Quotes About Humanity

With the coming forward of Greece, mankind became the center of the universe, the most important thing in it. This was a revolution in thought. Human beings had counted for little heretofore. In Greece man first realized what mankind was.

Our world is going through a crisis of dehumanization, breakup of family life, a general loss of moral values.

We shall hurt others less. Isn't it, after all, what you always wanted?

One of the great things about travel is you find out how many good, kind people there are.

To a torn heart uncomforted by human nearness a room may open almost human arms, and the being to whom no four walls mean more than any others, is, at such hours, expatriate everywhere.

As the rose-tree is composed of the sweetest flowers and the sharpest thorns, as the heavens are sometimes overcast—alternately tempestuous and serene—so is the life of man intermingled with hopes and fears, with joys and sorrows, with pleasure and pain.

He that accuses all mankind of corruption ought to remember that he is sure to convict only one.

A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.

In these meetings of all sorts, every counsel, in proportion as it is daring and violent and perfidious, is taken for the mark of superior genius. Humanity and compassion are ridiculed as the fruits of superstition and ignorance. Tenderness to individuals is considered as treason to the public.

It is no strange thing, to those who look into the nature of corrupted man, to find a violent persecutor a perfect unbeliever of his own creed.

It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss to the object, than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of a political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist.

Massacre, torture, hanging! These are your rights of men!

It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will . . . than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of a political benevolence.

É melhor valorizar a virtude e humanidade, deixando muito ao livre-arbítrio, mesmo com alguma perda para o objeto, do que tentar tornar os homens meras máquinas e instrumentos de uma benevolência política.

In history, a great volume is unravelled for our instruction, drawing materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind.

Before the Christian religion had, as it were, humanized the idea of the divinity, and brought it somewhat nearer to us, there was very little said of the love of God.

The true lawgiver ought to have an heart full of sensibility. He ought to love and respect his kind, and to fear himself.

Never did a state . . . enrich itself by the confiscations of the citizens. . . . Every honest mind, every true lover of liberty and humanity must rejoice to find that injustice is not always good policy, nor rapine the high road to riches.

Plans must be made for men. We cannot think of making men, and binding nature to our designs.

We are not made at once to pity the oppressor and the oppressed.

Man is a most unwise, and a most wise, being. The individual is foolish. The multitude, for the moment, is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and when time is given to it, as a species it almost always acts right.

None of us has the right to assess the value of a human existence. All must be held valuable, or none. The death of Christ and the death of Socrates, Fen added dryly, suggest that our judgements are scarcely infallible...And the evil of Nazism lay precisely in this, that a group of men began to differentiate between the value of their fellow-beings, and to act on their conclusions. It isn't a habit which I, for one, would like to encourage.

That's the trouble with all you liberals: you think that people ought to be kept alive just because they happen to exist.

My friends I tell you this, we are a jolly group but put us in uniform and all that change. In war I don't know who my brother. In war I don't know who my friend. War make everybody savage. Who can say what lies inside the heart of each one of us when everything is taken away.