Quotes About Humanity

Man is the highest essence of man, hence with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable essence.

At the same pace that mankind masters nature, man seems to become enslaved to other men or to his own infamy. Even the pure light of science seems unable to shine but on the dark background of ignorance. All our invention and progress seem to result in endowing material forces with intellectual life, and in stultifying human life into a material force. - Speech at anniversary of the People's Paper, April 1856

The standpoint of the old materialism is civil society; the standpoint of the new is human society, or social humanity. - Theses On Feuerbach (1845)

The proletariat is the agent of this emancipation because it is the only class whose particular interest is synonymous with he general interests of humanity. And it is charged with this supreme mission precisely because it is the most exploited and hence most dehumanized class in existing society.

Cilv?kiem pat?k tr?t m?les un kladzin?t. Cilv?ks nav vis c?lies no p?rti?a, bet gan no vistas.

One's own life seemed puny against the background of so much history.

I think there is something wrong with the human race. It undermines everything one would like to believe in, don't you think?

Sometimes I would like to cry. I close my eyes. Why weren't we designed so that we can close our ears as well? (Perhaps because we would never open them.) Is there some way that I could accelerate my evolution and develop earlids?

If she had been in charge of designing the human race she would have gone about things differently. (A golden shaft of light through the ear for conception perhaps and a well-fitting hatch somewhere modest for escape nine months later.)

By the end of the war there was nothing about men and women that surprised him. Nothing about anything really. The whole edifice of civilization turned out to be constructed from an unstable mix of quicksand and imagination.

Some people were complete in themselves, as if born from the earth or the ocean, like some of the gods. Which was not a compliment. The gods were ruthlessly indifferent to humanity.

So much for progress. How quickly civilization could dissolve into its more ugly elements.

For now indeed is the race of iron; and men never cease from labour and sorrow by day and from perishing by night.

Nothing feebler does earth nurture than man, Of all things breathing and moving.

Man is neither good nor bad; he is born with instincts and abilities.

Christian minds have been conformed to the modern spirit: the spirit, that is, that spawns great thoughts of man and leaves room for only small thoughts of God.

Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals, so that unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape, he is the shaper of the landscape.

There must be something unique about man because otherwise, evidently, the ducks would be lecturing about Konrad Lorenz, and the rats would be writing papers about B. F. Skinner.

The dignity of man is vindicated as much by the thinker and poet as by the statesman and soldier.

In its amplest meaning History includes every trace and vestige of everything that man has done or thought since first he appeared on the earth.

Never did Poesy appear So full of heaven to me, as when I saw how it would pierce through pride and fear To the lives of coarsest men.

One must be a living man and a posthumous artist.

Science had better not free the minds of men too much, before it has tamed their instincts.

To study men, we must look close by; to study man, we must learn to look afar; if we are to discover essential characteristics, we must first observe differences.