Quotes About Humanity

A work of art gives testimony to what it is to be a human being. It bears witness, it extracts meaning. A work of art is also the clearest nonphysical way that emotions is communicated from one human being to another. The emotion isn't referred to; it is re-created. The emotion shows us that our most private feelings are in fact shared feelings. And this offer us some relief from our existential isolation. (p: 10)

Anyone out without the excuse of a dog should be handcuffed and searched for loneliness.

Stephen G. Post

Jerry says Lewis shouldn't hold it against Harley. He didn't know what he was doing. When the whole world hurts, you bite it, don't you?

It's not easy, being a terrible person.

By locating our consciousness in only one biological oscillator, the brain, we blinded ourselves to perceptions that have been common to human beings since they emerged from this Earth. In gaining a reductionist understanding of the world, we lost touch with the essential nature of the Earth and ourselves.

The world is not a static backdrop across which humans can move, building their suburbs where they will, the only intelligent actors on the planet. They call it the American dream, as George Carlin once put it, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

As Anthony Trewavas once put it, "The use of the term 'vegetable' to describe unthinking or brain-dead human beings perhaps indicates the general attitude [toward plants].

Because the Nazis taught me this: There is a Hitler inside each of us and if we do not heal the Hitler inside of ourselves, then the violence, it will never stop.

There is an embedded assumption in evolutionary theory that the human race came from some prehuman source and through natural selection is heading someplace incredible, some peak of evolution that is our ultimate destination. This belief naturally engenders the perspective that the human achievements of the past were all right for our ancestors, but in the here-and-now are obviously primitive and hopelessly old-fashioned.

the Nazis taught me this: There is a Hitler inside each of us and if we do not heal the Hitler inside of ourselves, then the violence, it will never stop.

Unless mankind redesigns itself by changing our DNA through altering our genetic makeup, computer-generated robots will take over our world.

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

I think computer viruses should count as life ... I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image.

I don't think the human race will survive the next thousand years, unless we spread into space.

As long as man is persuaded that he can make even the smallest contribution to his salvation, he remains self-confident and does not utterly despair of himself.

Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.

I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.

Homo sapiens [are] a tiny twig on an improbable branch of a contingent limb on a fortunate tree.

Science is an integral part of culture. It's not this foreign thing, done by an arcane priesthood. It's one of the glories of the human intellectual tradition.

Geology gave us the immensity of time and taught us how little of it our own species has occupied.

The realization and the humbling power of knowing that life is not a human thing could go a long way toward making us human.

I had to slow down. If I was going to listen to Venice properly I needed to hear the cadence of the place. I needed to stand still. <...> I thought of Whitman observing the parade of humanity with lewd concentration. Walt had a good ear. He loved opera and knew how to sit perfectly still.

We're lovable in the ordinary.