Quotes About Humanity

Truth is, I think naked men are kind of strange looking what with their doodles and ding-dong hanging loose like they do. Nevertheless, there's the curiosity thing. I guess it's another one of those car crash experiences, where you feel compelled to look even if you know you'll be horrified.

Sometimes I find human nature to be real disappointing

What was the point in such loneliness among people. At least if you were by yourself, you had a good reason to be lonely.

their eager eyes unlocking the secrets of the human form. who could just look at it as it is, without prettying it up or emphasizing its awfulness

How vast was a human being's capacity for suffering. The only thing you could do was stand in awe of it. It wasn't a question of survival at all. It was the fullness of it, how much could you hold, how much could you care.

We get all the bad dreams, ese, she said, stroking my wet cheek with the palm of her hand. We got to leave some for somebody else.

That philosopher who said we think, therefore we are, should have spent an hour in the maternity ward of Waite Memorial Hospital. He'd have had to change his whole philosophy. The

She couldn't help but think how Michael would have loved this old man. He loved when people talked to him like this, just regular people. It made him feel human, connected, if someone was comfortable talking to him, saw him as an ordinary man, perhaps he wasn't as estranged from the world as he felt himself to be.

How else can we become reconciled, except one individual at a time? This Jesus you seek did not come to address nations. He washed the wounds of lepers. He dined with sinners. He healed all who came to him. One person at a time.

painful experiences can be used to better prepare us for heaven. You see, if we let it, even pain can shape us—make us better people—get rid of some of the ugly parts of our humanity.

I fall in love with contradictions without understanding. I can't really portray them unless I do. So in a roundabout way I have to fall in love, it's my duty. If love is about understanding and understanding is compassion and compassion is love, I have to have compassion towards the world.

Unless one is a religious fundamentalist and believes that man was created in the image and likeness of God, it is foolish to believe that human beings are exempt from biological classification and the laws of evolution that apply to all other life forms.

I like books that expose me to people unlike me and books that do battle against caricature or simplification. That, to me, is the heroic in fiction.

Unlike people of my generation, my children and my grandchildren have grown up living with, knowing, people who were outwardly gay and lesbian. And they have learned that they're just like us... And when you see that they're just like us, the rationale for discrimination melts away.

Hating a book is not unlike hating a person; in fact it's tempting to just go ahead and hate the author personally, by proxy, qua human being, except that I know that would be a mistake.

I need say no more, to prove that slavery is entirely unlike the servitude in the patriarchal families.

To assert that antisemitism is unlike other racisms is not to claim a privilege for it. Hating a Jew is no worse than hating anyone else.

The dead spacecraft in orbit have become a permanent fixture around our planet, not unlike the rings of Saturn. They will be the longest-lasting artifacts of human civilization, quietly circling the Earth until the sun turns into a red giant about 5 billion years from now.

Reading opens your mind and helps you understand and empathize with people who are unlike you and outside your breadth of experience.

Humanity has nearly suffocated the globe with carbon dioxide, yet nuclear power plants that produce no such emissions are so mired in objections and obstruction that, despite renewed interest on every continent, it is unlikely another will be built in the United States.

Our hubris needs to be downsized, thinking that profiteering on Earth, on whatever level - environmentally, economically, culturally - is unlimited and everybody should get as much as he wants or she wants. Humans need to be shrunk again to their actual size.

The kinds of things that we can make mistakes about are essentially unlimited in number.

Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.

Maybe we are all prospective migrants. The lines of national borders on maps are artificial constructs, as unnatural to us as they are to birds flying overhead. Our first impulse is to ignore them.