Quotes About Humanity

All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgently needed critique, is garbage.

I am a universalist, passionately devoted to the cause of equality within the human family.

Yet literal-mindedness is not honesty or fidelity to truth--far from it. For it is the whole experience of mankind that sexual life is always, and must always be, hidden by veils of varying degrees of opacity, if it is to be humanized into something beyond a mere animal function. What is inherently secretive, that is to say self-conscious and human, cannot be spoken of directly; the attempt leads only to crudity, not to truth.

The first requirement of civilisation is that men should be willing to repress their basest instincts and appetites: failure to do which makes them, on account of their intelligence, far worse than mere beasts.

Behaviorism entails the systematic denial of meaning, a denial which does violence to both the evidence and the everyday experience of humanity.

since no mass murder takes place without its perpetrators alleging that they are acting for the good of mankind, philanthropic sentiment can plainly take a multiplicity of forms.

If humankind, as T. S. Eliot put it, cannot bear very much reality, it seems that it can bear any amount of unreality.

But life is not a matter of double-entry book-keeping. No number of years in prison can be equivalent to the torture and killing of children: if it were, the term could be served in advance and the person who served it would be entitled to commit his crimes on his release.

Let us ask whether medicine is winning the war against death. The answer is obviously no, it isn't winning: the one fundamental rule of human existence remains, unfortunately, one man one death.

The social and cultural critic Theodor Adorno eloquently voiced this cast of mind when he proclaimed the final death of art after the Second World War. After Auschwitz, he said, it was no longer possible to produce fine art. The world had become too horrible. 'There is nothing innocuous left,' he declared. 'The

It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it—in other words, by becoming civilised—that men become fully human.

Our civilization is still in a middle stage, scarcely beast, in that it is no longer wholly guided by instinct; scarcely human, in that it is not yet wholly guided by reason.

"The most prevalent and destructive fear is not of sickness or death itself. It is the fear of being human. All of our neurotic symptoms are retaliation against ourselves for daring to be human, this is less than godlike martyrs or masters. This is what psychotherapy is all about: getting over the fear of being human.

Democracy means not "I am as good as you are" but "You are as good as I am.

Our chief usefulness to humanity rests on our combining power with high purpose. Power undirected by high purpose spells calamity, and high purpose by itself is utterly useless if the power to put it into effect is lacking

There is quite enough sorrow and shame and suffering and baseness in real life, and there is no need for meeting it unnecessarily in fiction.

We cordially believe in the rights of property. We think that normally and in the long run the rights of humanity, coincide with the rights of property... But we feel that if in exceptional cases there is any conflict between the rights of property and the rights of man, then we must stand for the rights of man.

Love of peace is common among weak, short-sighted, timid, and lazy persons; and on the other hand courage is found among many men of evil temper and bad character. Neither quality shall by itself avail. Justice among the nations of mankind, and the uplifting of humanity, can be brought about only by those strong and daring men who with wisdom love peace, but who love righteousness more than peace.

Every lynching represents by just so much a loosening of the bands of civilisation; that the spirit of lynching inevitably throws into prominence in the community all the foul and evil creatures who dwell therein. No man can take part in the torture of a human being without having his own moral nature permanently lowered

We cannot sit huddled within our own borders and avow ourselves merely an assemblage of well-to-do hucksters who care nothing for what happens beyond.

Justice among the nations of mankind, and the uplifting of humanity, can be brought about only by those strong and daring men who with wisdom love peace

Basically, fiction is people. You can't write fiction about ideas.

Let me tell you something: you can not write good fiction about ideas. You can only write good fiction about people.

life could have been different if the meetings which have decided its course had been less silent, superficial or routine, if more thoughts had been exchanged, if humanity had been more able to show itself in them