentness of the past, the reminder that everything changes, has always felt liberatory to me; to know that this moment will pass is freeing. There have been, there will be, other ways to be human. But the loss that is not gradual evolution but eviction and erasure is not liberatory at all.

James's investigation concluded that human beings respond with initiative, orderliness, and helpfulness; they remain calm; and suffering and loss are transformed when they are shared experiences.

What gives me hope is that human history is full of examples of people across the ages who have risen to face the great challenges of their time and have succeeded. Victory is not the arrival in some promised land; it is the series of imperfect victories along the way that edge us closer to building the critical mass that eventually shifts the status quo.

It's hard to say what difference we make, but we meet people who are hungry, people who bless us, and people who turn away because they're busy shooting up, or crack has taken away their appetites, or suffering has driven them mad. Few remember that there was no significant US homeless population before the 1980s, that Ronald Reagan's new society and economy created these swollen ranks of street people.

At large in disaster are two populations: a great majority that tends toward altruism and mutual aid and a minority whose callousness and self-interest often become a second disaster.

often the worst behavior in the wake of a calamity is on the part of those who believe that others will behave savagely and that they themselves are taking defensive measures against barbarism.