Quotes About Humanity

Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes penned the majority opinion, which included these immortal words: It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.… Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

We have to assume that the people whose dwelling-places, artefacts, lives even, we are dealing with were rational, integrated, sane and sensible human beings. Then we look around at our own contemporaries and wonder how this belief can possibly be sustained.

The category of crimes against humanity was used in the 1945 Nuremberg Charter to ensure that the deportation of Germans by Germans to the concentration camps, and their subsequent mistreatment and extermination, could be prosecuted. Under the international laws of war at that time, the way in which a government treated its own nationals (no matter how heinous) was considered by international law as exclusively a matter of domestic jurisdiction, rather than an issue of international concern.

I am against the death penalty.

but the truth is that I dislike most men as much as I dislike women. If anything, I am an equal opportunity misanthropist.

The Douglass of the memoirs is a paragon. There is little trace in him of the man who sometimes must have been petty, impulsive and vain--not a piece of property to be utilized in one way or another but, as one putative friend complained, a "haughty" and "self-possessed' man with the low as well as exalted desires that constitute freedom. To pretend otherwise is to treat him once again as less than human.

Por esta razón el hombre fue creado al comienzo como una sola persona, para enseñarles que quienquiera que destruya una vida es considerado por las Escrituras como alguien que ha destruido un mundo entero; y quienquiera que salve una es como si hubiera salvado un mundo entero.

The logic of evangelical Protestants in the 18th century led to an inescapable conclusion: If God was indeed no respecter of persons, and if all were equal in the sight of God—men and women, young and old, rich and poor, white and colored—then Christians had no business owning slaves or benefitting from their labor and suffering, and slavery itself was a crime against God.

Although Wesley was not a pacifist, he was deeply opposed to war, which he said was "a horrid reproach to the Christian name, yea, to the name of man, to all reason and humanity…When war breaks out, God is forgotten…So long as this monster stalks uncontrolled, where is reason, virtue, humanity? They are utterly excluded.

It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.

My feelings are spent, my moral rationalizations are empty, and I can't say it's not my problem when I'm pulling and lifting and throwing bodies of people who once only wanted to go about the business of their lives.

Without food, man can live at most but a few weeks; without it, all other components of social justice are meaningless.

There couldn't be a society of people who didn't dream. They'd be dead in two weeks.

Being the only non-Black was a unique experience. After a few weeks, you're not aware of skin color differences. You see the color; you're not blind, but it doesn't matter. You see the human being first.

People inspire me. Every day, I meet amazing individuals in the field. When I see a mother who has walked for three weeks to come to a MSF clinic, with two kids on her back and her belongings on her head, facing intimidation and physical abuse on her way, I am inspired by her resilience - her desire for life.

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.

Any beast can cry over the misfortunes of its own child. It takes a mensch to weep for others' children.

We should weep for men at their birth, not at their death.

The tears of the world are a constant quality. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.

Every day you read these awful stories in the papers that make you want to weep. You think, 'Why has this happened?' But at the same, people can also be lovely to each other.

There should be weeping at a man's birth, not at his death.

I befriended a homeless man five years ago, bought him a new set of teeth, helped him get his life on track. A writer for 'Elle' spent two hours talking to this guy and discarded almost everything he said. When the story came out, we both were weeping while reading it on the street!

Even if the technology advances, I don't expect we will be allowed to sail around with 400-meter long container ships weighing 200,000 tonnes without any human beings on board. I don't think it will be a driver of efficiency - not in my time.

Surely the day will come when color means nothing more than the skin tone, when religion is seen uniquely as a way to speak one's soul, when birth places have the weight of a throw of the dice and all men are born free, when understanding breeds love and brotherhood.