Quotes About Humanity

A strange species we are. We can stand anything God and nature can throw at us save only plenty.

There were people who gave everything they had to the war because it was the last war and by winning it we would remove war like a thorn from the flesh of the world and there wouldn't be any more such horrible nonsense.

A WAR COMES ALWAYS to someone else.

so to live that our death brings no pleasure to the world.

I love you," I said. And I do. I really do. And I remember thinking what a hell of a man a man could become.

You can't hate men if you know them.

The hell with it! There ain't no sin and there ain't no virtue. There's just stuff people do. It's all part of the same thing. And some of the things folks do is nice, and some ain't nice, but that's as far as any man got a right to say.

in him kindness and conscience are so large that they are almost faults.

In every bit of honest writing in the world," he noted in a 1938 journal entry," . . . there is a base theme. Try to understand men, if you understand each other you will be kind to each other. Knowing a man well never leads to hate and nearly always leads to love. There are shorter means, many of them. There is writing promoting social change, writing punishing injustice, writing in celebration of heroism, but always that base theme. Try to understand each other.

War did not make a killer of me, although for a time I killed men.

Muscles aching to work, minds aching to create beyond the single need-this is man.

Those people might have been murderers, sadists, brutes, ugly apish subhumans for all I knew, but I found myself thinking, "What charming people, what flair, how beautiful they are. How I wish I knew them." And all based on the delicious smell of soup.

There is one thing I don't think any one has ever set down although it is true—to a monster, everyone else is a monster.

We have only one story. All novels, all poetry are built on the never-ending contest in ourselves of good and evil.

Humans are caught - in their lives, in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty, and in their kindness and generosity too - in a net of good and evil. I think this is the only story we have.

Sto imparando una cosa importante, disse. La sto imparando ogni momento, tutt'i giorni. Quando stai male o magari hai bisogno o sei nei guai... va' dalla povera gente. Soltanto loro ti danno una mano... soltanto loro.

Ed ecco cosa puoi sapere per certo: terribile è il tempo in cui l'Uomo non voglia soffrire e morire per un'idea, perché quest'unica qualità è fondamento dell'Uomo, e quest'unica qualità è l'uomo in sé, peculiare nell'universo.

You got to have patience. Why, Tom—us people will go on livin' when all them people is gone. Why, Tom, we're the people that live. They ain't gonna wipe us out. Why, we're the people—we go on.

Man has become our greatest hazard, and our only hope.

If the most versatile of living forms, the human, now fights for survival as it always has, it can eliminate not only itself but all other life. (p 165)

I BELIEVE THERE ARE MONSTERS BORN in the world to human parents. Some you can see, misshapen and horrible, with huge heads or tiny bodies; some are born with no arms, no legs, some with three arms, some with tails or mouths in odd places.

Maybe you'll come to know that every man in every generation is refired.

I don't know whether he was good or bad, but that don't matter much. He was alive, an' that's what matters.

The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind.