Quotes About Humanity

a new form of democratic eco-socialism, with the humility to learn from Indigenous teachings about the duties to future generations and the interconnection of all life, appears to be humanity's best shot at collective survival.

just as bombs follow oil, and drones follow drought—so, now, boats follow both. Boats filled with refugees fleeing homes ravaged by war and drought in the driest parts of the planet.

And I know nobody gets to live or not live because they deserve it, deserving doesn't count for a thing, but the point was, I now felt deep in my heart that I was in fact a better human being than Magnus or Todd, and hooray, all the prizes for me, but that wasn't helpful when what I actually needed was reasons why I shouldn't just wipe them out of existence.

if people grew milder or kinder with age, he certainly hadn't.

Baruch ata adonai, eloheinu melech haolam, shelo hasair b'olamo kloom, ubara bo briyot tovot v'ilanot tovot, leihanot bahem b'nai adam

I managed to behave like a human being and hug her back, my throat tight.

I felt the soldiers understood perfectly well that we were making sums out of them—this many safe to spend, this number too high, as if each one wasn't a whole man.

There's no such thing as normal people," I said, a desperate flailing. "There's just people, and some of them are miserable, and some of them are happy, and you've the same right to be happy as any of them—no more and no less.

Si no quieres que alguien se muera, no lo aporrees una y otra vez en la cabeza.

Are people the only holy land?

But I know we need to keep warm here on earth And when your shawl is as thin as mine is, you tell stories.

From Why I could not accept your invitation Forgive me. Culture is everything right now. But I cannot pretend a scrap of investment in the language that allows human beings to kill one another systematically, abstractly, distantly. The language wrapped around 37,000, or whatever the number is today, dead and beautiful bodies thrown into holes without any tiny, reasonable goodbye.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

Poetry is everything that headline news is not.

Remind us again, brave friend. What countries may we sing into? What lines should we all be crossing?

The sea, the sky, the air see us as trouble.   They're right of course. We see each other as the landmarks of a day.   History doesn't see us. It doesn't see us at all.   From this we should draw one ounce of relief. At

The truth was, he had no girlfriend. Everyone was his girlfriend. This was his theory--float and drift. Be in love with everyone you see. The heart is a bucket without a lid. Maybe he had read it in a play. But it seemed to work.

Babies, I speculated in that peculiar mystical state, are sort of leaky little understudies for God. With each baby the human species gets the chance to break out of the self into the service of something so 'other' that the reasons for conditional love can give way to faith in unconditional love… with babies, we get the chance to take one manageable baby step on the long hard path of the saints.

Others have looked at this war from a biomedical perspective, or from a strictly political one. My focus is on how this ongoing war against us is far more basic, aimed at nothing less than dissolving the meaning of humanity itself and undoing of the rich cultural legacy we in the West have long treasured and passed on to succeeding generations.

Cruelty became as contagious as any disease.

No man is your enemy, no man is your friend, every man is your teacher.

During times of disaster sorrow brings people together in a spirit of friendship, and influences man to recognize the blessings of becoming his brother's keeper.

even as the holy and the righteous cannot rise beyond the highest which is in each one of you, So the wicked and the weak cannot fall lower than the lowest which is in you also.

To a man across a thousand years I offer a handshake. I say to him: Brother, make the story short, for the stretch of a thousand years is short.