Quotes About Humanity

It is essential that anyone reading this book know at the outset that the author is apolitical. I was convinced in 1927 that humanity's most fundamental survival problems could never be solved by politics.

How can I continue to live, he shouted at high scream under the nave of his encompassing skull, if people are going to continue to carry bundles of pain on top of their heads like Haitian laundresses, then fling the bundles at random into the face of any bright stroller who happened to be passing by?

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.

A little kindness from person to person is better than a vast love for all humankind.

Keynes once wrote: 'The day is not far off when the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs, and the arena of the heart and the head will be occupied or reoccupied, by our real problems of life and of human relations, of creation and behaviour and religion.

I sort of feel that climate change will be solved by science. I just feel instinctively that we will find a way of saving ourselves. But I am less confident that we won't destroy ourselves in other ways.

For the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boot and fists and horror of other men until the end of time, and all human history was a history of violence.

Is it easier for a man to live his life again as a fish, than to accept the wonder of being human? So alone, so frightened, so wanting for what we are afraid to give tongue to.

No man is an Island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. John Donne, Meditation XVII

Forsaken, fucking in the cold, eating each other, lost runny noses, complaining all the time like so many people that we know

Pain is never ennobling, only degrading. And do not be afraid, sir, that there will ever be too little of it in the world to spare mankind its "purification". There will always be human groans enough to fill the sails of that argument. But I am a practical Christian. Unlike you , sir, I relieve suffering, wherever I see it. Your ladies would not object to warm baths, to mitigate labour pains? To opium? It is the same prinicple.

Family separations were probably the most brutal, heartless aspect of American slavery, although many slaveholders claimed that blacks, being less than fully human, weren't particularly bothered by it.

Real people have trouble with long division if they don't have a calculator, sometimes forget their spouse's birthday, and have a hangover on New Year's Day.

Once the switch of parenthood is thrown, it changes you for ever & you can never escape the extra pull of humanity it gives you." - Richard Hammond

Once the switch of parenthood is thrown, it chages you for ever & you can never exchange the extra pull of humanity it gives you.

We must come down from our heights, and leave our straight paths, for the byways and low places of life, If we would learn truths by strong contrasts; and in hovels, in forecastles, and among our own outcasts in foreign lands, see what has been wrought upon our fellow-creatures by accident, hardship, or strife.

We must come down from our heights, and leave our straight paths, for the byways and low places of life, if we would learn truths by strong contrasts; and in hovels, in forecastles, and among our own outcasts in foreign lands, see what has been wrought upon our fellow-creatures by accident, hardship, or vice. Two

One would say that, instead of a tendency to equality in human beings, the tendency is to make the most of inequalities, natural or artificial.

Man had created God in his own image, not the other way around. He had done it through sheer terror, and who could blame him? Unfortunately he had made too good a job. The god he had invented was just as cruel and careless as man himself. Not a deity to whom one should seriously address a prayer.

Human beings do terrible things to each other and the tragic thing about it all is the way the remembrance of past hurt can rob us of our future and become the narrative of our lives.

The real battle for Christians today is not Armageddon, it is the battle for a sensible approach to that ancient library of books we call the Bible. The Bible was written by human beings, with all the longings, prejudices and illusions that characterise us as a species. It is not an apocalyptic almanac, a mystical code book, an inerrant textbook for living. It is a compendium of a particular people's struggle with meaning; so it should encourage us to do the same in our day.

Self understanding helps us connect our own weaknesses to the weaknesses of others and forgive them.

Indeed, as we have seen, the drama and tragedy of the moral life lies in the fact that most human disagreement is between opposing goods rather than between right and wrong.

The rights of man are poor things beside the eyes of hungry children. Their hurts are keener than the soreness of injustice.