Quotes About Humanity

Until humans can solve their philosophical problems, they're condemned to solve their political problems over and over and over again. It's a cruel, repetitious bore.

Behavioral traits such as curiosity about the world, flexibility of response, and playfulness are common to all young mammals but are rapidly lost with the onset of maturity in all but humans. Humanity has , when it has advanced, not because it was sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, and rebellious, and immature.

Humanity was a function of nature. It could not, therefore, live separately from nature except in a self-deceiving masquerade. It could not live in opposition to nature except in a schizophrenic crime. And it could not blind itself to the wonders of nature without mutating into something too monstrous to love. Yes

the greatest geniuses pee and poop just like the rest of us, but that in no way suggests that we are even remotely their creative equal, except perhaps in the confines of the toilet.

modern painting and the psychedelic sacraments -- offered humanity a new way of seeing, an enlarged and deepened definition of reality, a freshened and intensely sensual awareness of what it means to be a cognitive mammal on a tiny planet spinning precariously in the backwash of an infinite universe, a perpetually endangered species kept alive -- and occasionally driven quite mad -- by its capacity to love.

human reality is often simultaneously somber and funny.

There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. —Karl Popper, philosopher of science (1902-94)

Well, he us a nab, he is mortal, death comes to us all, etcetera, and consequently he would have died anyways, sooner or later. Or to look at it from the social point of view - he's just one man among many, the loss would be well within reason and convenience.

I don't know of anything greater than the Appassionata. Amazing, superhuman music. It always makes me feel, perhaps naively, it makes me feel proud of the miracles that human beings can perform. But I can't listen to music often. It affects my nerves, makes me want to say nice stupid things and pat the heads of those people who while living in this vile hell can create such beauty.

I renounce all love except pure philosophical love. The so-called love of human animals removes people two by two from the only possibility of happiness, which is the communion of beautiful souls.

To be morally educated is to realize that such would be a terrible price. Mechanical advance is the slack taken up of Our failing humanity. Hell is very likely to be modernization infinitely extended.

Being a person is respect, because you're not a cat or a dog or a bunch of tulips, you're a human person and humanness isn't like something there can be different amounts of, it's maxed out from the start, total respect every time - kill one, kill a trainload, you're dissing the transcendental is all.

BAKUNIN:    Left to themselves, people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they'd create a completely new kind of society if only people weren't so blind, stupid and selfish.

Let me tell you something. A man ain't a goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can't chop down because they're inside.

It's a bad word, 'belong.' Especially when you put it with somebody you love ... You can't own a human being.

This is the time for every artist in every genre to do what he or she does loudly and consistently. It doesn't matter to me what your position is. You've got to keep asserting the complexity and the originality of life, and the multiplicity of it, and the facets of it. This is about being a complex human being in the world, not about finding a villain. This is no time for anything else than the best that you've got.

Listen, baby, people do funny things. Specially us. The cards are stacked against us and just trying to stay in the game, stay alive and in the game, makes us do funny things. Things we can't help. Things that make us hurt one another. We don't even know why.

A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.

A man ain't a goddamn axe, choppin', hackin', bustin' every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him. Things he can't chop down, because they inside.

I said you. Take you, my daughter. Because I saw the tall man see you as a human child, not pieces of eight.

It wasn't a miracle. Bestowed by God. It was a mercy. Offered by a human.

A writer's life and work are not a gift to humankind; they are its necessity.

Race is the least reliable information you can have about someone. It's real information, but it tells you next to nothing.

We will be judged by how well we love.