Quotes About Humanity

My piece of bread only belongs to me when I know that everyone else has a share, and that no one starves while I eat.

"Thou shalt not kill" does not apply to murder of one's own kind only, but to all living beings; and this Commandment was inscribed in the human breast long before it was proclaimed from Sinai.

As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.

Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.

The best stories don't come from "good vs. bad" but "good vs. good.

It's not given to people to judge what's right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.

But the law of loving others could not be discovered by reason, because it is unreasonable.

I simply want to live; to cause no evil to anyone but myself.

As long as there are slaughter houses there will always be battlefields.

There is something in the human spirit that will survive and prevail, there is a tiny and brilliant light burning in the heart of man that will not go out no matter how dark the world becomes.

the same question arose in every soul: "For what, for whom, must I kill and be killed?"... p982

You think that your laws correct evil - they only increase it. There is but one way to end evil - by rendering good for evil to all men without distinction.

We are all created to be miserable, and that we all know it, and all invent means of deceiving each other. And when one sees the truth, what is one to do?

The whole trouble lies in that people think that there are conditions excluding the necessity of love in their intercourse with man, but such conditions do not exist. Things may be treated without love; one may chop wood, make bricks, forge iron without love, but one can no more deal with people without love than one can handle bees without care.

They ought to find out how to vaccinate for love, like smallpox.

I don't think badly of people. I like everybody, and I'm sorry for everybody.

When a man sees a dying animal, horror comes over him: that which he himself is, his essence, is obviously being annihilated before his eyes--is ceasing to be. But when the dying one is a person, and a beloved person, then, besides a sense of horror at the annihilation of life, there is a feeling of severance and a spiritual wound which, like a physical wound, sometimes kills and sometimes heals, but always hurts and fears any external, irritating touch.

And all people live, not by reason of any care they have for themselves, but by the love for them that is in other people.

Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals.

some straight and some gay, all of whom

The idea of "art for art's sake" is a recent Western cultural phenomenon that in some ways both distracts and diminishes the reality of human creative expressions. If we define art broadly, then it permeates virtually every aspect of our lives. All of us search for and attempt to create that which is aesthetically pleasing; thus, we are all "artists.

that horrible acts are caused, in part, by our very tendency to assume that some people are naturally evil.

Before Man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.

But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires. Still, anything can be endured if all humanity is watching. The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.