Quotes About Humanity

Humans make a machine, and then fool themselves into believing that their own brains are no better than the machines. This allows them to believe that their creation, the computer, is as brilliant as their own minds. But it's a ridiculous self-deception. Computers aren't even in the same league.

How suddenly we find the flesh of God within us after all, when we thought that we were only made of dust.

Anton: "You're asking me?" Sister Carlotta: "God not being convenient, I ask a fellow mortal.

Ningún ser humano es indigno cuando se comprenden sus motivos. Ninguna vida deja de merecer la pena. Incluso el más malvado de entre los hombres, si conoces su intimidad, tiene algún acto generoso que le redime de sus pecados, aunque sólo sea un poco generoso.

And no matter how well we think we know people, the fact is we're all strangers in the end.

How quickly we find the flesh of God within us all, when we thought that we were only made of dust.

The human race has always produced a vast surplus of human beings and of wealth, and it has used up almost all of it either on stupid monuments like the pyramids or on brutal, bloody, pointless wars. We want you to unite the world so that this waste can finally stop.

In wartime, commanders have always had to learn the concept of "acceptable losses." But those who keep their humanity never really accept the idea of acceptability

idea that people from the next village are as human as ourselves, it is presumptuous in the extreme to suppose we could ever look at sociable, tool-making creatures who arose from other evolutionary paths

The Buggers have finally, finally learned that we humans value each and every individual human life. We don't throw our forces away because every soldier is the queen of a one-member hive. But they've learned this lesson just in time for it to be hopelessly wrong — for we humans do, when the cause is sufficient, spend our own lives.

Any animal is willing to kill in order to save itself.' 'Any animal is willing to kill the Other,' said Ender. 'But the higher beings include more and more living things within their self-story, until at last there is no Other. Until the needs of others are more important than any private desires. The highest beings of all are the ones who are willing to pay any personal cost for the good of those who need them.

Still, just because humans did it, too, did not make it sensible.

What if the first homo sapiens had felt that way? We'd all still be neanderthals, and when the Buggers came they would have blasted us all to bits and that would be that." "We didn't evolve from neanderthals," said Bean. "Well, it's a good thing we have that little fact squared away," said Petra.

Don't you ever feel like lashing out at somebody? I mean, don't you ever lose your temper?' 'Ela, after you've inadvertently killed a couple of people with your bare hands, either you learn to control your temper or you lose your humanity.' 'You've done that?' 'Yes,' he said.

Nuestra misión es salvar el mundo, no curar corazones heridos. Eres demasiado compasivo.

You don't represent all humankind. You're about to fight a war with other humans. So how can you say that our wars are evil and your wars are good?' Surely Pizarro, for all his shortcomings, had an easier time of it with Atahualpa

If good people weren't so trusting of bad ones, the human race would have died out long ago—most women never would have let most men near them.

Individually, human beings are all dolts.>

it's for people like that, short-sighted, suicidal people, that we're pushing Ender to the edge of human endurance.' 'I think you underestimate Ender.' 'But I fear that I also underestimate the stupidity of the rest of mankind. Are we absolutely sure that we ought to win this war?' 'Sir, those words sound like treason.' 'It was black humor.

Excuse me, but if God wanted to do everything himself, what did he make us for in the first place?

the war that will come now is every bit as bloody." "But you delayed it a few more years," said Verily. "What good is that?" "It's two or three more years of life. Of loving and marrying and having babies. Of buying and selling, of plowing and planting and harvesting, of moving and settling. It will be a different world in two or three years, and those who die in the war will have had that much more life. It's not a small thing, those years.

Ender conocía las reglas nunca dichas de la guerra entre hombres, aunque sólo tuviera seis años. Estaba prohibido golpear al oponente caído indefenso en el suelo; sólo un animal lo haría. Precisamente por eso se acercó al cuerpo inerme de Stilson y le dio otra parada en las costillas, con saña.

the fact that you have belonged to the human race more deeply and fully than most people could even imagine, find a way to believe that, and don't hide from life in the unfathomable, lightless depths of relativistic space.

Even if there is no such thing as free will, we have to treat each other as if there were free will in order to live together in society.