Quotes About Humanity

Loneliness is and always has been the central and inevitable experience of every man.

Why is it that we are always strangers in this world, and never come to know one another, and are full of fear and shame and hate and falseness, when what we want is love? Why is it? Why? Why? Why?

men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know any one, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never.

He understood that men were forever strangers to one another, that no one ever comes really to know anyone, that imprisoned in the dark womb of our mother, we come to life without having seen her face, that we are given to her arms a stranger, and that, caught in that insoluble prison of being, we escape it never, no matter what arms may clasp us, what mouth may kiss us, what heart may warm us. Never, never, never, never, never.

What we should lament is not the loss of houses or of land, but the loss of men's lives. Men come first; the rest is the fruit of their labour.

Events of future history will be of the same nature - or nearly so - as the history of the past, so long as men are men.

had almost said of mankind. For though the events of remote antiquity

Indeed, it is true that in these acts of revenge on others men take it upon themselves to begin the process of repealing those general laws of humanity which are there to give a hope of salvation to all who are in distress, instead of leaving those laws in existence, remembering that there may come a time when they, too, will be in danger and will need their protection.

had almost said of mankind.

It is a long Baptism into the seas of humankind, my daughter. Better immersion and in pain than to live untouched. Yet how will you sustain?

It has never yet been a world right for love, for those we love, for ourselves, for flowered human life.

I have heard women complain about men holding doors for them,, as if it is inherently offensive and implies that they are weak. ... I would hold a door for anyone. ... It has to do with noticing our fellow human beings and saying, I recognize that you're on this planet, and I don't want a door hitting you in the face.

I believe that treating other people well is a lost art.

150 miles outside Baghdad and began shooting children. By his own account, he 'saw that children were in the room kneeling down. I

Humans crave knowledge, and when that craving ends, we are no longer human.

If even someone like Chuck, one of the sharts of humanity, eventually saw Trump for the malevolent con man that he is, what does that say about the rest who still excuse him?

We are fascinated, all of us, by the implacable otherness of others. And we wish to penetrate by hypothesis, by daydream, by scientific investigation those leaden walls that encase the human spirit, that define it and guard it and hold it forever inaccessible.

Together we understood what terror was: you're not human anymore. You're a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted or believed in. You know you're about to die. And it's not a movie and you aren't a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait.

Stories can save us.

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done.

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behavior, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If a story seems moral, do not believe it. If at the end of a war story you feel uplifted, or if you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie. There is no rectitude whatsoever. There is no virtue.

For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity. Now and then, however, there were times of panic, when they squealed or wanted to squeal but couldn't, when they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly and cringed and sobbed and begged for the noise to stop and went wild and made stupid promises to themselves and to God and to their mothers and fathers, hoping not to die.

Garden of Evil. Over here, man, every sin's real fresh and original." (p80 Mitch Sanders in "How to Tell a True War Story")

Henry Dobbins made the washing motion with his hands. You're right, he said. All you can do is be nice. Treat them decent, you know?