Quotes About Humanity

The need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens—second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter.

I never traded my humanity for my long life, Doctor. I've always remembered my roots....You worked so hard to be like your Elder master that you've forgotten what it is like to feel human - to be human. And we humans...have the capacity to feel another creature's pain. It is what lifted humani above the Elders, it is what made them great.

She knew then that whatever he was -- whoever he was -- he had not lost his humanity.

This is what I have always loved about you humans. You are essentially good." "Not everyone," Machiavelli said tiredly. "No. Not everyone. But enough.

These poor beasts are driven solely by their need to survive and to feed. It is their nature, and their nature has made them predictable. But man, on the other hand, has the capacity to change his nature. Man is the only animal that can destroy the world. Beasts live only in the present, but humans have the capacity to live for the future, to lay down plans for their children and grandchildren, plans that can take years, decades, even centuries, to mature.

To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man.

If men were equal in America, all these Poles and English and Czechs and blacks, then they were equal everywhere, and there was really no such thing as foreigner; there were only free men and slaves.

Why do there have to be men like that, men who enjoy another man's dying?

I don't really understand it. Never have. The more I think on it the more it horrifies me. How can they look in the eyes of a man and make a slave of him and then quote the Bible?

'Hamlet' is one of the most dangerous things ever set down on paper. All the big, unknowable questions like what it is to be a human being the difference between sanity and insanity the meaning of life and death what's real and not real. All these subjects can literally drive you mad.

I think being a parent is the most challenging thing you do. That's why we're here. It's at the heart of what it is to be a human being. It's the ultimate experience because it questions everything about who you are. But it's difficult.

When I was at drama school, I wanted to change the world, and thought I had some great wisdom to impart to people about humanity. Now that I'm older, I know enough to realise that I know nothing at all.

There is a longing for membership that no amount of rational thought, no proof of the absolute loneliness or humanity or of the unredeemed nature of our sufferings, can ever eradicate."84 Attempts to affirm the boundary between science and religion will thus likely not work so long as apocalyptic environmentalists speak to deep human needs for meaning and purpose and environmental rationalists don't. As

Killing a chicken is not the same as murdering a human. There's an important difference there.

Through no divine design or cosmic plan, we have inherited the mantle of life's caretaker on the earth, the only home we have ever known.

In the past 10,000 years, humans have devised roughly 100,000 religions based on roughly 2,500 gods. So the only difference between myself and the believers is that I am skeptical of 2,500 gods whereas they are skeptical of 2,499 gods. We're only one God away from total agreement.

As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races. —Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, 18711

The witch theory of causality, and how it was debunked through science, encapsulates the larger trend in the improvement of humanity through the centuries by the gradual replacement of religious supernaturalism with scientific naturalism.

the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."3 It was one of the greatest speeches of Dr. King's career

Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise and rudely great … He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest; In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast; In doubt his mind or body to prefer; Born but to die, and reasoning but to err.

Through no divine design or cosmic plan, we have inherited the mantle of life's caretaker on the earth, the only home we have ever known.

that wonderful name Scrooge - a combination of screw and gouge... The idea of Scrooge as the ultimate miser, the ultimate loner, who had no feelings for the rest of humanity, except just for how much money he would make out of them...

no matter what happened to him now, whatever became of what was left of humanity… nothing could take away his experiences of these last remarkable few weeks. Nothing could reverse, not really, the striking ways in which Wesley had grown. And nothing could erase the contributions he'd been able to make to the cause – finally, fumblingly, through sheer trial-and-error and dogged persistence. He'd been part of a great undertaking. And part of a team.

And it occurred to Elliott, young as he was, that this might actually be the core contradiction of being human: born with the souls of angels – but mortal angels, meat angels, born to die and rot away. And that was maybe even the fundamental problem every human had to solve: how to live in a world where we are born to die.