Quotes About Humanity

Google is neither God nor Satan, and if there are shadows in the Googleplex they're no more than the delusions of grandeur. What's disturbing about the company's founders is not their boyish desire to create an amazingly cool machine that will be able to outthink its creators, but the pinched conception of the human mind that gives rise to such a desire.

When, in an 1892 lecture before a group of teachers, William James declared that "the art of remembering is the art of thinking," he was stating the obvious.14 Now, his words seem old-fashioned. Not only has memory lost its divinity; it's well on its way to losing its humanness. Mnemosyne has become a machine.

When automation distances us from our work, when it gets between us and the world, it erases the artistry from our lives.

In the end, Adams believes, we "may come to regard tactical warfare as properly the business of machines and not appropriate for people at all."7

sex trafficking and mass rape should no more be seen as women's issues than slavery was a black issue or the Holocaust was a Jewish issue.

Even though we are peripheral to the slavery, our action is necessary to overcome a horrific evil.

Would the world stand by if it were men who were dying just for completing their reproductive functions? —ASHA-ROSE MIGIRO, UN DEPUTY SECRETARY GENERAL, 2007

Man is the measure of all things', meaning that there is no truth except that which man perceives.

There is no justice among men.

Books are the province of romantics and humanists, not heartless nerds.

thos anthrp?i daím?n Character for man is fate. Heraclitus

It is true, mountains everywhere are mountains, water everywhere is water, sky everywhere is sky, and men everywhere are men. But nevertheless, if seated before the Alps, you attempt to picture the Himalayas, something inexplicable but convincing will be lacking.

We're none of us, are we, just one thing? I am a policeman, but also a father, a husband for the time being, a nursemaid to a sister who I pray will survive her illness. You are a journalist, a writer, and I don't know what else besides. To look at a person from a single angle is to deform them. Even if Yolanda is guilty...she is also afraid of the dark. And I cannot forget that I put her there.

You have to suffer in order to be a human being who can help people understand suffering.

Oh, you can't hate people forever, can you? Sooner or later it always becomes clear that however awful they were to you, they were still trying to do their best. Nobody sets out to be awful, do they? But we're all this collection of traumas and hurts and dysfunctional mumbo-jumbo trying to be functional and logical and wise.

We value cleverness and intelligence and strength. Money, too. But nice is incredibly special. And it's not so easy to be this way all the time, you know? Other people are very difficult. It takes a lot of effort to understand them and stay nice despite everything.

As humans, we're designed to be able to love people despite their imperfections, and that's just as well really, because as a race, we do seem to have so many of them.

don't we all have moments of madness?

He used to say you can judge a society by how it treats its cats.

a person. Just like her. Just like everyone. Lost and alone

You and I come custom-equipped in much the same way. They don't call babies bundles of joy for nothing.

Death looms large I guess because it should. It's the one thing that we as human beings from birth have a right to. It's the only thing we've really got, and I don't mean to sound bleak about this, but it's a unifying factor amongst us all.

T]he luminous and shocking beauty of the everyday is something I try to remain alert to, if only as an antidote to the chronic cynicism and disenchantment that seems to surround everything, these days. It tells me that, despite how debased or corrupt we are told humanity is and how degraded the world has become, it just keeps on being beautiful. It can't help it.

You somehow grow into the fullness of your humanity, form your own character, become a proper person – I don't know, someone who has become a part of things, not someone separated from or at odds with the world.