Quotes About Humanity

Love me...I am not evil.

But centuries of time have not made me insensitive

I must recognise that in the same situation, I could have been either a killer or an evader... What I do not accept, however, are the old clichés that to explain is to excuse, to understand is to forgive. Explaining is not excusing; understanding is not forgiving.

War, a struggle between "our people" and "the enemy," creates a polarized world in which "the enemy" is easily objectified and removed from the community of human obligation.

This story of ordinary men is not the story of all men. The reserve policemen faced choices, and most of them committed terrible deeds. But those who killed cannot be absolved by the notion that anyone in the same situation would have done as they did. For even among them, some refused to kill and others stopped killing. Human responsibility is ultimately an individual matter.

Wolff was successful in that effort and wrote of his "special joy (besondere Freude) now that five thousand members of the Chosen People are going to Treblinka every day.

The fact is that no clear international ban against crimes against humanity existed prior to 1945, due in large part to U.S. opposition.

In an important departure from tradition, the commission singled out Turkish massacres and deportations of Armenian civilians as being so grotesque that—although they had not been specifically banned by the Hague and Geneva conventions—these actions were inherently criminal under the most elementary norms of human behavior. This was, they said, a "crime against humanity

I stared at the faces of the dead students. "You know, Zacharie, just looking at them, I can't tell you which ones were Tutsis, which Hutus." "Exactly!" said Deo in a loud whisper. Evidently, one was supposed to whisper here. "And neither could the killers!" "The killers couldn't see the difference, too," whispered Zacharie. "So they ask. Because they can't tell. We are the same people.

If you say that seven hours is too long to walk for two families of patients, you're saying that their lives matter less than some others. And the idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world.

Good teachers put snags in the river of children passing by, and over the years, they redirect hundreds of lives. Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy theory around the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who can never fully know the good that they have done.

Everything is quantified," he said. "Whether it's the technology or the way people use it, it has an insidious ability to reduce things to less than human dimensions.

Listening to the man's story, Jim felt he'd been granted a privilege. This was intimate contact with life, the very thing he had missed during all those years of reading philosophy.

Our pictures are fleeting and elusive. In the far future, bits of hard drives may be fossilized in limestone, and discarded iPhones may find themselves encased in amber, hardened like nail polish, but the bits of humanity that these exquisitely crafted machines hold will be lost to time.

Kindness is the truest thing there is -Sister Rosa

I don't think you can ever call kindness a mistake -Mr. Sabatini

The victimisation, I saw, was universal. It didn't depend on poverty, on lack of education or on tradition. It didn't depend on any of the things I had thought it depended on. Men took it everywhere with them.

While a battle is raging one can see his enemy mowed down by the thousand, or the ten thousand, with great composure; but after the battle these scenes are distressing, and one is naturally disposed to do as much to alleviate the suffering of an enemy as a friend.

my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse

The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species.

To make them forget how bad human beings are, they were taught too insistently that bears are good. Instead of being told honestly what humans are and what bears are.

History is a blood-drenched enigma and the world an error.

luckily, Eden is soon populated. The ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.

So you truly do not believe in God? I find no reason to, in nature... If the idea of God is unknown in the state of nature, it must then be a human invention.