Quotes About Humanity

We each have our belssings and our curses. In the end it makes us equals.

Still, it was a sad state of the world that people judged others not by the best that they could be but by the worst thought in their own hearts.

It was the sad state of the world that people judged others not by the best that they could be but by the worst thought in their own hearts

We Gypsies know that where Jews are killed, Gypsies are always murthered too. And then a lot of other people, usually.

History has taught us that the nature of man is evil, sublimely so. Good is not perfectible, but evil is.

Then he said a strange thing, but to himself. `They lived, didn't they?' And I said yes, that when one reads old letters one understands that people in the past really did live, and it is very touching.

This corner of history was as real as the tiled floor under our feet or the wooden tabletop under our fingers. The people to whom it had happened had actually lived and breathed and felt and thought and then died, as we did - as we would.

How quickly I judge, and therefore diminish their humanity.

The world wold have been different - and better - if women had had an equal say in the development of literature, medicine, chemistry, physics, peace and economics. Better, not because women are better, but because they are more than half of humanity, representing more than half of what it means to be human.

If all we do is immerse ourselves in the stories of bad people doing bad things to each other and the planet, we will sink under the weight of a lopsided story.

Each life deserves its own measure of respect; they are not kindling wood, to be bundled together.

Half the trouble in human relations arises from expecting human beings to conform to a single one-dimensional image. We are all hydra-headed monsters. But most people never learn that.

It interests me how we find ways to feel superior to another person, another group of people. It happens everywhere, and all the time. Whatever we call it, I think it's the lowest part of who we are, this need to find someone else to put down.

Because we all love imperfectly.

But what could you do? Only keep going. People kept going; they had been doing it for thousands of years. You took the kindness offered, letting it seep as far in as it could go, and the remaining dark crevices you carried around with you, knowing that over time they might change into something almost bearable.

Sometimes, like now, Olive had a sense of just how desperately hard every person in the world was working to get what they needed. For most, it was a sense of safety, in the sea of terror that life increasingly became. (211)

I have sometimes been sad that Tennessee Williams wrote that line for Blanche DuBois, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers. Many of us have been saved many times by the kindness of strangers, but after a while it sounds trite, like a bumper sticker. And that's what makes me sad, that a beautiful and true line comes to be used so often that it takes on the superficial sound of a bumper sticker.

I call upon you to draw from the depths of your being — to prove that we are a human race, to prove that our love outweighs our need to hate, that our compassion is more compelling than our need to blame

But so little does the rest of the world seem to care if we act nobly or otherwise that no help came to her

If one believed in angels one would feel that they must love us best when we are asleep and cannot hurt each other; and what a mercy it is that once in every twenty-four hours we are too utterly weary to go on being unkind. The doors shut, and the lights go out, and the sharpest tongue is silent, and all of us, scolder and scolded, happy and unhappy, master and slave, judge and culprit, are children again, tired, and hushed, and helpless, and forgiven. And

It's a hard time to be human. We know too much and too little.

Infants were tossed up in the air and used as the targets for machine guns

There never was, for all I could ever learn, a time when living was easy and peaceful.

The grace of God is not endangered by the follies or the wickedness of men.