Quotes About Humanity

The US isn't speeding up the immigration process in spite of what's happening to Jews in Germany, which makes me ashamed to carry an American passport.

Todos estão loucos, neste mundo? Porque a cabeça da gente é uma só, e as coisas que há e que estão para haver são demais de muitas, muito maiores diferentes, e a gente tem de necessitar de aumentar a cabeça, para o total. Todos os sucedidos acontecendo, o sentir forte da gente — o que produz os ventos. Só se pode viver perto de outro, e conhecer outra pessoa, sem perigo de ódio, se a gente tem amor.

I am an anthropologist who lost faith in her own method, who stopped believing that observable activity defined anthropos.

Nous ne sommes pas des bêtes idéalisées. Nous sommes d'imparfaits mortels, conscients de cette mortalité alors même que nous la rejetons, trahis par notre propre complexité, ainsi faits que lorsque nous pleurons nos pertes, c'est aussi, pour le meilleur et pour le pire, nous-mêmes que nous pleurons. Tels que nous étions. Tels que nous ne sommes plus. Tels qu'un jour nous ne serons plus du tout.

In that instant I thought I grieved for James Jones, a man I never met, but I think I grieved for all of us: for Jones, for myself, for the sufferers of mean guilts and for their exorcists, for Robert E. Lee Prewitt, for the Royal Hawaiian Hotel and for this golden nitwit who believed eternity to be a psychic science.

No em clavis un sermó; els sermons són desoladors perquè son un ranxo, igual per a tothom, quan cada u sent el seu mal com a únic i intransferible.

But any religion would be found lacking if judged solely by its human servants.

We say that so-and-so is a loving person or a cold person; we admire, are even awed by, people who have a large capacity for compassion. I think of Mother Teresa, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Guilleaume left La Praline with a small bag of florentines in his pocket; before he had turned the corner of avenue des Francs Bourgeois I saw him stoop to offer one to the dog. A pat, a bark, a wagging of the short stubby tail. As I said, some people never have to think about giving.

We're gods, not saints. Everyone lies. Everyone cheats. Everyone scores off everyone else.

Non ci sono demoni ma una serie di archetipi comuni a ogni civiltà.

we have the uncanny knack of focusing on difference; as if excluding others could make our sense of identity stronger. And yet, in all my travels, I have found that people are mostly the same everywhere.

L'amore è l'unica costante in questo difficile mondo razionale, l'amore e la sua metà oscura, l'odio.

History isn't about dates and places and wars. It's about the people who fill the spaces between them.

I told myself that if I didn't care, this wouldn't have hurt so much - surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn't a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.

It's choice that makes us human.

That's why we read fiction, isn't it? To remind us that whatever we suffer, we're not the only ones?

And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.

The only monsters I have ever known were men.

It's never the differences between people that suprise us. It's the things that, against all odds, we have in common.

How similar does someone have to be to you before you remember to see them, first, as human?

Isn't it amazing how, when you strip away everything, people are so much alike?

It's never the differences between people that surprise us. It's the things that, against all odds, we have in common.

It seems to me that no matter what religion you subscribe to, acts of kindness are the stepping-stones to making the world a better place--because we become better people in it.