Quotes About Humanity

we shall be led as much to the street and the cottage as to the temple and the tower; and shall be more interested in buildings raised by feeling

A little thought and a little kindness are often worth more than a great deal of money.

It being the privilege of the fishes, as it is of rats and wolves, to live by the laws of demand and supply; but the distinction of humanity, to live by those of right.

The weakest among us has a gift, however seemingly trivial, which is peculiar to him and which worthily used will be a gift also to his race.

You gotta try harder to be kind, man. We're all trapped on this earth together.

I'm a monster. You're a monster. We're all fucking inhuman monsters, and we don't see a damned thing wrong with it.

Part of what makes us human is what we mean to other people, and what people mean to us. I miss meaning something to someone, having that part of being human.

A church is an institution separate from the religion it serves. It's filled with people. And you know how people are.

Even without the Interdependency, being interdependent was the best way for humanity to survive.

It's okay if we turned entire cities full of people into nuclear ash, but the idea of monsters having a nibble afterward was just too much.

What if I told you that that which makes you fundamentally human is something that you share with another people, a people so different from you that they might appear strange or frightening at first glance. A people who might terrify you from appearance alone. Could you make the jump, and understand that inside, they are not so different at all?

You can't afford anthropomorphic biases when some of the aliens most like us would rather make human hamburgers than peace.

The short version was death, disease, despots and destruction. The longer version had kept him up wondering what the hell was wrong with people.

He decided he'd rather die as a fundamentally decent human being than live as the sort of asshole who'd tear out someone's liver to get into an escape pod.

You say 'cure.' I hear 'you're not human enough.

If there's one thing that distinguishes the human species, it is a pathological need to stay connected. The fact your people will interrupt sex to answer your communicators is a scandal across the entire Common Confederation.

It was breathtaking the situations that humans put themselves into, and still managed to thrive.

The Yherajk were a less immediate but infinitely more complicated problem—alien globs who want to befriend a humanity that, if asked, would probably prefer to be befriended by something with an endoskeleton.

So we're the monster police, too," I said to Tom. "Correct," he replied. "The only real question is, who are the monsters?

Humans, being intermediary creatures in both time and space, did not fully appreciate the value of life at every physical and temporal scale.

The only real question is, who are the monsters?" "They ask that question in every monster movie, you know. It's an actual trope." "I know," Tom said. "What does it say about us that it's relevant every single time they ask it?

That's a distinction that's going to make a lot of difference to the ninety percent of humanity that doesn't know the difference between astrology and astronomy

You are, at least to a certain approximation, human. You're not supposed to be here.

It worked because on a social level, apparently enough people wanted it to, and because at the heart of it, billions of humans living in fragile habitats prone to mechanical and environmental breakdowns and degradation, and with limited natural resources, were better off relying on each other than trying to go it alone. Even without the Interdependency, being interdependent was the best way for humanity to survive.