Quotes About Humanity

Our ability to communicate our own feelings, and to pick up the feelings of others and thus to heal fractures in connection, threatens the structures of hierarchy. Feelings of empathy and tender compassion for another's suffering or humanity make it difficult to maintain or justify inequality.

it's occurred to her that there are millions, billions, of other men and women in the world who wake up early in their separate beds, greedy for the substance of their own lives, but obliged every day to reinvent themselves.

Whenever I meet anyone new, I don't say, Tell me about your belief system. I say, Tell me about your average day.

When we think of the past we tend to assume that people were simpler in their functions, and shaped by forces that were primary and irreducible.

What can I possibly have in common with perpetrators of murder and torture?" It is much more reassuring to believe that they are evil and be done with them.14 We dare not let a glimmer of their humanity in the door, because it might force us to face the haunting truth of cartoonist Walt Kelly's great character Pogo, who famously said: "We have met the enemy and he is us.

Priam and Achilles meet in the very twilight of their lives. Their extinction is certain and there will be no reward for behaving well, and yet, in the face of implacable fate and an indifferent universe, they mutually assert the highest ideals of their humanity.

In a civil war," he said gently, "people forget that they are people. Next they forget anyone else is a person. They forget how to be kind. They learn to hurt. In our wars, they might execute you, but usually they chop hands off, so that you suffer before you die. If you live, you are helpless and must depend on others.

All human life seemed to be out there. And it was not a pretty sight.

beaten up, raped, murdered, arsonised—if there was such a word—yet the confidence of the human race that they, their loved ones and acquaintances had personally been granted divine immunity was uncrackable.

Only when we see ourselves in our true human context, as members of a race which is intended to be one organism and "one body," will we begin to understand the positive importance not only of the successes but of the failures and accidents in our lives.

Living and getting to know folks' hearts, that's what matters." "He's not only handsome

The heart doesn't know age, race, creed, or colors. It just knows happiness or pain.

a complete stranger, and yet grief is no respecter of persons.

God never retires his image bearers.

The whole human race, beginning with Eve, comes from Adam's wounded side. A second race--a new redeemed humanity--comes from Jesus' wounded side. Jesus is the second Adam. Even before there is despair, God foreshadows hope. The creation of the woman is a sacred, holy moment.

Stupid, fragile mortals.

When someone out there says that I'm not really human—what are they giving themselves permission to do to me?

I think we're here to make the world a better place than we found it. I think we don't always deserve the cards that we're dealt, good or bad. But we are judged by how we play the cards we're dealt. Those of us with a bum deal that makes it harder to do good—we just have to work a little more is all. There's no destiny. There's just muddling through without doing too much damage.

The underworld, the old world, is the womb that gave birth to humanity. The journey from under the earth is the journey from ignorance to wisdom.

For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and valor. Of the endless fluid passage of the humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who - one word- love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him, he felt a warning, a shaft of terror.

But no value has been put on human life; it is given to us free and taken without being paid for. What is it worth? If you look around, at times the value may seem to be little or nothing at all.

She decided to donate blood to the Red Cross; she wanted to donate a quart a week and her blood would be in the veins of Australians and Fighting French and Chinese, all over the whole world, and it would be as though she were close kin to all of these people. She could hear the army doctors saying that the blood of Frankie Addams was the reddest and the strongest blood that they had ever known.

I know, but what is it all about? People loose and at the same time caught. Caught and loose. All these people and you don't know what joins them up. There's bound to be some sort of reason and connection. Yet somehow I can't seem to name it. I don't know." "If you did you would be God," said Berenice. "Didn't you know that?

Always he wanted to set her up to something, to give to her. And not only a sundae or some sweet to eat – but something real. That was all he wanted for himself – to give to her. Biff's mouth hardened. He had done nothing wrong but in him he felt a strange guilt. Why? The dark guilt in all men, unreckoned and without a name.