Quotes About Humanity

The real world is simply too terrible to admit; it tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die.

the human condition is just too much for an animal to take; it is overwhelming.

For ages, when philosophers talked about the core of man they referred to it as his essence, something fixed in his nature, deep down, some special quality or substance. But nothing like it was ever found; man's peculiarity still remained a dilemma. The reason it was never found, as Erich Fromm put it in an excellent discussion, was that there was no essence, that the essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic.

every human being is… equally unfree, that is, we… create out of freedom, a prison….

The eminent biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy wrote in a masterful essay (1955) that evolution would soon have weeded man out if his cultural categories of space, time, causality, etc., were entirely deceptive.

It is all right to say, with Adler, that mental illness is due to problems in living,-but we must remember that life itself is the insurmountable problem.

I think if we push the analysis to its ultimate point we have to say that each earthly father accuses us of our impotence if we become truly creative personalities; they remind us that we are born of men and not gods. No living person can give genius the powers it needs to shoulder the meaning of the world.

Why are groups so blind and stupid?" men have always asked. "Because they demand illusions," answered Freud. They constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real. And we know why. The real world is simply too terrible to admit. It tells man that he is a small, trembling animal who will decay and die. Illusion changes all of this, makes man seem important, vital to the universe, immortal in some way.

In other words, the final terror of self-consciousness is the knowledge of one's own death, which is the peculiar sentence on man alone in the animal kingdom

Why, then, the reader may ask, add still another weighty tome to a useless overproduction?

One of the main reasons that it is so easy to march men off to war is that deep down each of them feels sorry for the man next to him who will die. Each protects himself in his fantasy until the shock that he is bleeding.

The human ego would have to become strong enough to die; and strong enough to set aside guilt… . [F]ull psychoanalytic consciousness would be strong enough to cancel the debt [of guilt] by deriving it from infantile fantasy.7

Perhaps Becker's greatest achievement has been to create a science of evil. He has given us a new way to understand how we create surplus evil—warfare, ethnic cleansing, genocide.

Our task for the future is exploring what it means for each individual to be a member of earth's household, a commonwealth of kindred beings. Whether we will use our freedom to encapsulate ourselves in narrow, tribal, paranoid personalities and create more bloody Utopias or to form compassionate communities of the abandoned is still to be decided.

Our heroic projects that are aimed at destroying evil have the paradoxical effect of bringing more evil into the world.

Becker has never found a mass audience is because he shames us with the knowledge of how easily we will shed blood to purchase the assurance of our own righteousness.

Although there exist many thousand subjects for elegant conversation, there are persons who cannot meet a cripple without talking about feet.

Most people were heartless about turtles because a turtle's heart will beat for hours after it has been cut up and butchered. But the old man thought, I have such a heart too.

Everything you have is to give. Thou art a phenomenon of philosophy and an unfortunate man.

Don't let yourself slip and get any perfect characters... keep them people, people, people, and don't let them get to be symbols.

I have watched them all day and they are the same men that we are. I believe that I could walk up to the mill and knock on the door and I would be welcome except that they have orders to challenge all travelers and ask to see their papers. It is only orders that come between us. Those men are not fascists. I call them so, but they are not. They are poor men as we are. They should never be fighting against us and I do not like to think of the killing.

But, thank God, [the fish] are not as intelligent as we who kill them; although they are more noble and more able.

Then he was sorry for the great fish... How many people will he feed?.. But are they worthy to eat him? No, of course, not. There is no one worthy of eating him from the manner of his behavior and his great dignity.

Nessun uomo è un'isola, completo in se stesso; ogni uomo è un pezzo del continente, una parte del tutto. Se anche solo una nuvola venisse lavata via dal mare, l'Europa ne sarebbe diminuita, come se le mancasse un promontorio, come se venisse a mancare una dimora di amici tuoi, o la tua stessa casa. La morte di qualsiasi uomo mi sminuisce, perché io sono parte dell'umanità. E dunque non chiedere mai per chi suona la campana: suona per te.