Quotes About Humanity

Look at the photographs of Hitler at Nuremberg two years ago, the deadness behind the eyes that denies humanity, just as it betrays the true darkness of the soul.' May

Thanks to Hitler, we are no longer living in a world that cares about the death of someone because they were loved in the past. It cares only if that death can do damage to the future. It's a grim truth, Sidney. Like Orpheus leaving Hades, we are rushing headlong into the light of a terrible new world.

All my life, when children have asked me for money, I've told them to fuck right off. But you've taught me that there's a positive side to charity. Thank you.

Until you have done something for humanity," wrote the great American educator Horace Mann, "you should be ashamed to die.

The gods that we've made are exactly the gods you'd expect to be made by a species that's about half a chromosome away from being chimpanzee.

The person who is certain, and who claims divine warrant for his certainty, belongs now to the infancy of our species.

Nihil humanum a me alienum puto, said the Roman poet Terence: 'Nothing human is alien to me.' The slogan of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service could have been the reverse: To us, no aliens are human.

Past and present religious atrocities have occured not because we are evil, but because it is a fact of nature that the human species is, biologically, only partly rational. Evolution has meant that our prefrontal lobes are too small, our adrenal glands are too big, and our reproductive organs apparently designed by committee; a recipe which, alone or in combination, is very certain to lead to some unhappiness and disorder.

The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.

As the cleansing ocean closes over bin Laden's carcass, may the earth lie lightly on the countless graves of those he sentenced without compunction to be burned alive or dismembered in the street.

Once again it is demonstrated that people do not love their chains or their jailers,-and that the aspiration for a civilized life - that universal eligibility to be noble, as Saul Bellow's Augie March so imperishably phrases it - is proper and common to all.

Osama bin Laden's writings and actions constitute a direct negation of human liberty, and vent an undisguised hatred and contempt for life itself.

This is a small episode in an unending argument between those who know they are right and therefore claim the mandate of heaven, and those who suspect that the human race has nothing but the poor candle of reason by which to light its way.

Those who worry about the treatment of animals are often accused of sentimentality or of putting the plight of beasts before the immense problems of humanity. But it is quite rare to find a humanitarian who is indifferent to animals and surprisingly common to find that those who belittle animal rights are the same ones who find the pain of humans easy to bear.

there are in all periods people who feel themselves in some fashion to be apart. And it is not too much to say that humanity is very much in debt to such people, whether it chooses to acknowledge the debt or not. (Don't expect to be thanked, by the way. The life of an oppositionist is supposed to be difficult.)

History is more of a tragedy than it is a morality tale.

Like the quality of mercy, the prompting of compassion is not finite, and can be self-replenishing.

Por mais impiedoso e arrogante que o poder possa parecer, seus detentores são meros mamíferos que evacuam e anseiam e que sofrem de insônia e insegurança. Esses mamíferos são também necessariamente vaidosos ao extremo e muitas vezes desejam ser amados tanto quanto desejam ser temidos.

The 'environment' is not the gift of entrepreneurs, risk takers, or investors. It is the common, inherited property of humanity.

Jefferson writes dismissively of slaves that "their griefs are transient." American white supremacists to this day maintain that blacks are "mud people" because their lack of conscience prevents them from blushing—they are not capable of summoning "blood in the face," as the

I am always and at once on the defensive, for example, when people speak of races and nations as if they were personalities and had souls and destinies and such like.

The pluralism of religion is attributable to the fact that man created God and not the other way around. If you accept the posture that man makes gods, there is no mystery in the proliferation of gods and religions that has always existed in human society. If

When mass rapes occurred in the course of aggressive war in Bangladesh and later in Bosnia, Mother Teresa in the first case and the Pope in the second made strenuous appeals to the victims not to abort the seed of the invader and the violator.

one of the great failures of human civilization has been its refusal to pay proper attention, or a proper wage, to those who perform the hard but essential primary task of growing our food.