Quotes About Humanity

The possibility that empathy is part of our primate heritage ought to makes us happy, but we're not in the habit of embracing our nature. When people commit genocide, we call them "animals". But when they give to the poor, we praise them for being "humane". We like to claim the latter behavior for ourselves.

Primates arouse a certain nervousness because they show us ourselves in a brutally honest light, reminding us,.....that we are mere 'naked apes.

Along with people in other creative professions, such as artists and musicians, many scientists experience this transcendence. I do so every day. For one, it's impossible to look an ape in the eye and not see oneself. There are other animals with frontally oriented eyes, but none that give you the shock of recognition of the ape's. Looking back at you is not so much an animal but a personality as solid and willful as yourself.

I sometimes try to imagine what would have happened if we'd known the bonobo first and the chimpanzee only later or not at all. The discussion about human evolution might not revolve as much around violence, warfare, and male dominance, but rather around sexuality, empathy, caring, and co-operation. What a different intellectual landscape we would occupy!" , Our Inner Ape

Language-trained apes often give the impression that they regard themselves as almost human, such as when, while sorting pictures of humans from those of other animals, they put their own portrait on the human pile. They obviously sympathize with the people that surround them: they want to fit in, and to be like them.

La auténtica empatía humana no se centra en uno mismo, sino que se orienta en el otro.

We humans will be diminished if we cannot even protect the animals closest to us, who share almost all of our genes, and who differ from us only by degree.

En vez de convertir a la humanidad en la medida de todas las cosas, tenemos que evaluar a las otras especies por lo que son ellas mismas. Al hacerlo, estoy seguro de que descubriremos muchos pozos mágicos, incluyendo algunos que por ahora están más allá de nuestra imaginación.

True empathy is not self-focused but other-oriented. Instead of making humanity the measure of all things, we need to evaluate other species by what they are. In doing so, I am sure we will discover many magic wells, including some as yet beyond our imagination.

We seek ecological validity in our studies and follow the advice of Uexküll, Lorenz, and Imanishi, who encouraged human empathy as a way to understand other species. True empathy is not self-focused but other-oriented. Instead of making humanity the measure of all things, we need to evaluate other species by what they are.

We can't return to this preindustrial way of life. We live in societies of a mind-boggling scale and complexity that demand quite a different organization than humans ever enjoyed in their state of nature. Yet, even though we live in cities and are surrounded by cars and computers, we remain essentially the same animals with the same psychological wants and needs.

humans are a strange lot. We have the power to analyze and explore the world around us, yet panic as soon as the evidence threatens to violate our expectations.

Charles Darwin's well-known observation that the mental difference between humans and other animals is one of degree rather than kind.

The dominant hypothesis remains that we carry the mark of Cain. For example, in his 2011 book The Better Angels of Our Nature, the Canadian-American psycholinguist Steven Pinker proposed that humanity needs civilization to keep its destructive instincts under control. Since his theory works only if our forebears were hyperaggressive characters, Pinker went for the chimpanzee as ancestral model and cheerfully swept bonobos under the rug, calling them "very strange primates.

When a bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the grounds of his color I say that philosophy has never saved anyone. When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men I say that intelligence has never saved anyone: and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men.

When someone strives & strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men, I say that intelligence has never saved anyone; and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men.

Superiority? Inferiority? Why not simply try to touch the other, feel the other, discover each other?

Man is human only to the extent to which he tries to impose himself on another man in order to be recognized by him. As long as he has not been effectively recognized by the other, it is this other who remains the focus of his actions. His human worth and reality depend on this other and on his recognition by the other. It is in this other that the meaning of his life is condensed.

We believe that an individual must endeavor to assume the universalism inherent in the human condition.

What counts today, the question which is looming on the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity must reply to this question, or be shaken to pieces by it.

Chaque fois qu'un homme a fait triompher la dignité de l'esprit, chaque fois qu'un homme a dit non à une tentative d'asservissement de son semblable, je me suis senti solidaire de son acte.

And the day when our human race has fully matured, it will not define itself as the sum of the inhabitants of the globe, but as the infinite unity of their reciprocities.

I do battle for the creation of a human world - that ism a world of reciprocal recognition.

We must not cultivate the spirit of the exceptional or look for the hero, another form of leader. We must elevate the people, expand their minds, equip them, differentiate them, and humanize them.