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Quotes About Humanity

??te ben bunun hayalini kurdum Kemik Bey. Dünyay? daha iyi bir yer haline getirmenin hayalini. Ruhun kasvetli, karanl?k kuytular?na biraz olsun güzellik katmak istedim. Bunu bir ekmek k?zart?c?s?yla yapabilirsin, bir ?iirle yapabilirsin, elini bir yabanc?ya uzatarak yapabilirsin. Nas?l yapt???n hiç önemli de?il. Dünyay? buldu?undan daha iyi bir durumda b?rakmak. ?nsan?n elinden gelecek en iyi ?ey budur
~ Paul Auster
Los pensamientos son reales —sentenció—. las palabras son reales. Todo lo humano es real, y aveces conocemos las cosas antes de que ocurran, aun cuando no seamos consientes de ello. Vivimos en el presente, pero el futuro está siempre en nosotros. Puede que el escribir se reduzca a eso, Sid. No a consignar los hechos del pasado, sino a hacer que ocurran cosas en el futuro.
~ Paul Auster
Never underestimate the importance of war. War is the purest, most vivid expression of the human soul.
~ Paul Auster
Jeder hat Freundlichkeit verdient, sagte ich. Egal wer.
~ Paul Auster
Dünya sarho? ediyor insan? evlat. Dünyan?n bilinmezli?i sarho? ediyor.
~ Paul Auster
From poetry to justice, then. Poetic justice, if you will. For the sad fact remains: there is far more poetry in the world than justice.
~ Paul Auster
Dumbfounded, I stood before the court, trying to figure out if there was a state of being between "guilty" and "innocent." Why were those my only alternatives? I thought. Why couldn't I be "neither" or "both"? After a long pause, I finally faced the bench and said, "Your Honor, I plead human.
~ Paul Beatty
En jullie zijn te stom om te begrijpen dat sier het eigenste van de mens is. Dat we daarvan leven, en daarvoor en daarop.
~ Unknown
Philosophers have often looked for the defining feature of humans — language, rationality, culture, and so on. I'd stick with this: Man is the only animal that likes Tabasco sauce.
~ Paul Bloom
As you would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise," or Rabbi Hillel's statement, "What is hateful to you do not do to your neighbor; that is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary thereof.
~ Paul Bloom
Carlyle was upset because the economists were against slavery. He argued for the reintroduction of slavery in the West Indies and was annoyed that the economists railed against it. Think about this when you're tempted to scorn economists and the cool approach they take to human affairs, and when you hear people equating strong feelings with goodness and cold reason with nastiness. In the real world, as we've seen, the truth is usually the opposite.
~ Paul Bloom
We have gut feelings, but we also have the capacity to override them, to think through issues, including moral issues, and to come to conclusions that can surprise us. I think this is where the real action is. It's what makes us distinctively human, and it gives us the potential to be better to one another, to create a world with less suffering and more flourishing and happiness. There
~ Paul Bloom
The idea I'll explore is that the act of feeling what you think others are feeling—whatever one chooses to call this—is different from being compassionate, from being kind, and most of all, from being good. From a moral standpoint, we're better off without it.
~ Paul Bloom
It's not that empathy itself automatically leads to kindness. Rather, empathy has to connect to kindness that already exists.
~ Paul Bloom
Blaise Pascal was even blunter: "All men seek happiness. This is without exception." And, to make clear how serious he is, he later adds: "This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.
~ Paul Bloom
In April of 1945, in the Dachau concentration camp, several men were lined up against the wall, tortured, and shot. Such savagery was typical for Dachau. Tens of thousands of prisoners had been murdered there, through starvation, execution, the gas chamber, and even grotesque medical experiments. But this incident happened after the camp had been liberated. The victims were captured German soldiers, and it was the American liberators who were doing the killing.
~ Paul Bloom
The fifth chapter is about evil, looking skeptically at the view that lack of empathy makes people worse. The final chapter steps back to defend human rationality, arguing that we really do have the capacity to use reasoned deliberation to make it through the world. We live in an age of reason.
~ Paul Bloom
Perhaps more important, religion provides our species' longest and deepest struggle to make sense of suffering, including suffering that is unchosen.
~ Paul Bloom
So if the world were a simple place, where the only dilemmas one had to deal with involved a single person in some sort of immediate distress, and where helping that person had positive effects, the case for empathy would be solid.
~ Paul Bloom
If our concern is driven by thoughts of the suffering of specific individuals, then it sets up a perverse situation in which the suffering of one can matter more than the suffering of a thousand.
~ Paul Bloom
I told a story earlier from Jonathan Glover about a woman who lived close to a concentration camp and felt empathy for those being tortured. Her response was to ask that the torture be done elsewhere, where it wouldn't disturb her. This was one of a series of examples meant to show how empathy need not make us good.
~ Paul Bloom
Statistics are human beings with the tears wiped off.
~ Unknown
War is still going on in the hearts and minds of men. This is where it must first be stopped, for it is there that the explosives, whether they later take the form of small bullets or tremendously destructive atom bombs, begin their existence.
~ Paul Brunton
Compassion is the highest moral value, the noblest human feeling, the purest creature-love. It is the extreme social expression of the divine soul of man. Because he is able to share his feelings, where both are in reality connected in harmony by the presence of this soul in each one. One consequence of this habit of compassion is that an immense understanding of human nature fills his entire being.
~ Paul Brunton