Quotes About Humanity

We've been fighting our whole lives to say we're just human beings like everyone else. When we start separating ourselves in our work, that doesn't help the cause. I've heard it for years: 'How do you feel being a black filmmaker?' I'm not a black filmmaker, I'm a filmmaker. I'm a black man, I have black children. But I'm just a filmmaker.

Once in a while, a person finds his humanity in a way that astounds his contemporaries.

So they didn't let anybody else off. I can't live like this, I'm finished. Auschwitz was easy.

I no longer see my world as delineated by countries with borders or language, but as seven billion humans living off a single, finite planet.

I firmly believe there are no bad people.

I firmly believe that you are supposed to love everybody. That is God's one boldest commandment.

I firmly believe in the sanctity of life.

I came into this world the way every person on the planet does - with clenched fists.

I have fits of melancholia when I watch the news, but we all do, don't we?

Lincoln prevailed: wearing his green shawl in the White House and gripped with melancholy, his feet constantly cold, he preserved a nation that had begun to unravel, often holding it together with nothing more than the flat of his hand and his unfaltering sense of human worth.

The most glaring aspect of white privilege is that when someone is described neutrally - without indicating color or ethnicity - more often than not, people will assume that the person is white. That assumption indicates an uncomfortable truth: in our society, whiteness determines humanity.

We know that all interracial groups in South Africa are relationships in which whites are superior, blacks inferior. So as a prelude, whites must be made to realize that they are only human, not superior. Same with blacks. They must be made to realize that they are also human, not inferior.

The whites are the same everywhere. I see them every day.

Be nice to the whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.

Why should blacks feel elated about seeing men walk on the moon when millions of poor blacks and whites don't have enough money to buy food to eat on earth?

Basically there is no difference between whites and blacks, browns and yellows. I decided to think no more of people as Northerners and Southerners.

I think the real understanding comes when we recognize our humanity in each other. That's not just between blacks and whites. That's between all religions as well.

I was told that Daddy was murdered by a white man. I could have adopted an attitude of hating whites. But then in 1974 my grandmother was killed by a black man, so I could have hated blacks too.

I used to think I saw life in blacks or whites, turns out I was more grey. It is extremely liberating to care for people even if they are flawed, you needn't eschew the whole person for a few not so shiny, sparkly parts.

He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals.

War: a massacre of people who don't know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don't massacre each other.

Man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.

Because no matter who we are or where we come from, we're all entitled to the basic human rights of clean air to breathe, clean water to drink, and healthy land to call home.

Anyone who hates children and animals can't be all bad.