Quotes About Humanity

It is the duty of every generation of writers and artists to find fresh ways of expressing the habitual circumstances of the human condition. To serve up the lukewarm remains of yesterdays dinner is easy, profitable and popular, (for a while). It is also wrong.

Very few people ever manage what nature manages without effort and mostly without fail. We don't know who we are or how to function, much less how to bloom. Blind nature. Homo Sapiens. Who's kidding whom?

To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.

Nature made me happy and good, and if I am otherwise, it is society's fault.

So finally we tumble into the abyss, we ask God why he has made us so feeble. But, in spite of ourselves, He replies through our consciences: 'I have made you too feeble to climb out of the pit, because i made you strong enough not to fall in.

To renounce freedom is to renounce one's humanity, one's rights as a man and equally one's duties.

T]he man who meditates is a depraved animal.

The first sentiment of man was that of his existence, his first care that of preserving it.

Our sweetest existence is relative and collective and our true self is not entirely in us. Such is man's constitution in this life that he never succeeds in truly enjoying himself without the help of other people.

L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers.

But in some great souls, who consider themselves as citizens of the world, and forcing the imaginary barriers that separate people from people...

Whoever is endowed with a power superior to mankind, should also be above the weakness of humanity, without which, that excess of strength would, in effect, only sink him below the most feeble, or what he would actually have been, had he remained their equal.

The bounds of human possibility are not as confining as we think they are; they are made to seem to be tight by our weaknesses, our vices, our prejudices that confine them.

an animal, at the end of a few months, is what it will be all its life; and its species, at the end of a thousand years, is what it was in the first of those thousand years. Why is man alone subject to becoming an imbecile?

To decide that the son of a slave is born a slave is to decide that he is not born a man.

Deri tani kam parë shumë maska, kur do të shoh fytyra njerëzish?

Tout est bien sortant des mains de l'Auteur des choses, tout dégénère entre les mains de l'homme.

Les villes sont le gouffre de l'espèce humaine.

Renoncer à sa liberté c'est renoncer à sa qualité d'homme

Renoncer à sa liberté c'est renoncer à sa qualité d'homme, aux droits de l'humanité, même à ses devoirs.

Men, despite all their ethics, would never be anything more than monsters if nature had not given them pity to bolster their reason.

There is not a single ill-doer who could not be turned to some good. The State has no right to put to death, even for the sake of making an example, any one whom it can leave alive without danger.

Emerging society gave way to the most horrible state of war; since the human race, vilified and desolated, was no longer able to retrace its steps or give up the unfortunate acquisitions it had made, and since it labored only toward its shame by abusing the faculties that honor it, it brought itself to the brink of its ruin. Horrified by the newness of the ill, both the poor man and the rich man hope to flee from wealth, hating what they once had prayed for.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau