Quotes About Humanity

No need to act all hoity-toity. Aloofness is a bore. We're all lonely in one way or another.

And thus ended the third Crusade, less destructive of human life than the two first, but quite as useless.

What kind of damage is done to our ability to love or understand and thus fully judge one another when daily we're encouraged to forget that people are people and view them instead as so much pasteboard, scenery, clutter, generalized instances (of murder, of rape, of embezzlement, etc.)?

The poem's not fragile. You can beat on it. It's got good traction. Paraphrased, its four stanzas go like this: 1. You're fucked. 2. We're all fucked. 3. Why? 4. Let's eat lunch.

La véritable fonction de la littérature est de nous maintenir en vie dans un monde brutal. [Interview de Charles Dantzig par Josyane Savigneau à l'occasion de la publication de Pourquoi lire ?, 15 oct. 2010, journal Le Monde]

Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

Whilst Man, however well-behaved, At best is but a monkey shaved!

The great variability of all the external differences between the races of man, likewise indicates that they cannot be of much importance; for if important, they would long ago have been either fixed and preserved, or eliminated.

Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.

Light will be thrown on the origin of men and his history.

In a series of forms graduating insensibly from some apelike creature to man as he now exists, it would be impossible to fix on any definite point where the term 'man' ought to be used.

Sympathy beyond the confines of man, that is, humanity to lower animals, seems to be one of the latest moral acquisitions. This virtue, one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings.

The imagination is one of the highest prerogatives of man.

The moral sense perhaps affords the best and highest distinction between man and the lower animals

Travelling ought also to teach him distrust; but at the same time he will discover, how many trully goodnatured people there are.

I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect (compared to animals or other living beings), only in zeal and hard work; and I still think there is an eminently important difference

It is very true what you say about the higher races of men, when high enough, replacing and clearing off the lower races. In 500 years how the Anglo-Saxon race will have spread and exterminated whole nations; and in consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.

En realidad, dudo de que la compasión sea una cualidad natural o innata.

It is not necessary to teach others, to cure them or to improve them; it is only necessary to live among them, sharing the human condition and being present to them in love.

It's a good thing war is so terrible or else we'd get to liking it too much.

The horror is other people. The things they think up to do to you.

Monroe had in fact preached that God was not at all such a one as ourselves, not one to be temperamentally inclined to tread ragefully upon us until our blood flew up and stained all His white raiment, but rather that He looked on both the best and worst of mankind with weary, bemused pity.

Humans are inhuman, whether it's by direct action or by acceptance of a horrible action as normal.

We all go about burdened with the reality that we are the broken-off ends of true people.