Quotes About Humanity

there's still room for writing that holds out some hope for humanity.

dreams are all that separates us from the machines

What do you think of the war, M. Severn? [...] What can one think of war? I said, tasting the wine again. It was quite good, though nothing in the Web could match my memories of French Bordeaux. War does not call for judgment, I said, merely survival.

Either all of us are accidents of history or none of us are.

I don't think that we have any right to have a sort of generalized criticism, if not hatred, of the people who hated us, because then we only descend to the level of those people who persecuted us for so many years. New

Yet, as should become obvious, genocidal events have been common enough to suggest that they cannot be explained as some kind of deviant behavior. On the contrary, given the right circumstances, normal human beings are all too ready to kill by category.

The important point to understand here is that it is unnecessary, and even misleading, to think of those who engage in large-scale killing of civilians as somehow abnormal. Given the right circumstances, it is not too difficult to turn a significant proportion of humans into mass murderers. The disgust one may feel, the identification with the victims, the sense of unfairness can all be overcome and have routinely been overcome with training and experience.

This is a world of corpses strewn in streets and pits, yet in the deadcart itself a drunken piper wakes up to cry, 'But I an't dead tho', am I?' (p. 89).

and for which the very name of a Spaniard is reckoned to be frightful and terrible, to all people of humanity or of Christian compassion; as if the kingdom of Spain were particularly eminent for the produce of a race of men who were without principles of tenderness, or the common bowels of pity to the miserable, which is reckoned to be a mark of generous temper in the mind. (2)

So certainly does interest banish all matters of affection, and so naturally do men give up honour and justice, humanity, and even Christianity, to secure themselves.

And if there are any two moral stances that our times call for, they are precisely these, self-restraint and compassion.

the root of altruism lies in empathy, the ability to read emotions in others; lacking a sense of another's need or despair, there is no caring.

humans the prefrontal cortex takes up a larger ratio of the brain's top layer, the neocortex, than in any other species, and has been the site of the major evolutionary changes that make us human. This neural zone, as we will see, holds the seeds of awakening to enduring well-being, but it is also entwined with emotional suffering. We can envision wonderful possibilities, and we also can be disturbed by worrisome

Empathy is the prime inhibitor of human cruelty: withholding our natural inclination to feel with another allows us to treat the other as an It.

Numbersign questionmark you and Asterisk exclamation point the world.

You can't mind these things, you just can't, for to dislike what makes a person human is to dislike all humans.

Come on in, I said again, and he came on in and I hugged him. I felt his arms, warm through the linen. Suddenly there was a reason to leave the house and see other humans, because some of them were good.

Love makes the world go round, the hit songs collectively tell us, and the world is full of people you don't know and might as well be nice to because they won't leave.

Que si está bien no ser virgen, sí. La mayoría de la gente no lo es, Min. Para empezar, por eso existe la gente.

Si existe alguna película que, con elegancia e imaginación, profundice en las violentas y delicadas verdades sobre el corazón humano, este humilde crítico aún no la ha descubierto.

the world is full of people you don't know and might as well be nice to because they won't leave.

No, you don't understand because it isn't happening to you, and no one can understand but me. I don't blame you. You've got your job to do, and your Ph.D. to get, and-oh, yes don't tell me, I know you're in this largely out of love of humanity, but you've got your life to live and we don't happen to belong on the same level. I passed your floor on the way up, nad now I'm passing it on the way down, and I don't think I'll be taking this elevator again. So let's just say good-bye here and now.

Whatever happens to me, I will have lived a thousand normal lives by what I might add to others not yet born.

Even a feeble-minded man wants to be like other men. A child may not know how to feed itself, or what to eat, yet it knows hunger.