Quotes About Humanity

Treat others as compassionately as you want to be treated. Keep in mind that needy, demanding behaviors often arise from a healthy, natural longing for the deep connections upon which humanity is designed to thrive.

Humanity has won its battle. Liberty now has a country.

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

Emotions have taught mankind to reason.

We should expect the best and the worst of mankind, as from the weather.†

Teach this triple truth to all: A generous heart, kind speech, and a life of service and compassion are the things which renew humanity." — THE BUDDHA

Iam not easily frightened. Not because I am brave but because I know that I am dealing with human beings, and that I must try as hard as I can to understand everything that anyone ever does.

I had a major conflict with what went on in his head, but I've learned that I enjoy human beings more if I don't hear what they think.

And I want him to know the subtle, sneaky, important reason why he was born a human being and not a chair.

I am not easily frightened. Not because I am brave but because I know that I am dealing with human beings, and that I must try as hard as I can to understand everything that anyone ever does. And that was the real import of this morning: not that a disgruntled young Gestapo officer yelled at me, but that I felt no indignation, rather a real compassion

In every human being, black or white, there exists, however dimly, a certain natural identification with every other human being, so that we tend to feel that what happens to a fellow human being also in some way happens to us. Therefore no man can very long continue to abuse another human being without beginning to feel in himself at least some dull answering stir of discomfort.

The arc of the moral universe is long, and it bends toward justice.

I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch, He said to me, "You must not ask for so much." And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door, She cried to me, "Hey, why not ask for more?" —Leonard Cohen, "Bird on a Wire

One-third to one-half of humanity are said to go to bed hungry every night. In the Old Stone Age the fraction must have been much smaller. This is the era of hunger unprecedented. Now, in the time of the greatest technical power, is starvation an institution. Reverse another venerable formula: the amount of hunger increases relatively and absolutely with the evolution of culture.

We have come to look at our planet as a resource for our species, which is funny when you think that the planet has been around for about five billion years, and Homo sapiens for perhaps one hundred thousand. We have acquired an arrogance about ourselves that I find frightening. We have come to feel that we are so far apart from the rest of nature that we have but to command.

Seek art from every time and place, in any form, to connect with those who really move you.

There's more God in one hurt child than in all the religions humans ever created.

Disgust relies on moral obtuseness. It is possible to view another human being as a slimy slug or a piece of revolting trash only if one has never made a serious good-faith attempt to see the world through that person's eyes or to experience that person's feelings. Disgust imputes to the other a subhuman nature. How, by contrast, do we ever become able to see one another as human? Only through the exercise of imagination.

We might say that there can be pity in its full-fledged form only where there is also mercy for self: for the self engulfed by a sense of its own utter blackness can never win through to a sufficient recognition of the sorrows of the other as other.

One man gave her water from his skin pouch, which carried with it a faint taste of animal

It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

War happens to people, one by one. That is really all I have to say and it seems to me I have been saying it forever. Unless they are immediate victims, the majority of mankind behaves as if war was an act of God which could not be prevented; or they behave as if war elsewhere was none of their business. It would be a bitter cosmic joke if we destroy ourselves due to atrophy of the imagination.

On the night of New Year's Day, I thought of a wonderful New Year's resolution for the men who run the world: get to know the people who only live in it.

No wars, in the war-logged record of our species, have been terminal. Until now, when we know that nuclear war would be the death of our planet. It is beyond belief that any governments–those brief political figures–arrogate to themselves the right to stop history, at their discretion.