Quotes About Humanity

There are no essential genetic elements for any particular group of people who might be identified as a "race." As far as genetics is concerned, race does not exist.

Of all the attempts over the centuries to place humans in distinct races, none succeeds.

Not only were we diverse in our skin color long before the dispersal from Africa, we were diverse in our skin color before we were our own species.

What we can also say with an arsenal of scientific ammunition is that though skin color is the first and most obvious way we see humans, it's a superficial route to an understanding of human variation, and a very bad way to classify people.

Darwin, with typical prescience, suspected that this might be the case: Man alone is capable of progressive improvement. That he is capable of incomparably greater and more rapid improvement than is any other animal, admits of no dispute; and this is mainly due to his power of speaking and handing down his acquired knowledge.

For our purposes, if we are to look at the evolution that led to where we are now, instead of the nice neat tree, I think it could reasonably be described as one big million-year clusterfuck. Whenever humans met - Sapiens, Neanderthal, Denisovans - they had sex. What a time to be alive.

The question of our relationship with Neanderthals has been refined with genetics, in terms of our shared ancestors; our lineage moved away from theirs around half a million years ago. But what DNA analysis revealed more categorically than anything else was that we had sex with them, repeatedly, probably as soon as these two peoples met, and every time afterward.

from the point of view of a geneticist, race does not exist. It has no useful scientific value.

Despite our differences, all humans are remarkably close relatives, and our family tree is pollarded, and tortuous, and not in the slightest bit like a tree. But we are the fruit thereof.

Some researchers suppose that the presence of tools represents the boundary between the genus Homo and what came before, meaning that humans are actually defined by tool use.

life has existed on Earth for about 3.9 billion years. The species Homo sapiens, of which you are a member, emerged a mere 300,000 years ago as far as we know, in pockets in east and north Africa. Writing began about 6,000 years ago, in Mesopotamia, somewhere in what we now call the Middle East.

In fact, the converse is true: At a time when the United States has been called on for a level of moral leadership, vision and inspiration not seen since World War II, we cannot afford to dissemble about crimes against humanity.

Humanity is the virtue of a woman, generosity that of a man.

The robot is going to lose. Not by much. But when the final score is tallied, flesh and blood is going to beat the damn monster.

Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did and never can carry us beyond our own persons, and it is by the imagination only that we form any conception of what are his sensations...His agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have this adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels.

Occasionally I glanced at the big blue cradle of civilization hanging in the sky, remembered for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that none of this had any right to be happening, and reminded myself for the fiftieth or sixtieth or one hundredth time that the only sane response was to continue carrying the tune.

Alles, was der Mensch tut, unvollkommen ist. Aber wer will sich schon seine Unvollkommenheit eingestehen?

there is not one good man on earth who does what is best* and doesn't err.

We should judge one another. It stops us becoming animals. The pressure of failing in the eyes of society passes for some sort of morality.

What remains to be said is that no portrait of the Prophet's character will do him justice. He was superior to anything we can imagine. Perhaps the description that comes closest to the truth is that he was "the teacher of perfect goodness." May God reward him well for having taught that perfect goodness to humanity.

How many does it take to metamorphose wickedness into righteousness? One man must not kill. If he does, it is murder.... But a state or nation may kill as many as they please, and it is not murder. It is just, necessary, commendable, and right. Only get people enough to agree to it, and the butchery of myriads of human beings is perfectly innocent. But how many does it take?

Righteousness and evil are not character traits determined in advance or by heredity, but lie rather in the hand of each one of us.

On this shrunken globe, men can no longer live as strangers.

There is no evil in the atom; only in men's souls.