Quotes About Humanity

I had realized that while books are extraordinary, writers themselves are no more or less special than anyone else.

We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, weight and dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the color of grief is common to us all. "I know," he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.

He didn't know, of course. Not really. And yet that was what he said and I was soothed to hear it. For I knew what he meant. We all have our sorrows, and although the exact delineaments, the weight and the dimensions of grief are different for everyone, the colour of grief is common to us all. 'I know,' he said, because he was human, and therefore, in a way, he did.

Armstrong] had found the line that separated humans from the animal kingdom to be a porous one, and all the things that people though unique to them--intelligence, kindness, communication--he had seen in his pigs, his horse, even the rooks that hopped ad strutted amongst his cows. And then there was this: the methods he used on animals generally bore fruit when applied to people too. He could usually win them round in the end.

We're all just a range of shades of brown, sometimes with a little bit of other colors mixed in, like pink and red. But people are funny about stuff like that. We all share the same ancestors, if you go back enough generations. We all come from Africa.

I am an atheist and I consider religions to be a form of collective neurosis. I am not an enemy of the Catholics, as I am not an enemy of the tuberculars, the myopic or the paralytics; you cannot be an enemy of the sick, only their good friend in order to help them cure themselves.

An artist is above all a human being, profoundly human to the core. If the artist can't feel everything that humanity feels, if the artist isn't capable of loving until he forgets himself and sacrifices himself if necessary, if he won't put down his magic brush and head the fight against the oppressor, then he isn't a great artist.

Progressive Democrats in the twentieth century would in fact attack the founding fathers as misguided or their ideas as out of date. But in the nineteenth century, Democrats took a different line. They denied that blacks were men, which is to say, they denied the full humanity of black people.

So the Democratic defense went like this: all men are created equal, blacks are subhuman, which is to say, not fully men, therefore, we are justified in enslaving them.

In the German camps and on the Democrat-run plantations, forced labor was employed with "human tools" solely with regard to productivity and with little if any regard for the lives of the workers who were, in both cases, considered inferior and even subhuman. The analogy between two of the worst compulsory confinement and forced labor systems in human history is not merely legitimate; it is overdue.

In reference to four of the most notorious death camps, Snyder notes, "The 1.6 million or so Jews killed at Treblinka, Chelmni, Belzec and Sobibor were asphyxiated by carbon monoxide." At Auschwitz, the Nazis used Zyklon B hydrogen cyanide gas to kill an additional one million Jews.

Let us concede at the outset that, in a free society, freedom will frequently be used badly. Freedom, by definition, includes freedom to do good or evil, to act nobly or basely. Thus we should not be surprised that there is a considerable amount of vice, licentiousness, and vulgarity in a free society. Given the warped timber of humanity, freedom is simply an expression of human flaws and weaknesses. But if freedom brings out the worst in people, it also brings out the best.

Explain: the evolution of the heart and compassion is what is missing technically. Humans have proceeded to technological advances before without heart balance, without heart evolution. And it has been disastrous. So we are here to evolve heart first until the heart is aligned with this knowledge.

Striking in its insistence and durability is the quest or desire for a decisive criterion with which to differentiate humans from other animals as well as the human from the animal in human beings.

I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own disasters.

Shit is universal no matter which language.

History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood -- read the speeches of Mussolini -- at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation.

Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be humans forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.

What did it mean, the first time, a thinking creature looked deeply into another's eyes? Did it take a hundred thousand years before this happened or it was the first thing they did, transcendingly, the thing that made them higher, made them modern, the gaze that demonstrates we are lonely in our souls?

the half-concealed disasters that constitute a life.

I'd never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. This was not the frailty of a man who is said to be only human, subject to a weakness or a vulnerability. This was a wave of sadness and loss that made me understand that I was a man expanded by grief.

We're a crowd, a swarm. We think in groups, travel in armies. Armies carry the gene for self-destruction. One bomb is never enough. The blur of technology, this is where the oracles plot their wars. Because now comes the introversion. Father Teilhard knew this, the omega point. A leap out of our biology. Ask yourself this question. Do we have to be human forever? Consciousness is exhausted. Back now to inorganic matter. This is what we want. We want to be stones in a field.

I don't know whether to feel good or bad about learning that my experience is widely shared.' 'Feel bad,' he said.

Like I'm a person and you're a person, which gives you the right to kill me.