Quotes About Humanity

Sé amable, porque cada persona enfrenta una dura batalla.

All people—white and colored, slave and free, Union and Confederate—shared a common humanity belied by their outward differences. In a time of discord, in a land torn by war, no truth was more important to remember than that.

Everybody's crooked. The trick is to find out how they're bent.

One expects decent people to stand up for the good of all. Decent people shut their doors and hide behind them as decent people do. Massacres could never happen if it weren't for decent people.

Every heart is made of stories.

Watch a child die for the lack of a few coins. Do that, and you might start to understand a few things, like the difference between a theft and a crime.

Humans are selfish creatures who can always be counted on to do the wrong thing.

But when I was a little girl, my mom always told me to be nice to everybody, no matter what they looked like or how they treated me, because I never knew who might be an angel God had sent to Earth in disguise.

All that love, all that pain, all the stuff people feel – not just me and you, brother, but everyone, everyone who's ever walked this beautiful green planet – how can all that disappear when somebody dies? It can't disappear, it's too big. Too strong, too... permanent. So it moves to another frequency, where the human ear can't pick up.

I understood with sudden clarity that doing the right thing - being right - gets you nothing in this world. It's the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time.

Holding my phone, looking out at twinkling Lake Michigan, I understood with sudden clarity that doing the right thing—being right—gets you nothing in this world. It's the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time. Fuck Sasha, I thought.

There is nothing original about human behavior.

It's the weird and terrible way of this place that a little thing, a hand on a head, can matter so much.

Here we've been thinking we had nothing in common beyond where we happen to be, and all this time we've been doing the same thing: picking up ghosts.

My point is, screw the machines. Throw them away. Put some faith in that brain of yours. My brain can't make a phone call. Sure it can. You can talk to anyone you want.

A good deed needs no excuse. So his pop used to reassure Dexter when he would resist, embarrassed, carrying a covered dish of leftover meatballs to the bums and hoboes who haunted the carny houses near his restaurant. Dexter muttered the phrase to himself as he lifted the heavy folded chair into his trunk. A good deed needs no excuse.

There is no end to it, no way to measure it. Consciousness is like the cosmos multiplied by the number of people alive in the world (assuming that consciousness dies when we do, and it may not) because each of our minds is a cosmos of its own: unknowable, even to ourselves.

Holding my phone, looking out at twinkling Lake Michigan, I understood with sudden clarity that doing the right thing—being right—gets you nothing in this world. It's the sinners everyone loves: the flailers, the scramblers, the bumblers. There was nothing sexy about getting it right the first time.

If you ever find yourself thinking that a mass human extinction event would be good for population control, you might want to get checked out.

Maybe we shared an impatience with small talk, being a heart surgeon and a drug counselor. The body and its needs: the thing itself.

And yet, as it turns out, nothing is harder than loving human beings. In part, this is because we don't know what we want. Or, on those unlikely occasions when we do know what we want, we often don't know how to put our desire into words. Instead, a lot of the time we act like my old friend Gomer, snarling and slathering at the end of our chains, driven to fury not only by our imprisonment but also by the presence of others who appear to us to be undeservedly walking free.

Don't you know that this is the only reason we are here, to love one another, and to be loved?

Maybe we should just love one another, even if we don't completely understand the things that people bear in their dark, strange hearts, even if the stars that other men and women are following seem invisible to us. If we make ourselves open to the humanity of others first, maybe understanding will follow. An incomprehensible theory of the universal isn't necessary if your only ambition is to embrace another soul. What you need, maybe all you need, in fact, is the willingness to love.

Don't you know that this is the only reason we are here, to love one another, and to be loved? Why is it that what is so obvious to dogs is such a mystery to men and women?