Quotes About Humanity

Let's draw the boundary early not wait until it's obvious like Hitler's Germany and insist that the state shall never, never, take the life of a person!

The great danger of humane punishment is that people will come to accept state murder as something sanitary. I don't think bureaucracy should ever be entrusted with that kind of power.

Identification is why the reader reads and why the writer writes. We all want to identify with a character, so that we can, in turn, identify with ourselves. Do you have yourself all figured out? Is your self-knowledge so complete? Do you know yourself so well that you'll never do anyting stupid or make a fool of yourself again? When it comes to knowing ourselves, we are incomplete, lacking, deficient. Each of us is our own ongoing problem until the day we die.

What's been great about the human race gives you a sense of how great you might get, how far you can reach.

But shitty human beings sometimes make great art.

That's not serious, it's just human.

Alabama Tenant Farmer Wife, by Walker Evans (version published in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men). From a print in a private collection, trimmed under Evans's direction and signed by him in 1971.

If you knock even the most hateful human being, you will come out of the encounter looking less than heroic. People almost always side with the one being attacked.

Still holding my breath, I worked the dull point inside and slowly, slowly drew back the stopper, plunged it back in, and exhaled. At last, my grateful spirit eased out of the fetid bag of humanity crumpled in that Japanese car, eased out and drifted overhead, until it floated high over the San Fernando Valley, far away from all these people who just didn't understand, far away and high above the awful circumstance of what now passed for my life.

When life becomes sub-human, sub-humans come alive.

Instynkt ?ycia najtrudniej zabi?. Widzia?em ludzi, którzy im g??biej staczali si? w upodlenie, tym gwa?towniej pragn?li przetrwa? wszystko i ocali? siebie.

Wouldn't it be easier to change people's eyes and hair than to build big furnaces and then catch Jews and Gypsies to burn them?

The agony of having to share this small slice of world with big breakable humans who are really just uncovered beating hearts walking around spilling their viscera and their words everywhere, not bothering to clean up. Animals are a smooth punctuation to human parataxis, resisting our love out of modesty.

That's sad. How plastic and artificial life has become. It gets harder and harder to find something…real." Nin interlocked his fingers, and stretched out his arms. Real love, real friends, real body parts…

And because he felt like he might burst open and because he lacked the dexterity in English to say all that he was thinking--how in his estimation, the more you lived the more regret and longing you suffered, that life was a glorious catastrophe--Pasquale Tursi said, only, "Yes.

In searching for a way out of my own troubles, I had found my way into the trouble of others, some long gone, and now I was trying to find my way back out, through their troubles, as if we human beings can ever learn from one another.

You live your life, you try to live compassionately, and that's the end of it. You do a little more than you should have to in order to be a good person, but you don't go making big changes in the world, trying to fix things. It presumes too much to do so. There's only this: if everyone acts quietly, compassionately, things will go a little better than they would have otherwise. But people will still suffer.

reason and sensical behavior are not always necessary if there exists some small flood of kindness.

Are we not all the same? Do we not all strive to simply have enough?

In searching for a way out of my own troubles, I had found my way into the troubles of others, some long gone, and now I was trying to find my way back out, through their troubles, as if we human beings can ever learn from one another.

This is what we bear, I thought, the nearness of other lives.

It is so easy for humans to be cruel, and they leap to it. They love to do it. It is an exercise of all their laughable powers

Our nation is a rainbow - red, yellow, brown, black, and white - and we're all precious in God's sight.

Of justice you will find none.... To judge is evil. To mete justice, more appalling still. Act from compassion and you will do better than to devise any code or facade of justice.