Quotes About Humanity

A leader's first duty is to look after his or her people, especially those who are sick, hungry, or thirsty.

Man may trust man, Prince Elric, but perhaps we'll never have a truly sane world until men learn to trust mankind.

THE LESS OF a man I became, and the more of an automaton, so the dreams and half-memories ceased to plague me. It was as if they had deliberately driven me into this mindless rôle; so long as I continued to be a creature without remorse or conscience they would reward me with their absence. If I again showed signs of ordinary Humanity, then they would punish me with their presence.

One evening, after he'd read a piece about yet another savagery in Bosnia, I saw there were tears in his eyes. 'Don't it ever stop?' he said. 'I can mind Father telling that there'd be no more wars, not after his one. It shames me. It shames all of us. What's the good in reading, if that's all there is to read about?

I have no pity for them, but no hatred either

When people make wars, they make refugees.

As he did so, he held out his other hand in a gesture of friendship and reconciliation, a smile lighting he worn face. 'In an hour, maybe, or two,' he said, 'we will be trying our best again each other to kill. God only knows why we do it, and I think he has maybe forgotten why. Goodbye Welshman. We have shown them, haven't we? We have shown them that any problem can be solved between people if only they can trust each other. That is all it needs, no?

They fight a war and they do not know what it is for. Isn't that crazy. How can one man kill another and not know the reason why he does it, except that the other man wears a different colour uniform and speaks a different language?

As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves.

The first sentence of every novel should be: Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.

We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them.

Caravaggio was constantly diverted by the human element during burglaries. Breaking into a house during Christmas, he would become annoyed if the Advent calendar had not been opened up to the date to which it should have been.

a person who, as the line went, would live in many places and die everywhere.

People think a bomb is a mechanical object, a mechanical enemy. But you have to consider that somebody made it.

Kimse zenginler kadar kötü olamaz.

We are the real countries, not the boundaries drawn on maps with the names of powerful men.

All over the world there must be people like us, Anna had said then, wounded in some way by falling in love—seemingly the most natural of acts.

Ecology's implications for capitalism are too momentous for the capitalist to contemplate. They are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with the fate of humanity.

At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature—but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst. . . .

Curiously, the one bodily fluid of other people that doesn't disgust us is the one produced by the human alone: tears. Consider the sole type of used tissue you'd be willing to share.

Cooking is all about connection, I've learned, between us and other species, other times, other cultures (human and microbial both), but, most important, other people. Cooking is one of the more beautiful forms that human generosity takes; that much I sort of knew. But the very best cooking, I discovered, is also a form of intimacy.

We are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.

R. D. Laing once said there are three things human beings are afraid of: death, other people, and their own minds.

Weeds, as the field guides indicate, are plants particularly well adapted to man-made places. They don't grow in forests or prairies—in "the wild." Weeds thrive in gardens, meadows, lawns, vacant lots, railroad sidings, hard by dumpsters and in the cracks of sidewalks. They grow where we live, in other words, and hardly anywhere else.