Quotes About Humanity

JOSEPH STALIN, the leader of Russia, ordered operatives to remove all the stores of food from farming towns in the Ukraine. Millions of people had no bread—they ate field mice, insects, husks, and dead children. It was 1933.

OUT of that moment Jesus was nailed to his cross flowed our attempts to represent it, to create a narrative that could contain it. Yet the body, hanging there, is still, simply, terrible. Caravaggio's genius was to paint Jesus with dirty feet, to bring him back down to earth.

I'm human. That's how humans spend their time, doing shitty things.

There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them.

We can't be as good as we'd want to, so the question then becomes, how do we cope with our own badness?

Women who disapprove of men - and there's plenty to disapprove of - should remember how we started out, and how far we had to travel.

You know that bad people can make great art, don't you?'Said Annie. 'Yes, of course. Some of the people whose art I admire the most are assholes.' 'Dickens wasn't nice to his wife.' 'Dickens didn't make a memoir called I'm Nice to My Wife.

Passion was a part of being human.

One thing about great art: it made you love people more, forgive them their petty transgressions.

It was almost as if he had been given a glimpse of what it was like to be human. It wasn't too bad, really; he wouldn't even mind being human on full-time basis

It seems to me now that the plain state of being human is dramatic enough for anyone; you don't need to be a heroin addict or a performance poet to experience extremity. You just have to love someone.

There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them. So

People are allowed to feel horny and fucked-up at the same time.

But they were corrupt, Father! - They were human, my child. And if we were to reject all worldly authority for that reason, we would have to reject everything: marriage and government and society; the family, the state, and the church. We would have to abolish the world. Is that what you propose to do?

I'm someone who's mostly dead inside but still has a little hope for something extraordinary, which, as I said, is the worst breed of human, because it means I know everything is bullshit, but that I secretly hope for the day when it might not be.

Throughout history, men have made many things to contain God: churches, temples, denominations, ceremonies. All of these have mixed motives and chequered histories. God doesn't 'need' any of these things, but it is in humanity's nature to keep building houses, and it is in God's nature to keep turning up.

Reject the tribalism. Reject the calls to fight the other team. The other party. The other species. The other football club. The other family down the street that has a bigger interstellar corvette than you. Don't demonize the other candidate. Don't hate the opponent. Oppose them. Debate them. Disagree with them. But then, at the end of the day, break bread with them. Because I promise you this: we will all need each other again. And again. And again. Thank you.

no he encontrado entre lo poco que poseo nada que me sea más caro o que tanto estime como el conocimiento de las acciones de los hombres

There are times when the kindness of strangers only makes things worse because one realizes how badly one is in need of kindness and that the only source is a stranger.

The misery of other people is only an abstraction [...] something that can be sympathized with only by drawing from one's own experiences. But as it stands, true empathy remains impossible. And so long as it is, people will continue to suffer the pressure of their seemingly singular existence.

Deslizó los dedos por su espalda de arriba abajo, sobre la fina blusa y, durante un momento, se olvidó del peligro, agradeciendo que el mundo marque divisiones, para que podamos superarlas sintiendo la dicha de acercarnos al otro más y más, aun reconociendo en el fondo, con tristeza, que hay diferencias insuperables.

The third movement is one of the most moving passages ever written, and I've never listened to it without feeling as if I alone have been lifted up on the shoulders of some giant creature touring the charred landscape of all human feeling.

How little needs to stay the same for you to continue the effort they call, for lack of a better word, being human.

He watched the old man sleep and felt the vast loneliness of the world, the loneliness passed from person to person like a beach ball at a rock concert, kept aloft at all costs, and this was his moment to shoulder it. Or maybe it was his own personal loneliness, a solitary, errant longing no one else could ever know, and the knowledge of this stoked the already existing loneliness, made it widen and blur at the edges until it included everything.