Quotes About Humanity

Nice and good are different. Being nice involves immediate actions and immediate consequences—you give water to the thirsty and comfort to the afflicted right here, right now. Being good involves living in the world so that you contribute to the welfare of your fellow human beings.

natural selection has almost become irrelevant in human evolution. There's been no biological change in humans in 40,000 or 50,000 years. Everything we call culture and civilization we've built with the same body and brain."6

The genius of free human beings is that, given responsibility, they join together to take care of each other—to be their brothers' keepers when their brother needs help. The triumph of an earlier America was that it had set all the right trends in motion, at a time when the world was first coming out of millennia of poverty into an era of plenty. The tragedy of contemporary America is that it abandoned that course. Libertarians want to return to it.

It is wrong to kill anyone. It is wrong to kill those who kill. It is wrong to kill the executioner. The laws on murder must be killed!

To think of what he must have done to have inflicted so much damage /.../. It was hard to believe. It was hard to believe anything good about out species. Was this what we were - cruel apes who wore clothes and washed and perfumed our bodies?

La bella Antigüedad fue siempre venerable; pero no creo en absoluto que ella sea admirable. Veo a los antiguos, sin doblar las rodillas; son grandes, es cierto, pero hombres como nosotros.

There is no knowing what is in a man's heart.

Ask the experimenters why they experiment on animals, and the answer is: "Because the animals are like us." Ask the experimenters why it is morally okay to experiment on animals, and the answer is: "Because the animals are not like us." Animal experimentation rests on a logical contradiction.

Christ did not, like a moralist, love a theory of good, but he loved the real man.

I would like to believe he's sick rather than just mean and evil.

The Simiadae then branched off into two great stems, the New World and Old World monkeys; and from the latter at a remote period, Man, the wonder and the glory of the universe, proceeded.

Man with all his noble qualities… with his godlike intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system… still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

I know the answer! The answer lies within the heart of all mankind! The answer is twelve? I think I'm in the wrong building.

Dear Friedrich, the world's still false, cruel and beautiful...

Herder put forward the idea that each of us has an original way of being human. Each person has his or her own "measure" is his way of putting it. This idea has entered very deep into modern consciousness. It is also new. Before the late eighteenth century no one thought that the differences between human beings had this kind of moral significance.

Many felt a profound malaise at the idea that the sources of benevolence should be just enlightened self-interest, or simply feelings of sympathy. This seemed to neglect altogether the human power of self-transcendence, the capacity to go beyond self-related desire altogether and follow a higher aspiration. This

the change I want to define and trace is one which takes us from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human

When you watch the living force go out of a man's face as you fire your weapon into his unprotected body, it is very personal

they are able to forgive themselves, as a wise man once said, for being human. That is knowing that life is hard and virtue rare, they keep the ancient faith that it is better to love than to hate, to live fully even if imperfectly.

We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, not only our reason, but our instincts; and that it cannot

I'm not a superhero. I'm background. I'm a good person wrapped in mediocre soul. I want to be better. I really do. But even now in my greatest moment I know this is as good as it will ever get for me and it's not that good. I have a small heart, a dark heart, a heart filled with exactly equal amounts of good and evil, one that is weak and will take us only so far, but for now it propels us higher and higher and higher.

Man as an individual is a genius. But men in the mass form the headless monster, a great, brutish idiot that goes where prodded.

More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness

More than machinery, we need humanity; more than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness.