Quotes About Humanity

Refusing to accept our "real selves," we try to create more powerful false selves, or we give up and become less than human. This results in a lifetime of cover-up and secrecy. This secrecy and hiding is the basic cause of human suffering.

Take stock, citizen bacillus, Now that there are so many billions of you, Bleeding through your opened veins, Into your bathtub, or into the Pacific Of that by which they may remember you.

I find no evidence for believing that I matter any more than any other human being who ever existed or who ever will exist. Nor does any of them matter more than I do. We're elements in a process that began in the dim past and will develop through who knows what kind of future.

Men, embryonically speaking, are imperfect women, as you know.

I don't think of my fellow men as dangerous. I think of them as capable of occasional dangerous mistakes.

a sneaking feeling that people are wrong when they say human beings can't keep track of the world any more, we have to leave it up to the machines.

Votre pays, le mien, tous les pays du monde, partagent la même cause, et le résultat, c'est que des gens qui s'en foutent comme d'une fiente de baleine sont envoyés pour tuer des femmes et des enfants. La voilà, la cause de tous les pays ! Et vous savez ce que c'est que cette cause ? Pour moi, c'est de la rapacité pure et simple, et elle me pue au nez ! »

The real Earth was the place from which men would cheerfully run away to enlist as lowly troopers on a ship like this one, to be cocooned and made to hibernate while light-years ticked away, to be revived and ordered to battle stations against an enemy who might not appear, to return to mindless sleep until the time came for paying-off and discharge – most likely on some other human planet than the race's overcrowded pock-faced homeworld.

Here were we wretched creatures of men making for each other's throats, and outraging the good earth which God had made so fair a habitation.

gave half-a-crown to a beggar because I saw him yawn; he was a fellow-sufferer.

The war had called forth the finest qualities of human nature, and with the advent of peace there seemed a risk of the world slipping back into a dull materialism. Men had begun to ask of everything its cash value, and to cherish, as if it were a virtue, a narrow utilitarian commonsense.

all the little rags of honest impulse and stumbling kindness with which we try to shelter ourselves from the winds of space.

Man indeed is the most noble, by creation, of all the creatures in the visible World; but by sin he has made himself the most ignoble.

There isn't anyone you couldn't learn to love once you've heard their story." —Fred Rogers

German poet Herman Hesse wrote, "If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us." I agree with his viewpoint.

how we view a person is reflected by how we treat a person.

the entire population of the world—with one minor exception—is composed of others.

Usted no habrá vivido el día de hoy hasta que haya hecho algo por alguien que nunca podrá pagarle. –JOHN BUNYAN

Give to others? Why? I have needs too

I expect to pass through this world but once. Any good therefore that I can do, or any kindness that I can show to any fellow creature, let me do it now. Let me not defer or neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again.

The people around us seem to be dressed in every kind of clothing from every nation and era in human history. I see people dressed in modern military uniforms, animal skins, togas, tribal regalia, European and Japanese armor, robes, breeches, long dresses, short dresses, and suits. Some people wear not much clothing at all. It's as though we're on the back lot of a movie studio and actors from a hundred different exotic movies mingle together. But these people are real, not costumed performers.

GIVE FIRST, NO MATTER WHAT YOUR CIRCUMSTANCES MAY BE.

Stories tell us who we are. They… Inspire us. Connect with us. Animate our reasoning process. Give us permission to act. Fire our emotions. Give us pictures of who we aspire to be. Stories are us.

Su un tram affollato a Roma all'ora di chiusura una sera d'inverno, qualcuno per sbaglio mi tocca la spalla. Non mi giro a guardare chi è e non saprò mai se è un uomo o una donna, una sgualdrina o un prete, ma quel tocco delicato scatena in me un tale desiderio di tenerezza e di cura che sospiro; mi sento cedere le ginocchia. Non è un sospiro profumato di violette né uno spasimo chopinesco: è qualcosa di rozzo e reale come i peli sulla mia pancia