Quotes About Humanity

Plants, animals, men, angels, then God. Difference between men and angels is that men are stuck in a body. They feel pain, hunger, and thirst...But me and you, we don't have to feel them things...We can turn off the human condition. So maybe we're closer to the angels, you know? Creatures of the mind. A higher morality. The machine takes us deeper into our souls. That far inside, we're capable of anything. Way beyond right or wrong.

I say we keep building new versions of ourselves, keep exploring the unknown, and keep growing. We're gonna be fine. Different, but fine. Because most people are good. Right?

In the grand scheme of things, all human beings are part of the same family, regardless of origin.* The divisions we have built between ourselves along the lines of race and geography are illusions.

most people are good," says Jim. "But not when they're afraid.

Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.… Can events be guided so that we may survive? VERNOR VINGE, 1993

humanity learns true lessons only in cataclysm.

I can only give you words. Nothing fancy. But this will have to do. It doesn't matter if you're reading it a year from now or a hundred years from now. By the end of the chronicle you will know that humanity carried the flame of knowledge into the terrible blackness of the unknown, to the very brink of annihilation. And we carried it back.

Technology changes, but people stay the same.

It's the one thing we do better than any other animal. We communicate, cooperate, and make tools to extend our reach. Every new tool changes us...The old fears the new, and the two threaten destroy each other. Our technology is what makes us strong. And it's what makes us dangerous.

I don't think. I react. My action is divorced from all emotion and logic. It isn't human or inhuman-it just is. I believe that choices like these, made in absolute crisis, come from our True Selves, bypassing all experience and thought. These kinds of choices are the closest thing to fate that human beings will ever experience.

Throughout most of the world and for most of human history, music making was as natural an activity as breathing and walking, and everyone participated. Concert halls, dedicated to the performance of music, arose only in the last several centuries.

I think that when humans get around to exploring and building cities and towns on Mars, it will be viewed as one of the great times of humanity, a time when people set foot on another world and had the freedom to make their own world.

I think art, especially literature, has the particular power to immerse the viewer or reader into another world. This is especially powerful in literature, when a reader lives the experience of the characters. So if the characters are human and real enough, then readers will feel empathy for them.

The world is bad but not without hope. It is only hopeless when you look at it from an ideal viewpoint.

It may be shocking to some people in this country to realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler when they preach discrimination against other religious, racial or economic groups.

'Babel' is about the point of view of others. It literally includes points of views as experienced from the other side. It is not about a hero. It is not about only one country. It is a prism that allows us to see the same reality from different angles.

The essence of humanity's spiritual dilemma is that we evolved genetically to accept one truth and discovered another. Is there a way to erase the dilemma, to resolve the contradictions between the transcendentalist and the empiricist world views?

During the pilot, director Len Wiseman and I discussed how Lucifer views humanity, and we can came up with this notion that he sees them as lab rats.

Because I don't think it's very healthy to hold people to idealized views. I think that's a certain stage in life, something kids do. You have to go through that idealistic phase with your parents, but at a certain point, you need to see people as just people.

I was fortunate enough to have been raised to a certain point before I got into the race thing. I had other views of what a human is, so I was never able to see racism as the big question. Racism was horrendous, but there were other aspects to life.

When I walk around my neighborhood, the grocery store, or the farmers market, I don't see Democrats or Republicans, Progressives or Conservatives. I see my brothers and sisters - living, breathing human beings with diverse and complicated stories, views, and desires that can't be packaged neatly in a box.

I hope that vigorous space exploration continues and that humankind will have a space station that resides between Earth and the moon. Outside the gravitational field of Earth, we could launch robotic spacecraft to other destinations in our solar system.

Societies have debated the severity of punishment for vile acts over millennia, with complex moral arguments on both sides of the question. But citizens and society should pay more attention to the trend of over-criminalisation of common human failings and frailties.

We have been working with Habitat for Humanity and we have built eighty homes, 80% of which are being lived in by New Orleans' musicians. It is called the Musicians' Village and at the center is the Ellis Marsalis Center for Music.