Quotes About Humanity

È terribile pensare che siamo tutti uomini, tutti destinati, chi più chi meno, a portare il nostro fardello sotto un cielo sconosciuto, e che non vogliamo fare il minimo sforzo per capirci a vicenda.

Researchers believe that the conscious cultivation of empathy, including through the reading of novels (see S. Keen), will make communication far easier and will save us from future world cataclysms. —The Journal of Community and Cortex

The history of the family can be described through the abandonment of several children. The history of the world, too.

The question of what happens after life is question that unifies human beings.

As the psychologist Carl Jung once said, 'If our civilization were to perish, it would be due more to stupidity than to evil.

Until we consider animal life to be worthy of the consideration and reverence we bestow upon old books and pictures and historic monuments, there will always be the animal refugee living a precarious life on the edge of extermination, dependent for existence on the charity of a few human beings.

I can be of no real help to another unless I see that the two of us are in this together, that all of our differences are superficial and meaningless, and that only the countless ways we are alike has any importance at all.

Fear can be known as the most virulent and damaging virus known to humankind.

Yes, they were part of him. He hoped he was a little part of them--if only a memory, a fraction of their consciousness. How the Sweeney's of the world needed them. He blinked fiercely, stemming his tears. I am not much of a man, but at least I have known them.

No, it couldn't all be bad the way Stonebreaker insisted it was. There were people who hid the children from the sanctioned murderers; people who looked the horror in the eye and said, no, no, you can't do it any more, we're against you even if you kill us. Thus had Sweeney's friends acted, and they had redeemed belief and tradition for millions.

No one will believe a crime that big. People will say, "Impossible, they could not kill that many, torture that many, be so cruel." People will say that there are limits, that human beings stop at some point. But they didn't stop.

They have fooled the world. Or else the world doesn't give a damn. What confounds me is that no one seems to ask what right they have to put us in prisons at all. The assumption seems to be that it's all right for Jews to be jailed and treated like dogs, provided they aren't murdered.

I knew something about myself. Killing was indecent, depraved. I would not get used to it. One killed to survive, to keep one's loved ones alive. No good attached to ending the lives of others. That Ukrainian kid had parents, a family, hopes. Like the millions of us now dying for no reason.

if everything that is happening in the world is traceable to our inability to understand what is happening in the world.  If there is such a thing as original sin, it's the human capacity to get everything wrong, right from the beginning and all the way up to now, and that's what the old storytellers have been telling us, including the Creek Indians who told this story along with every other tribe on earth. 

Once she exclaimed, "But I always thought that sorceresses were evil!" "What do you mean 'evil'?" Lynet has never considered the question. "You know," she said, after a moment, "unfriendly to people." "People!" repeated Morgana derisively. "As if humans were all that mattered. Just once I'd like to see people judged by how friendly they are to sorceresses.

the real question isn't whether it's bombs versus muskets or wagons versus automobiles. It still comes down to more basic thins like people's right to life, to liberty, and to peacefully enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Our planet cannot continue to be a life-giving environment unless human beings quickly become much more responsible stewards of the created world.

To forgive or forget the crimes of Josef Mengele would require the amputation of our conscience and the dismemberment of our memory.

So war is an extremely sad business, because the majority of people don't want to be in it.

The hagaddah came to Sarajevo for a reason. It was here to test us, to see if there were people who could see that what united us was more than what divided us. That to be a human being matters more than to be a Jew or a Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox. p. 361

How little we know, I thought, of the people we live amongst.

We were too intelligent, too cynical for war. Of course, you don't have to be stupid and primitive to die a stupid, primitive death.

the book has survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it. You've got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the Convivencia, and everything's humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize 'the other'--it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists...same old, same old.

I was struck, as always, that a heathen poet from long ago should know so much of the human heart, and how little that heart changes, though great cities fall and new dispensations sweep away the old and pagan creeds.