Quotes About Humanity

When you go to Mars, you need to have made the decision that you're there permanently. The more people we have there, the more it can become a sustaining environment. Except for very rare exceptions, the people who go to Mars shouldn't be coming back. Once you get on the surface, you're there.

The Holocaust, taken by itself, is a black hole. To look at it directly is to be swallowed up by it.

Anybody that's ever been to Israel and to Palestine knows that you can't look at a person and tell if they're Israeli or Palestinian. You can assume. But I've seen Palestinians who look Swedish, and I've seen Israelis who are black.

It's something that you pick up at a history class in college, the idea that history and time is something to which we can't even hold a candle to. We, as human beings, are just a small element in the overarching sweep of narrative history. That really had a profound effect on me, that realization.

If I never do another thing, I've met the good, sweet people of the world.

Frank Loesser was a beautiful soul. I didn't know how great he was when I met him, but I just adored him. He was a sweet man.

The poorest people are the sweetest people.

Everybody is the way they are because of certain events that have happened in their life. Oftentimes you'll meet somebody who seems a certain way, and then you realize, 'Oh, that guy's actually the sweetest man I know. But I wouldn't have known that from the outset because that's hidden.'

My dad is one of the sweetest human beings around. He's so patient with people and has so many ideas that he's so much fun to work with.

I think to a certain extent in Bosnia and among the Hutus in Rwanda and also among the Tutsis in Rwanda who then took revenge on the Hutus, there is a sense of being swept up and a sense that the society in which they live has gone mad.

Slavery is something that is all too often swept under the carpet.

The whole world is set up so that for places like Switzerland to exist, that are crime-free and with the best care for everybody, you have to have places like Sudan, or Jamaica. But really, there's enough to share, when you check it. It's not that complicated, really. It's probably less thinking and more feeling that's required.

If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.

My wish for humanity is to invent a way to communicate between us and whatever comes next. And in the end that we the creator of the sentient sapient and the created we have a symbiotic relationship.

We humans are an extremely important manifestation of the replication bomb, because it is through us - through our brains, our symbolic culture and our technology - that the explosion may proceed to the next stage and reverberate through deep space.

We have new ways to be born, humane and symbolic ways to die, different ways to be rich... new ways to be human and to discover what we are to each other.

The guns and the bombs, the rockets and the warships, are all symbols of human failure.

Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions.

You can't tell a Batman story without the Joker, and you can't tell a Joker story without Batman. They're just the symbols of the best and worst of humanity.

I only knew one thing about policemen: they were inhuman beasts. The problem was how to turn them into likable, sympathetic human beings. The answer was simple. Give them head colds. And first names. And keep their dialogue homey and conversational.

People aren't inherently sympathetic.

It's interesting that one of the definitions of the word 'human' is 'sympathetic.' More and more people are beginning to show that they understand why that is important.

I try to find what makes even the worst, most despicable character sympathetic at his or her core.

I really do try not to emote. I don't like seeing it on documentaries - it seems a bit unprofessional. I also need to be human being and be a kind of sympathetic presence for the contributors I'm with, so there' a line you have to walk.