Quotes About Humanity

To her the strangest thought of all was that she might be extraordinarily appealing. It went against everything she believed in, or at least against everything she wanted to believe in; because, deep down, in her most honest heart, maybe every person considered herself extraordinarily appealing. Maybe this was just a human thing.

She seemed more pitiable than murderable.

The infinite variety of human badness.

L'America, [...] il paese della libertà, il luogo dei grandi spazi aperti dove un figlio poteva ancora sentirsi speciale. Niente, però, disturba questa sensazione quanto la presenza di altri esseri umani che si sentono altrettanto speciali.

In the New Testament, the only things that mattered were love and free will.

In the instant before it was over and pure nothing, he heard all the human voices in the world.

Cuando te quedas en tu habitación y te encolerizas o adoptas una actitud de desdén o te encoges de hombros, como hice muchos años, el mundo y sus problemas te intimidan de manera extraordinaria. Pero cuando sales y estableces una relación real con personas reales, o incluso con animales reales, existe el peligro muy real de acabar queriendo a alguno de ellos.

The very ritual practices that the New Atheists dismiss as costly, inefficient and irrational turn out to be a solution to one of the hardest problems humans face: cooperation without kinship

Zelmo was nearly bellowing by the time he raised his glass to the tables center. 'To the human heart!' Diners at other tables glanced to see what was the matter.

This was before cell phones. The desolate spaciousness between humans, between human moments, not yet filled in with chattering ghosts of reassurance. You could hear yourself not think.

Agli inizi della carriera ero così fesso da credere che il lavoro consistesse nell'individuare un colpevole tra la massa degli innocenti. In realtà si tratta casomai di trovare uno o due innocenti che meritano di essere salvati in mezzo alla massa dei cattivi.

That's stupid. That's people.

I don't ever want to live in a world where something like mercy...or maybe it's compassion...is the wrong choice.

Walls, towns, rules, and day-to-day life doesn't make us civilized ... That's organization and ritual. Civilization lives in our hearts and heads or it doesn't exist at all.

It means that the things that make us human often make us ill.

Why did God create mankind? Because God likes stories.

When human beings try to become more than human, they quickly become less than human.

One who is not in my image is nonetheless in God's image

Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?

It made me start to wonder if there were other people so lonely so close. I thought about "Eleanor Rigby." It's true, where do they all come from? And where do they all belong?

I put my hand on him. Touching him has always been important to me, it was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches, my fingers against his shoulder, the outsides of our thighs touching as we squeeled together on the bus. I couldnt explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stiching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love?

She died in my arms, saying, I don't want to die. That is what death is like. It doesn't matter what uniforms the soldiers are wearing. It doesn't matter how good the weapons are. I thought if everyone could see what I saw, we would never have war anymore.

Anyway, the fascinating thing was that I read in National Geographic that there are more people alive now than have died in all of human history. In other words, if everyone wanted to play Hamlet at once, they couldn't, because there aren't enough skulls!

It's much easier to be cruel than one might think.