Quotes About Humanity

Nearby he saw a man, his head covered in blood, stumble like a drunkard into a thicket; he sat there between the branches in a bizarre and uncomfortable position, his knees folded under him, his chin resting on his chest. He heard an officer shouting angrily, "No doctors, no nurses, no ambulances! What are we supposed to do?

Christian charity, the compassion of centuries of civilization, fell from her like useless ornaments, revealing her bare, arid soul. She needed to feed and protect her children. Nothing else mattered any more.

?i rezonanÈ›a uman? a acestor vorbe, gestul, tot ce dovedea f?r? putin?? de t?gad? c? nu era un monstru însetat de sânge, ci un soldat ca ceilalÈ›i sparser? deodat? gheaÈ›a între sat È™i german, între ??ran È™i invadator.

We are at our best when we serve others. Be civilized.

People are inherently dignified, and they are only made undignified if they are placed in situations that are demeaning.

One small gesture of compassion can have a life-changing impact.

Sometimes he's most evident in small gestures of kindness. And those gestures can be found even in the worst situations.

So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of "bestial machinery." Yet the Rape of Nanking remains an obscure incident. Unlike the atomic explosions in Japan or the Jewish holocaust in Europe, the horrors of the massacre at Nanking remain virtually unknown to people outside Asia. The massacre remains neglected in most of the historical literature published in the United States.

If you are struck by a bus, someone may steal your purse or wallet while you lie injured, but many more will come to your aid, trying to save your precious life. One person will call 911, and another will race down the street to alert a police officer on his or her beat. Someone else will take off his coat, fold it, and place it under your head, so that if these are indeed your last moments of life you will die in the small but real comfort of knowing that someone cared about you.

The pictures up on that wall in Cupertino illustrated that not just one person but hundreds of thousands could have their lives extinguished, die at the whim of others, and the next day their deaths would be meaningless. But even more telling was that those who had brought about these deaths (the most terror-filled, even if inevitable, tragedy of the human experience) could also degrade the victims and force them to expire in maximum pain and humiliation.

One historian has estimated that if the dead from Nanking were to link hands, they would stretch from Nanking to the city of Hangchow, spanning a distance of some two hundred miles. Their blood would weigh twelve hundred tons, and their bodies would fill twenty-five hundred railroad cars. Stacked on top of each other, these bodies would reach the height of a seventy-four-story building.

no race or culture has a monopoly on wartime cruelty.

When does one ever know a human being? Perhaps only after one has realized the impossibility of knowledge and renounced the desire for it and finally ceased to feel even the need of it. But then what one achieves is no longer knowledge, it is simply a kind of co-existence; and this too is one of the guises of love.

Tal como nos conocemos, somos objetos falsos, imposturas, ramilletes de ilusiones" "Los juicios sobre las personas no son jamás decisivos, surgen de resúmenes que inmediatamente hacen pensar en la necesidad de una reconsideración. Los arreglos humanos no son otra cosa que cabos sueltos y cálculos nebulosos, independientemente de cualquier cosa que para consolarnos pueda fingir el arte

How easily one is hurt. Or is it only I who am so stupidly vulnerable.

I have seen much of human beings over a long period, and I have learnt how little good to expect from them.

The world is perhaps ultimately to be defined as a place of suffering. Man is a suffering animal, subject to ceaseless anxiety and pain and fear.

Odd I should have said those words before and forgotten them. It makes one feel that human beings are just machines after all.

How can we not be dooms to each other?

We're just living on our emotions and eating each other.

But people have their own troubles and tend to forget. One is not all that interesting. Even Hitler is being forgotten at last.

I know that human life is horrible. I know that it is utterly unlike art. I have no religion except my own task of being. Conventional religions are dream stuff. Always a world of fear and horror lies but a millimetre away. Any man, even the greatest, can be broken in a moment and has no refuge. Any theory which denies this is a lie.

Perhaps he has realised now that he's trapped here and has to suffer with us and become mortal and die.

Art is not cosy and it is not mocked. Art tells the only truth that ultimately matters. It is the light by which human things can be mended. And after art there is, let me assure you all, nothing.