Quotes About Humanity

This is what I discovered during my imprisonment. I saw the human character in its naked form. I saw at one end a narrow rank of villainy, and at the other a narrow rank of virtue. In the middle was everyone else. And I understood that the state of the world is the result of the struggle between these two extremes.

Some forms of socialism and collectivism are – explicitly or implicitly – based on the notion that many people are not competent to make decisions about their own lives, so that the more talented should make decisions for them. But that would mean there were no universal human rights, only rights that some have and others do not, denying the essential humanity of those who are deemed to be owned.

Karl Popper once said that attempts to create heaven on earth invariably produce hell.

Deep down, most humans prefer living out their lives surrounded by comfortable certainties, guided by warm myths and metaphors, knowing that they'll understand their children, and their children will understand them.

Your faith in Homo technologicus -the Tinkering Man- has one fatal flaw. It offers you no escape clause.

All I ask is Ã¢â'¬Â¦ ponder with open minds. We've made so many mistakes, humanity, during just one lifetime. Many of them perpetrated not by evildoers, drenched in malice, but by men and women filled with fine motives! Like you.

Once artificial intelligence matches our own, won't they then design even better ai minds? Then better still, with accelerating pace? At worst, might they decide (as in many cheap dramas), to eliminate their irksome masters? At best, won't we suffer the shame of being nostalgically tolerated? Like senile grandparents or beloved childhood pets?

By one way of reckoning, we transformed several hundred cubic kilometers of fossil fuels into two cubic kilometers of human beings.

People generally overestimate how distinct their lives are, so the commonalities seemed to them like a series of miracles.

But I've seen enough to know that we all carry a measure of guilt and innocence among us.

Big History is the story of how you and I came to be.

Ä°nsan için deÄŸer kavram?n?n tam bir soyutlama olduÄŸunu kabul etmelisiniz. Ä°nsani deÄŸer diye bir ÅŸey asl?nda yok. Bu nedenle de ona sahip olup olmamak diye bir ÅŸey de yok ve bu ölçülebilir bir ÅŸey deÄŸil.

If almost everyone is in favor of feeding the hungry, the politician may find it in his interest to do so. But, under those circumstances, the politician is unnecessary: some kind soul will give the hungry man a meal anyway. If the great majority is against the hungry man, some kind soul among the minority still may feed him—the politician will not.

Everyone's lonely, dear," she explained, drawing him close to her. "We touch other people only briefly, then we're alone again. You'll get used to it in time.

Nosotros, por tanto, vemos en Cristo todo lo que Adán debió ser, pero que nunca fue. Cristo recogió la urdimbre de humanidad que Adán había hecho caer y la llevó a su plenitud completa.

There's a kind of Ah-ha! Somebody at least for a moment feels about something or sees something the way that I do. It doesn't happen all the time. It's these brief flashes or flames, but I get that sometimes. I feel unalone—intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. I feel human and unalone and that I'm in a deep, significant conversation with another consciousness in fiction and poetry in a way that I don't with other art.

The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness.

No wonder we cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from the horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home.

Tell them there are no holes for your fingers in the masks of men. Tell them how could you ever even hope to love what you can't grab onto.

It took years after I'd graduated from Amherst to realize that people were actually far more complicated and interesting than books, that almost everyone else suffered the same secret fears and inadequacies as I, and that feeling alone and inferior was actually the great valent bond between us all. I wish I'd been smart enough to understand that when I was an adolescent.

The horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle: That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. —David Foster Wallace, "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness" (2005)

Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction's job is to dramatize what makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still are human beings, now. Or can be…I just think that fiction that isn't exploring what it means to be human today isn't good art.

For reasons that are not well understood, war's codes are safer for most of us than love's.

The other half is to dramatize that we still 'are' human beings, now. Or can be.