Quotes About Humanity

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing the things historians usually record; while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry, and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happens on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.

The first category—those eunuchs who have been so from birth—is the closest description we have in the Bible of what we understand today as a homosexual."7 It is clear that Jesus did not see humanity as universally heterosexual. Jesus recognized and acknowledged many types of sexual difference—even in a society in which such difference would have been downplayed, hidden, or even punished.

The English department of the spirit—that great quagmire that lurks at the bottom of all of us.

If religions are diseases of the human psyche, as the philosopher Grintholde asserts, then religious wars must be reckoned the resultant sores and cankers infecting the aggregate corpus of the human race. Of all wars, these are the most detestable, since they are waged for no tangible gain, but only to impose a set of arbitrary credos upon another's mind.

Underneath, you would surely see that the best care passionately about their people—about their growth and success. And you would see that they themselves are comfortable in their own skins. They're real, filled with candor and integrity, optimism and humanity.

We're all the same inside.

Why is it that you can bear pain, but someone's kindness makes you cry?

Poetry in here keeps the conversation open between the living and the dead, the misunderstood and the wise, the imprisoned and the free. Koestler Voices Vol. 3

I'm not concerned with your liking or disliking me. All I ask is that you respect me as a human being.

The world forgets easily, too easily, what it does not like to remember.

Man is not naturally a ferocious wild beast. On the contrary, he loves, ordinarily, to live in peace and quietness, to till his lands and tend his flocks, and to enjoy the blessings of peace and repose.

Man is not naturally a ferocious wild beast. On the contrary, he loves, ordinarily, to live in peace and quietness, to till his lands and tend his flocks, and to enjoy the blessings of peace and repose. It is comparatively but a small number in any age of the world, and in any nation, whose passions of ambition, hatred, or revenge become so strong as that they love bloodshed and war. But these few, when they once get weapons into their hands, trample recklessly and mercilessly upon the rest.

I don't believe that the big men, the politicians and the capitalists alone, are guilty of the war. Oh, no, the little man is just as guilty, otherwise the peoples of the world would have risen long ago! from We Are Witnesses: Five Diaries of Teenagers Who Died in the Holocaust

"Sooner or later every one of us breathes an atom that has been breathed before by anyone you can think of who has lived before us-Michelangelo or George Washington or Moses."

Man is not the most majestic of the creatures; long before the mammals even, the dinosaurs were far more splendid. But he has what no other animal possesses: a jigsaw of faculties, which alone, over three thousand million years of life, made him creative. Every animal leaves traces of what he was. Man alone leaves traces of what he created.

Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible.

We are all afraid for our confidence, for the future, for the world. That is the nature of the human imagination. Yet every man, every civilization, has gone forward because of its engagement with what it has set itself to do.

This is the concentration camp and crematorium at Auschwitz. This is where people were turned into numbers. Into this pond were flushed the ashes of some four million people. And that was not done by gas. It was done by arrogance. It was done by dogma. It was done by ignorance. When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave.

Man is unique not because he does science, and he is unique not because he does art, but because science and art equally are expressions of his marvellous plasticity of mind.

Fifty years from now if an understanding of man's origins, his evolution, his history, his progress is not in the common place of the school books we shall not exist.

There are two parts to the human dilemma. One is the belief that the end justifies the means. That push-button philosophy, that deliberate deafness to suffering, has become the monster in the war machine. The other is the betrayal of the human spirit: the assertion of dogma that closes the mind, and turns a nation, a civilization, into a regiment of ghosts--obedient ghosts or tortured ghosts.

We are finite, we are temporal, and we are embodied.

Oh, God! That bread should be so dear, And flesh and blood so cheap!

Paradójicamente, a partir de que el hombre adjudicó a la materia el papel que le correspondía a la Conciencia como origen de todas las cosas, perdió la posibilidad de explicar su propia existencia, cuando su motivación era precisamente entenderla.