Quotes About Humanity

Never in my life have I known anyone who has such a basic dislike of people, yet has such unstinting and bottomless compassion for them.

Kindness isn't a job, Eve, it's a choice.

Our differences are only skin deep, but our sames go down to the bone.

Replicating human beings in a lab, selecting traits, eliminating others. Who decides what are the parameters? What of the failures, as there must be in any sort of experimentation of procedures.

Whatever our DNA, it's living and being that make us.

NO MATTER YOUR RACE, CREED, SEXUAL ORIENTATION, OR POLITICAL AFFILIATION, WE PROTECT AND SERVE, BECAUSE YOU COULD GET DEAD.

There are people out there. Nothing fucks things up faster than people.

She shrugged. "I could write a book of sayings that should actually be sayings if people didn't keep killing each other.

It's rare in war for either side to consider the innocent." Why

By action, by omission of action, people sacrifice other people all the damn time.

For himself, then. For his idea of the world, a world in which men do not use shovels to beat corpses into a more convenient shape for processing.

How many of the ragged workingmen who pass him in the street are secret authors of works that will outlast them: roads, walls, pylons? Immortality of a kind, a limited immortality, is not so hard to achieve after all. Why then does he persist in inscribing marks on paper, in the faint hope that people not yet born will take the trouble to decipher them?

No consciousness that we would recognize as consciousness. Not awareness, as far as we can make out, of a self with a history. What I mind is what tends to come next. They have no consciousness therefore. Therefore what? Therefore we are free to use them for our own ends Therefore we are free to kill them? Why? What is so special about the form of consciousness that we recognize that makes killing a bearer of it a crime while killing an animal goes unpunished?

That is what whores are for, after all; to put up with the ecstasies of the unlovely

She is no longer sure that people are always improved by what they read. Furthermore, she is not sure that writers who venture into the darker territories of the soul always return unscathed.

Decency: the inexplicable: the ground of all ethics. Things we do not do. We do not stare when the soul leaves the body, but veil our eyes with tears or cover them with our hands. We do not stare at scars, which are places where the soul has struggled to leave and been forced back, closed up, sewn in.

They do us honor by seeing gods in us, and we respond by treating them like things.

I am now no more than a pile of blood, bone and meat that is unhappy.

Let me point out that a duck's idea of being saved may be different from your idea of being saved. It may include being left in peace by human beings.

El espacio es sólo espacio, la vida sólo es vida, igual en todas partes.

Let it at the very least be said, if it ever comes to be said, if there is ever anyone in some remote future interested to know the way we lived, that in this farthest outpost of the Empire of light there existed one man who in his heart was not a barbarian.

We partake of the ideal but we also make poo.

What does he know of the force that drives the utmost strangers into each other's arms, making them kin, kind, beyond all prudence?

Voy a terminar en un hoyo en el suelo —dice él—. Y tú también. Como todos.