Quotes About Humanity

Art is the act of triggering deep memories of what it means to be fully human.

to be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others...

One thing I'll have to face about myself, I suppose, is that while I've always loved mankind in general, I have been less than generous to some of those I've been involved with in particular.

Now, 2.6 million years after we started making tools, the last 0.016 per cent of our history as produced the most change, an exponential curve turning vertical. It's why I keep saying 'a recent idea' to anything less than a couple of centuries old. That change is young, its paint is still wet. And it's still external, due to mechanisation and its effects, it hasn't really changed humans except to make the affluent fat—and by affluent I mean anyone who shits in good drinking water.

Technology can't do what humans do. Whatever it is that we do, we should do it now in earnest. If art is the gap's boatman, its job now grows critical: because it alone addresses our humanity. And we're going to need some of that.

We're all terrible people. Eventually, we all become terrible, maybe around the middle of our lives, and then, if we're lucky, we have time to find a way to be good again.

Culture now spreads at central nervous system speed. It's a shame that compassion doesn't.

Humanity enveloped in entropy desperately seeking symmetry for peace of mind

Empathy Is An Endangered Instinct

Human beings are such knotted, desperate pieces of work-it's a rare thing to know one completely, to the core, and still love him.

the most identifying trait of humanity is our ability to be inhumane to one another.

This world, which has the potential to be Eden, is instead the hell before Hell. In our arrogance, we have made it so.

Six billion of us walking the planet, six billion smaller worlds on the bigger one. Shoe salesmen and short-order cooks who look boring from the outside - some have weirder lives than you. Six billion stories, every one an epic, full of tragedy and triumph, good and evil, despair and hope. You and me - we aren't so special, bro.

Envy, envy eats them alive. If you had money, they'd envy you that. But since you don't, they envy you for having such a good, bright, loving daughter. They envy you for just being a happy man. They envy you for not envying them. One of the greatest sorrows of human existence is that some people aren't happy merely to be alive but find their happiness only in the misery of others.

Darkness dwells within even the best of us. In the worst of us, darkness not only dwells but reins.

The most identifying trait of humanity is our abilty to be inhumane to one another.

What sucks the worst is . . . this world was a gift to us, and we broke it, and part of the deal is that if we want things right, we have to fix it ourselves. But we can't. We try, but we can't.

I've since discovered that many human beings need no supernatural mentoring to commit acts of savagery; some people are devils in their own right, their telltale horns having grown inward to facilitate their disguise.

Maybe the devil in human beings isn't the reflection of the devil, perhaps the devil is only a reflection of the savagery and brutality of our kind. Maybe what we've done is create the devil in our own image

Human cruelty and treachery surpassed all understanding. There were no answers. Only excuses.

After once having made the mistake of watching television news, I had worried for a while about an asteroid hitting the earth and wiping out human civilization. The anchorwoman had said it was not merely possible but probable. At the end of the report, she smiled.

When I am battered and oppressed by the world that humanity has made - which is difference from the world that is was given - my primary defense, my consolation, is the absurdity of that world

Like me, you are human, after all, and we know what a joy and terror that is.

Riots come and go, wars come and go, but under the tumult, day after day, century after century, millions of people are doing nice things for one another, making sacrifices, mostly small things, but it's all those little kindnesses that hold civilization together, all those people who live quiet lives and never make the news.