Quotes About Humanity

Even if torture works, what is the point of 'defending' America using a tactic that is a fundamental violation of what America ought to mean?

In this dangerous world that we live in, where hatred and violence and natural disasters sometimes collide to almost overwhelm us, we each can help in some way.

I want to gesture toward a poetry of ourselves and others under the conditions of twenty-first-century absolutism, making us dimensional in a time when the human concrete is continually erased by state and religious violence and by disingenuous jargon serving state power.

Abortion is the ultimate violence.

The story of Noah, like other stories in the first 11 chapters of Genesis, are archetypal. Noah's story tells us that human beings have an inherent tendency towards violence both towards their fellow human beings and towards the creation itself. The story tells us that this violence grieves God.

Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.

I think violence can never be justified.

Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.

It is the great sadness of our species that we have not found a way to eliminate the conflict and to eliminate violence as a device to resolve our conflicts throughout the entire history of the human race.

You want to free the world, free humanity, from oppression? Look inside, look sideways, look at the hidden violence of language. Never forget that language is where the other, parallel violence, the cruelty exercised on the body, originates.

There's always a theme I'm drawn to, that we humans are not good or bad. We're all a mixture of both. We can have great compassion or commit great violence.

In our struggle to restrain the violence and contain the damage, we tend to forget that the human capacity for aggression is more than a monstrous defect, that it is also a crucial survival tool.

Violence is not funny.

The greatest nation in the world should not have much to fear from a family, especially children, fleeing violence. More importantly, children fleeing violence ought to have nothing to fear from the greatest country in the world.

I don't think that swearing or gratuitous violence or sex make a show better. I just think there are natural rhythms to a human being in these situations, and what happens in these situations that cable allows is a natural reaction.

The rise of man from the animal to the human level was prolonged by the necessity of rising from a state of barbarism and violence to one of order and peace.

Actual violence has no attraction for me at all.

For all the tribulations in our lives, for all the troubles that remain in the world, the decline of violence is an accomplishment that we can savor - and an impetus to cherish the forces of civilization and enlightenment that made it possible.

We'll engage in pretty extreme violence in the world but, you know, the one thing that comes to humans as easily as eating or breathing or sleeping, is sex.

Violence is never a solution in my plays, just as ultimately violence is never a solution in human affairs.

Of course I am frustrated with regard to extreme poverty, to violence that never seems to cease.

Yes, violence begets more violence, but historically this has been the way of the world.

Violence always seems to me the worst form of tyranny. It deprives people of their rights, including the right to live.

Vietnam helped me to look at the horror and terror in the hearts of people and realize how we can't aim guns and set booby traps for people we have never spoken a word to. That kind of impersonal violence mystifies me.