Quotes About Humanity

Am I a person or a weapon?" Always he wanted to know that he was a person. He just kept giving me different choices so one time I might slip up and say, "You're not a person." "You are a person. But like a person, you can be a weapon, too.

Back there, I had always felt as if my work amounted to a futile attempt to save us from who we are.

Perhaps only I could truly make Wick a person, by forgiving him, and if I forgave him, if I showed I forgave him, then maybe we could be people together.

That is why the human race is dying—too limited an imagination. No thought for the consequences.

Talking around the edge of a catastrophe. But wasn't that what people did, if you were still alive?

I never much understood the point of the world of men. How they fed off each other. How they motivated themselves. I mean, I got the purpose, but I navigated that world the way an astronaut would an alien landscape. Trying not to breathe the same air. Which was impossible, of course.

That's the problem with people who are not human. You can't tell how badly they're hurt, or how much they need your help, and until you ask, they don't always know how to tell you.

Wick never believed he was a person, was continually being undone by that. Borne was always trying to be a person because I wanted him to be one, because he thought that was right. We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means

What was a person but someone who turned monstrous, anyway? What was a person, in Moss's experience, but a kind of demon.

I was in love with everything- I wanted to look with love at the angry people so that their eyes would be forced to respond; and I wanted to bring gifts to the envious and tell them that I am worthless.

I want to lead an important life. I want to do it because I was born a human being.

Call them robbers and cutthroats--were they not amiable enough when they had sufficient to fill their bellies? Something was out of joint in a world that drove these men to steal.

It would make it that much harder to delude ourselves that humanity's ancestors, alone in the animal kingdom, lost their hair by wandering out into the sunshine.

The point is best made by Aristotle, who supposedly asked, "Would you rather be a happy pig or an unhappy human?" HSPs prefer the good feeling of being very conscious, very human, even if what we are conscious of is not always cause for rejoicing.

qué mundo es este en que los migrantes, al verse imposibilitados para mínimamente sobrevivir, pierden su condición de humanos, adultos, racionales?

Fear thrives strongest; there is no telling how little we would be without having suffered fear. An intrinsic characteristic of humanity is the tendency to give in to fear. No fear is lost, but its hiding places are a riddle. Perhaps, of all things, fear is the one that changes least.

People sit together, bare their teeth and eat and, even in this critical moment, feel no desire to eat each other. They respect themselves for this, and respect their companions for an abstemiousness equal to their own.

Ben poco del male che si può dire dell'uomo e dell'umanità io non l'ho detto. E tuttavia l'orgoglio che provo per essa é ancora così grande che solo una cosa io odio veramente: il suo nemico, la morte.

Allora non sapevo ancora cosa è la vastità, eppure lo intuivo: il poter contenere in sé moltissime cose, anche tra loro contraddittorie, sapere che tutto ciò che sembra inconciliabile sussiste tuttavia in un suo ambito, e questo sentirlo senza perdersi nella paura, e anzi sapendo che bisogna chiamarlo col suo nome e meditarci sopra: ecco la cosa che proprio da mia madre ho imparato, ed è la vera gloria della natura umana

Spesso si parla dell'istinto di distruzione della massa, è la sua caratteristica più vistosa, quella che, innegabilmente, si ritrova ovunque nei paesi e nelle civiltà più diverse.

I thought, If only the whole nation of Israel—and the whole world—could understand that Jews and Palestinians can get along when they begin to treat each other with dignity.

A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent.

They are committing the greatest indignity human beings can inflict on one another: telling people who have suffered excruciating pain and loss that their pain and loss were illusions. (v)

I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it…