Quotes About Humanity

The first thing to say about Eve is that she was a big improvement on the Adam design, or that Adam was an extremely misguided variation on the Eve design. (Consider testicles. Two concentrated nuclei of absolute vulnerability. Where? Dangling between the legs. I rest my case.)

When you're a kid it's people's cruelty that makes you cry, then when you're an adult it's their kindness.

The beast is redundant. It's been us all along.

The collective human unconscious can't stand it, the thought of stuff going on forever, so has decided (collectively, unconsciously) to bring the planet to an end. Eco-apocalypse isn't accident, it's deep species strategy.

I didn't cry. Real things don't make me cry. Only false or sentimental things can do that. In this respect I'm like most civilised humans.

The moon sets. The next day you wake up in sheets that smell of fabric conditioner. There is CNN. There is coffee. There is weather. There is your human face in the mirror. The world, you discover, is a place of appalling continuity.

but it was humanly good to be touched too, to be alone with someone at the secret feast that went all the way back to Adam and Eve. You looked at each other and felt just how old the contract was, the warm-faced commitment to the adventure, the stepping together out of the light into the rewarding darkness.

Every time I saw Muslim masses bowed in prayer or the Catholic faithful gathered all I saw was fear. Moronically nodding Hasidim, paint-throwing Hindus, shimmying and jabbering Evangelicals, they were all scared shitless this was all there was. Even the Buddhists (whose crinkled tee-heeing lamas always made me want to slap them) were terrified of their own flesh and blood, needed some disembodied desire-free fairyland to shoot for.

There's always someone's father, someone's mother, someone's wife, someone's son. This is the problem with killing and eating people. One of the problems.

It's why people in sexual extremis say Oh, God . It's not a cry to the Divine, it's a recognition of their own divinity.

I read somewhere that when you're a kid it's people's cruelty that makes you cry, then when you're an adult it's their kindness.

Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.

Let's not encourage that scourge by accepting its premise that there exists such a thing as different races of human beings. There is the human race, and that's that.

W]e are basically more similar to our patients than we are different from them. The psychological mechanisms in pathological states are merely extensions of principles involved in normal developmental functioning. Doctor and patient are both human beings. [...] [C]ountertransference in the psychiatrist and transference in the patient are essentially identical processes - each unconsciously experiences the other as someone from the past.

You shut your door to these poor women," he said so they could hear him, "and you'll answer for it the rest of your lives. You won't sleep. You'll choke on drinks. The food you eat'll block up your bowels and you'll die of your own shit.

She looked at him bravely now for the first time, at his face, the face from which a child had fled, and drew breath. She rose. Her eyes filled. She knew. He took her in his arms and kissed her ardently. Men in their hosts, young and old, innocent and corrupt, had paid her for her favors, but she put her arms about him of her own free will as though to give him what she could in recompense for this, the last gift she guessed, of his manhood.

Someone once told me that everyone deserved to be loved. Even the unlovable? Maybe especially them.

the desire for privacy is shared by us all as an essential, not ancillary, part of what it means to be human. We all instinctively understand that the private realm is where we can act, think, speak, write, experiment, and choose how to be, away from the judgmental eyes of others. Privacy is a core condition of being a free person.

I am reminded of the query made about man's inhumanity to man in the concentration camps. The question was asked: At Auschwitz, tell me, where was God? And the answer came: Where was man? For it was men alone who did this evil. Not God or religion or men acting in the name of God or religion. But simply men.

the way we ignore the suffering of others and close our ears to their cries of pain. The way we disrespect our fellow man and are selfish for our own needs. Much of human suffering is avoidable. But a righteous path has a high price, and many are not prepared to pay that price.

By contrast to the above views, people with self-esteem believe they are neither more or less than human. Knowing their faults and rough edges, they still are deeply and quietly glad to be who they are (Briggs 1977). They are like the good friend who knows you well and likes you anyway because they recognize the goodness, excellence, and potential that coexist alongside imperfections.

The journey toward developing healthy self-esteem, starts with the recognition that people are born with unconditional human worth that is independent of the way people treat us.

People as a rule do mean much more than they understand.

However, because death is the only absolute equality among human beings on earth, even the ignoblest and the most welcome instance of it deserves a little ceremonious thought.