Quotes About Humanity

Do-gooding is like treating hemophilia - the real cure is to let hemophiliacs bleed to death...before they breed more hemophiliacs.

Violence and war lead only to death.

She knew all she needed to know about the history of the human race: the ruthless and the defenseless. She didn't need the dates and the names. The ruthless and the defenseless, there's the whole fucking deal.

had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.

I wonder if you fully understand just how very little love there is in this world for Jewish people. I don't mean in Germany, either, under the Nazis. I mean in run-of-the-mill Americans, Mr. and Mrs. Nice Guy, who otherwise you and I consider perfectly harmless. Nathan, it is there. I guarantee you it is there. I know it is there. I have seen

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong.

if there weren't war, lunacy, perversity, sickness, imbecility, suicide, and death, chances were he'd be in a lot better shape.

He was just someone who had grown ugly, old, and embittered, one of billions.

There are a hundred different ways to hold someone's hand. There are the ways you hold a child's hand, the ways you hold a friend's hand, the ways you hold an elderly parent's hand, the ways you hold the hands of the departing and of the dying and of the dead.

Qué profundo es el oído! Piensa en lo que significa comprender algo que solamente has oído. ¡El carácter casi divino del oído! ¿No es por lo menos un fenómeno semidivino verte ante las inequidades más profundas de una existencia humana por el sencillo procedimiento de permanecer sentado en la oscuridad, escuchando lo que te dicen?

Mientras permanecía allí sentado con sus colegas resultaba extraño pensar que unas personas tan bien educadas, unos profesionales tan civilizados, hubieran cedido en buen grado al venerable sueño humano de una situación en la que un solo hombre puede encarnar el mal. Sin embargo, existe esa necesidad, y es imperecedera y profunda.

The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride. But if you can do that—well, lucky you.

I'm talking to a virtually inhumanly disciplined, rational person who has lost all sense of proportion and entered into a desperate story of unreasonable wishes. Yet that is what it is to be in life, isn't it? What it is to forge a life. You know your reason can reassert itself at any time - and if it does, there goes life and the instability that is life.

Mishima. Rothko. Hemingway. Berryman. Koestler. Pavese. Kosinski. Arshile Gorky. Primo Levi. Hart Crane. Walter Benjamin. Peerless bunch. Nothing dishonorable signing on there.

As though the ever-hovering shadow of humiliation isn't in fact, what binds one to everyone else.

Jesus, who did not sin, also felt pain.

Jesus honored the dignity of people, whether he agreed with them or not. He would not found his kingdom on the basis of race or class or other such divisions.

a sick person is not a sick person, but rather a person of worth and value who happens to have some bodily parts that are not functioning well.

Make it so the poor are no longer despised and thrown away. Look at them standing about — like wildflowers, which have nowhere else to grow.

A cease-fire between human beings depends upon a cease-fire with God.

Homeless people bear God's image too.

Nosotros, sin Dios, no podemos. Dios, sin nosotros, no quiere», decía San Agustín.

Contrary to nature's rule of "survival of the fittest," we humans measure civilization by how we respond to the most vulnerable and the suffering.

To pray is to walk in the full light of God, and to say simply, without holding back, 'I am human and you are God.