Quotes About Humanity

There is no need for hell fire in hell. Hell is other people.

To do?wiadczenie zawodowe: lekarze, ksi??a, urz?dnicy i oficerowie znaj? si? na cz?owieku tak, jakby go stworzyli.

On this Earth that bleeds, all joy is obscene, and all happy men must live alone.

Can I help it if my heart beats, if my hands go cold?

If you think I minded, then you've never lived like that, plunged in a dream, when all the faces are masks and only the trees are alive and you can almost see the strings that are pulling the puppets. Close-up of human nature - isn't it worth something?

A child who dies from hunger is a murdered child.

La conscience de l'identité entre tous les hommes est au fondement du droit à l'alimentation. Personne ne saurait tolérer la destruction de son semblable par la faim sans mettre en danger sa propre humanité, son identité. (p. 122)

Entre la raison marchande et le droit à l'alimentation, l'antinomie est absolue. Les spéculateurs jouent avec la vie de millions d'êtres humains. Abolir totalement et immédiatement la spéculation sur les denrées alimentaires constitue une exigence de la raison. (p. 329)

L'angoisse humaine n'est pas quantifiable, elle n'est pas un élément de l'analyse macroéconomique. N'étant pas mesurable, elle n'existe pas pour le FMI

But poetry has never had an answer for anything. All it does is bear witness. To despair. And desperate lives.

We were all moving to a pre-ordained end. You just had to open the papers and read the international news, or the crime reports. We didn't need nuclear weapons. We were killing each other with prehistoric savagery. We were just dinosaurs, and the worst thing of all was that we knew it.

Of course, every new caress would only have taken us closer to the inevitable: break-ups, tears, disillusionment, sadness, anguish, loathing. It wouldn't have made the slightest difference to the mess that human beings make of this world.

Does it take the harsh light of disaster to show a person's true nature?

So that's why I'm such a big fan of storytelling. I think the most important thing is empathy. And it's less about 'those people'. Because I think we're all 'those people'.

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

What it means to be human is to bring up your children in safety, educate them, keep them healthy, teach them how to care for themselves and others, allow them to develop in their own way among adults who are sane and responsibile, who know the value of the world and not its economic potential. It means art, it means time, it means all the invisibles never counted by the GDP and the census figures. It means knowing that life has an inside as well as an outside. And I think it means love.

Where did love begin? What human being looked at another and saw in their face the forests and the sea? Was there a day, exhausted and weary, dragging home food, arms cut and scarred, that you saw yellow flowers and, not knowing what you did, picked them because I love you? In the fossil record of our existence, there is no trace of love. You cannot find it held in the earth's crust, waiting to be discovered. The long bones of our ancestors show nothing of their hearts.

I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people.

Two things significantly distinguish human beings from the other animals; an interest in the past and the possibility of language. Brought together they make a third: Art. The invisible city not calculated to exist. Beyond the lofty pretensions of the merely ceremonial, long after the dramatic connivings of plitical life, like it or not, it remains. Time past eternally present and undestroyed.

Capacity for love in its higher forms seems to be peculiarly human although even in humans it is still peculiar.

I think we are worlds compressed into human form.

Humankind cannot bear very much reality. That is why we invent stories, I said. And what if we are the story we invent? said Shelley.

I am civilised. My feelings are not.

Why is it that human beings are allowed to grow up without the necessary apparatus to make sound ethical decisions?