Quotes About Humanity

For every scientist who dedicates his life to helping humanity, there are ten thousand fools who are just as willing to destroy. —PTOLEMY, Zenith Archives

Humans tried to develop intelligent machines as secondary reflex systems, turning over primary decisions to mechanical servants. Gradually, though, the creators did not leave enough to do for themselves; they began to feel alienated, dehumanized, and even manipulated. Eventually humans became little more than decisionless robots themselves, left without an understanding of their natural existence.

Despite their biological flaws, human beings continue to see things that our most sophisticated sensors cannot detect, and they understand strange concepts that gelcircuitry minds cannot comprehend. It is no surprise, then, that so many of them go insane. —Erasmus Dialogues

adverse circumstances, every creature becomes something else, evolving or devolving. What makes us human is that we know what we once were, and—let us hope—we remember how to change back. Ambassador Cammar Pilru, Dispatches in Defense of Ix

It is often easier for us to destroy each other than it is to resolve our differences. Such is the cosmic joke of human nature!

Humans must never submit to animals. —Bene Gesserit Teaching

It seemed to Jessica that love was something a machine could not experience, and humans had defeated thinking machines in the Butlerian Jihad, millennia ago. But if humans were the victors, why did this remnant of non-humanity—the savagery of the gom jabbar—thrive in one of the Great Schools? Savagery was as much a part of the human psyche as love. One could not exist without the other.

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind. Chief commandment resulting from the Butlerian Jihad, found in the Orange Catholic Bible

Do you really expect to become more than a machine?" Taking no offense, Erasmus replied, "It is a human trait to better oneself, is it not? That is all I am trying to do.

My son, this is more essential than anything you will learn on an industrial world: people are more important than machines.

We are human not because of our physical form, but because of our underlying nature. Even when fitted with a machine body, a man may have a heart and soul Ã¢â'¬Â¦ but not always. People made of flesh can be monsters, too. —PTOLEMY, Laboratory Sketches

The Bene Gesserit occupied themselves with numerous breeding schemes, as if farming humanity for their own obscure purposes. They also commanded one of the greatest storehouses of information in the Imperium, using their intricate libraries to look at the broad movements of peoples, to study the effects of one person's actions amidst interplanetary politics.

Consider human life: We are animals, yet are expected to be so much more. Although honor requires us to make altruistic decisions, even acting for the benefit of other people keeps coming back to self interest, no matter how much one attempts to conceal it. —REVEREND MOTHER RAQUELLA BERTO-ANIRUL

Owing to the seductive nature of machines, we assume that technological advances are always improvements and always beneficial to humans.

When we come / when we come again / to celebrate renewal / at the heart / at the heart of us / our eyes will touch Life." This renewal of the earth is at the heart of our humanity, and in such renewal "our eyes touch Life." In this mixed metaphor, vision and touch are united. Eyes do not just see, they also, in some profound sense, must touch Life. And note that this is Life, not life. There is something about this Life that transcends life itself.

There is no greater evil than killing. I don't care whether they call it war or justice. Life is precious.

There are enough cowards in the world without killing a brave creature for so little reason.

What cruel creatures men are. Our bodies tell us to love so many, but there's room in our hearts for so few.

It's a rusty old saw that the writers and artists who create the darkest work are usually the nicest human beings, presumably because they get to purge into their fiction allof the awful crap that makes the rest of us such miserable bastards.

The tool produces according to human needs, the machine regardless of human needs.

Humankind has not learned about balance, let alone practiced it. It is guided by greed and ambition, steered by fear. In this way it will eventually destroy itself. But nature will survive; at least the plants will.

compassion, that

The world, the human world, is bound together not by protons and electrons, but by stories.

You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give." – Khalil Gibran, The Prophet