Quotes About Humanity

Because we're human and so beautifully imperfect, we get to practice using our tools on a daily basis. In this way, courage, compassion, and connection become gifts—the gifts of imperfection.

Look out into that audience again. These are people. Just people.

If we take a closer look at the origin of the word compassion, much like we did with courage, we see why compassion is not typically our first response to suffering. The word compassion is derived from the Latin words pati and cum, meaning "to suffer with

Everyone wants to know why customer service has gone to hell in a handbasket. I want to know why customer behavior has gone to hell in a handbasket. When we treat people as objects, we dehumanize them. We do something really terrible to their souls and to our own.

Just because you're standing in your office or your classroom or your studio doesn't mean that you can take emotion out of this process. You cannot. (P.8)

Compassion is fueled by understanding and accepting that we're all made of strength and struggle—no one is immune to pain or suffering. Compassion is not a practice of "better than" or "I can fix you"—it's a practice based in the beauty and pain of shared humanity.

In the past, jobs were about muscles, now they're about brains, but in the future they'll be about the heart. —MINOUCHE SHAFIK, director, London School of Economics

The bottom line is that we need each other. And not just the civilized, proper, convenient kind of need. Not one of us gets through this life without expressing desperate, messy, and uncivilized need. The kind we are reminded of when we come face-to-face with someone who is in a deep struggle.

sadness is important and we need it. Feeling sad is a normal response to loss or defeat, or even the perception of loss or defeat. To be human is to know sadness.

To feel is to be vulnerable. Believing that vulnerability is weakness is believing that feeling is weakness. And, like it or not, we are emotional beings.

Jeremy Bentham, the great utilitarian philosopher, once spiked this argument. He said, 'There are two types of people in the world, those who divide people into two types, and those who do not.

No matter how separated we are by what we think and believe, we are part of the same spiritual story.

In the past, jobs were about muscles, now they're about brains, but in the future they'll be about the heart.1 —MINOUCHE SHAFIK, director, London School of Economics

Connection to a larger humanity gives people more freedom to express their individuality without fear of jeopardizing belonging.

All lives matter, but not all lives need to be pulled back into moral inclusion. Not all people were subjected to the psychological process of demonizing and being made less than human so we could justify the inhumane practice of slavery.

All lives matter, but not all lives need to be pulled back into moral inclusion

When we treat people as objects, we dehumanize them. We do something really terrible to their souls and to our own. Martin Buber, an Austrian-born philosopher, wrote about the differences between an I-it relationship and an I-you relationship. An I-it relationship is basically what we create when we are in transactions with people whom we treat like objects--people who are simply there to serve us or complete a task. I-you relationships are characterized by human connection and empathy.

Empathy is a strange and powerful thing. There is no script. There is no right way or wrong way to do it. It's simply listening, holding space, withholding judgment, emotionally connecting, and communicating that incredibly

Perfect and bulletproof are seductive, but they don't exist in the human experience. We must walk in the arena, whatever it may be.

Not only do moments of collective emotion remind us of what is possible between people, but they also remind us of what is true about the human spirit.

Perfect and bulletproof are seductive, but they don't exist in the human experience.

others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize

When we degrade and diminish our humanity, even in response to being degraded and diminished, we break our own wild hearts.

I don't know. I really don't. All I know is that my life is better when I assume that people are doing their best. It keeps me out of judgment and lets me focus on what is, and not what should or could be.