Quotes About Humanity

For surely a king is first a man. And so it must follow that a king does as all men do: the best he can.

Writing made it tolerable to be human in a way nothing else ever had. It gave me a place to thrive, to exorcise, to cultivate some understanding of aspects of being human that were otherwise confounding.

I suppose regret is an expression of humanity. Without regret . . . where does that leave us?

Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature.

Love is imploring humanity: Set down your burden of doubt; in perfect faith there is neither fear nor struggle.

El artista no hace su arte para salvar a la humanidad, sino para salvarse a sí mismo. Todo comentario benévolo de un artista a este respecto no será sino echar una cortina de humo, ocultar el rastro sangriento de su asalto contra la realidad y los otros.

Simply follow nature, Rousseau declares. Sade, laughing grimly, agrees.

Man's spiritual trajectory ends in the rubbish heap of his own mother-born body.

Sang Ly, we are literature-our lives, our hopes, our desires, our despairs, our passions, our strengths, our weaknesses. Stories express our longing not only to make a difference today but to see what is possible for tomorrow. Literature has been called a handbook for the art of being human.

I adore him, she said. I feel compassion for him because he's totally fucked up.

But there was always a word for what Candy was, then and now: human.

Eventually she came to believe that her condition was one that couldn't be treated medically; she was doomed to demand more decency and consideration from her fellow humans than they demanded of themselves.

human progress has depended on enlarging the circle of compassion.

Species differ - but are often not very different. Only humans have human minds. But believing that only humans have minds is like believing that because only humans have human skeletons, only humans have skeletons.

Whether on'e special emphasis is global warming or child welfare, the cause is the same cause. And justice comes from the same place being human comes from: compassion.

It is said that humans are defined and distinguished from other animals by our ability to use tools and language, but often I wonder if the most uniquely human trait is our ability to deceive ourselves.

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

One glance at (a book) and you hear the voice of another person - perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millenia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time.

Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.

National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.

For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads: We came in peace for all Mankind. As the United States was dropping 7 ½ megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.

If we are to send people, it must be for a very good reason - and with a realistic understanding that almost certainly we will lose lives. Astronauts and Cosmonauts have always understood this. Nevertheless, there has been and will be no shortage of volunteers.