Quotes About Humanity

In the evening I came home and read about the Messina earthquake, and how the relief ships arrived, and the wretched survivors crowded down to the water's edge and tore each other like wild beasts in their rage of hunger. The paper set forth, in horrified language, that some of them had been seventy-two hours without food. I, as I read, had also been seventy-two hours without food; and the difference was simply that they thought they were starving.

They were trying to save their souls—and who but a fool could fail to see that all that was the matter with their souls was that they had not been able to get a decent existence for their bodies?

Lanny, climbing the hill, carried a thought which by now had become his familiar companion: Why, oh, why did men have to make their lives so ugly? What evil spell was upon them that they wrangled and scolded, hated and feared? He

To think that in the midst of the last desperate agony of war, with several "Big Berthas" dropping shells into the city every twenty minutes, with food scarce and fuel unobtainable, more than three thousand men and women had sat at easels and maintained their faith that art could not be destroyed, but was and would remain the supreme achievement and goal of life! Lanny

I find that all the fair and noble impulses of humanity, the dreams of poets and the agonies of martyrs, are shackled and bound in the service of organized and predatory Greed!

But both of them had been business men all their lives and would take it for granted that their duty to the stockholders of Budd-Erling outweighed any duty they might owe to truth, justice, humanity, or any other glittering generality.

When will they stop following leaders who build their monuments out of millions of human skulls?" The son of Budd-Erling was perhaps the least happy man in that famous old church at the moment. He had little admiration for Napoleon Bonaparte, and still less for his Austrian imitator.

National Socialism versus true Socialism, racism versus humanity—that was the struggle between Satan and God in the modern world.

Brothers have fought against brothers, and fathers against sons, in all civil wars; and here was a new kind of war, spreading rapidly all over the earth: National Socialism against true Socialism, racialism against the brotherhood of humanity.

Lanny had seen much poverty here and elsewhere, but never more gaunt and haggard humans than he found in this lonely valley in the naked hills of Aragon, bitter cold in winter and blazing hot in summer.

Great moments do not last in a confused and helter-skelter world. The idealist dreams how things ought to go, but they don't—there being no perfect human creatures or groups of them.

Lanny Budd was the son and grandson and great-grandson of merchants of death; he had been born and reared and educated on money made by the manufacture and sale of instruments of death; he was flying now in a warplane, upon an errand of war, even though he persuaded himself, as men do, that it was one of peace. He asked himself whether man was doomed because he could not deliver himself from the curse of war.

For Lanny's then stepfather had been not merely a painter, but a student and thinker. When he painted the ancient ruins of Greece and Rome he tried to make you feel the sorrow of great things vanished forever. When he painted a Greek shepherd in his rags or a Biskra water carrier in his gray burnoose, Marcel was not just getting something exotic and unusual; he had a heart full of pity for lonely men who lived hard lives and did not understand the forces which dominated them.

Of course it was terrible that men went to war and killed one another; but for that you had to blame nature, not the Budd family.

the souls of none of them were dead, but only sleeping; now and then they would waken, and these were cruel times.

These are thing, Trudi's father told her long before she was old enough for confession, that the church call sins, but they are part of being human. And those we need to embrace. The most important thing-- He paused. --is to be kind.

I could meet dreadful people and end up seeing the world through their eyes, seeing their frailties, their needs. You refer to yourself in order to understand other people. That's the novelist's gift, isn't it?

once the propagation mechanism was in place, it would have exerted selective pressure to make some outliers in the population more innovative. This is because innovations would only be valuable if they spread rapidly. In this respect, we could say mirror neurons served the same role in early hominin evolution as the Internet, Wikipedia, and blogging do today. Once the cascade was set in motion, there was no turning back from the path to humanity.

The TELL-TALE BRAIN A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human V. S. RAMACHANDRAN

I feel that the dormant goodwill in people needs to be stirred. People need to hear that it makes sense to behave decently or to help others, to place common interests above their own, to respect the elementary rules of human coexistence.

All human suffering concerns each human being

Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind'.

I believed a person could consider himself a human being as long as he felt totally prepared to kill himself, to interfere in his own biography. It was this awareness that gave me the will to live. I checked myself — frequently — and felt I had the strength to die, and thus remained alive.

I saw that the only group of people able to preserve a minimum of humanity in conditions of starvation and abuse were the religious believers, the sectarians (almost all of them), and most priests. Party workers and the military are the first to fall apart and do so most easily.