Quotes About Humanity

When a man sits buried in a book, it is not the man that you see and know that is reading: deep down in him are antecedent generations--soldiers, pirates, martyrs, fading back to cave men. As he reads, the 'universal' book is calling to one of them.

Perhaps it was a failure right from the start: slave owners preaching freedom and equality. But it would be a lie, an evil lie, to say that the American experiment did not give the world a glorious and transcendent vision of human beings: worth affirming in their differences, vital in their contradiction. That is still a vision of human existence worth fighting for.

People adjust to their circumstances. People subject to the most barbaric cruelty can still delight in a baby's laugh or feel moments of perfect contentment lying on a grassy hillside in the sun. There is something beautiful in our capacity to accommodate atrocity, even if it can also be our undoing.

The capacity for evil is inherent in mankind, although some institutions promote it and others minimize it.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great German Protestant theologian who died opposing Hitler's holocaust, believed that the test of the morality of a society is how it treats its children. We flunk Bonhoeffer's test every hour of every day in America as we let the violence of guns and the violence of poverty relentlessly stalk and sap countless child lives."6

When we make friends then we change from being animals to being human.

On this world you have the animals and they have as much right to be on this world as us; and it's man who is the reason they are pushed to extinction. They're killing them for their tusks and their horns, and these fucking idiots, they think claws will give them sex appeal and they get all fucking sissy on you.

When I got off him, I spat the blood that was swamping my mouth in to his face, I looked down at him and it really looked like he was dying… shit! The ambulance arrived in about a minute and they got an oxygen mask straight on him and I could see the life draining out of him. You see, this is the problem; we are only human and flesh and blood.

nature, a phenomenon unrelated to humanity or even to life itself.

They all deserve to die. Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why. Because in all of the whole human race Mrs Lovett, there are two kinds of men and only two There's the one they put in his proper place And the one with his foot in the other one's face Look at me, Mrs Lovett, look at you. Now we all deserve to die Tell you why, Mrs. Lovett, tell you why. Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief For the rest of us death will be a relief We all deserve to die.

Because in all of the whole human race Mrs. Lovett, there are two kinds of men and only two There's the one staying put in his proper place And the one with his foot in the other one's face Look at me, Mrs Lovett, look at you. No, we all deserve to die Even you, Mrs Lovett, even I! Because the lives of the wicked should be made brief For the rest of us death will be a relief

Someone tell the story, Someone sing the song. Every now and then the country Goes a little wrong. Every now and then A madman's bound to come along. Doesn't stop the story Story's pretty strong.

Theres a hole in the world like a great black pit and its filled with people who are filled with shit

Even in hell, if a man was a man, you'd know it.

For the man crucified on the crossed machine guns Without name, without resurrection, without stars, His dark head heavy with death and his flesh long sour With the smell of his many prisons -- John Smith, John Doe, John Nobody -- oh, crack your mind for his name!

Our earth is but a small star in a great universe. Yet of it we can make, if we choose, a pane unvexed by war, untroubled by hunger or fear, undivided by senseless distinctions of race, color, or theory.

There was sadness in being a man, but it was a proud thing too.

When God became flesh, every ordinary human life was validated as sacred. The fact that God became human and spent most of His life in obscurity as a carpenter in a small village called Nazareth gives us perspective. Through the incarnation, we learn that every life has dignity and significance; every ordinary life matters.

The Nazis are regarded as animals in human form because they gassed, shot, or burned perhaps as many as six million Jews. Today the people of the United States are quite prepared, if provoked, to actually burn alive hundreds of millions of innocent men and women, young and old. I deliberately put the matter in such blunt terms because it is long past time to do so and because there is apparently no other way to start people thinking of the moral questions raised by nuclear weapons.

Narration, after all, isn't just a literary function. It represents the human capacity to tell stories in such a manner that they yield meaning. Television replaced this concerted quest for meaning with a frantic pursuit of wonder.

the essential work of literary art: they make us more human than we were before.

In fact, I'm willing to argue at this point that we are all Drooling Fanatics, that every single human being carries within him or her the need for music and that we differ only in matters of degree and expression.

they do the essential work of literary art: they make us more human than we were before. (from the Introduction to Tiny Beautiful Things by Cheryl Strayed)

All of us bear God's image, all are worthy to be loved, all can grow in the spirit of God.