Quotes About Humanity

Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings. Like many millions of people, I am a bastard child of history. Perhaps we all are, black and brown and white, leaking into one another, as a character of mine once said, like flavours [sic] when you cook

Father argued that society as a whole must come to be organized on a different basis than greed, for while material interests gained somewhat by the institutionalized deification of pure selfishness, ordinary men and women lost everything by it.

The race of man haunted by the thought of what it used to be, ashamed of what they are, afraid of what they were.

Real literature is something much better than a harmless instrument for getting through idle hours. The purpose of great literature is to help us to develop into full human beings.

Could a child who had never been inside a house, who had never seen a bathtub, or a flush toilet, who had long forgotten what his parents looked like before they were shot or burned, ever be normal?

He hated the idea of killing people he could not hate.

A time being is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.

Blessed Stars, please make this world into a place where we will never again be forced to kill an enemy whom we cannot hate. Were such a thing to come about, I would not complain even if my body were torn to pieces again and again.

But what a sweet story it is! And in the end, to us, that's what really matters. That's what books are for, after all, to tell your stories, to hold them and keep them safe between our covers for as long as we're able. We do our best to bring you pleasure and sustain your belief in the gravity of being human. We care about your feelings and believe in you completely.

We're by-products of the mid-twentieth century, Oliver said. Who isn't?

People are born from the womb of the world with different sensitivities, and the world needs every single one of you to experience it fully, so that it might be fully experienced.

For the time being, standing on the tallest mountaintop, For the time being, moving on the deepest ocean floor, For the time being, a demon with three heads and eight arms, For the time being, the golden sixteen-foot body of a buddha, For the time being, a monk's staff or a master's fly- swatter, For the time being, a pillar or a lantern, For the time being, any Dick or Jane, For the time being, the entire earth and the boundless sky.

Of course there are individual books—you may even be holding one in your hand right now—but that's not all we are. At the risk of sounding full of ourselves, we are both the One and the Many, an ever-changing plurality, a bodiless flow. Shifting and changing shape, we encounter your human eye as black marks on a page, or your ear as bursts of sound. From there, we travel through your minds, and thus we merge and multiply.

A wave is born from deep conditions of the ocean," she said. "A person is born from deep conditions of the world. A person pokes up from the world and rolls along like a wave, until it is time to sink down again. Up, down. Person, wave.

She told me that real strength is the capacity for kindness to others, and that I should do whatever I could to find that kind of strength. She said she couldn't tell me how to go about doing that, because she never found it herself, but that people who where strong enough to be kind to others could always get by in this world.

Every one of us living on this planet is an Other in the view of Others - I am in their view, and they are in mine.

After a day of heat and hunger, one is weak and listless. But a certain stuport, an internal numbness, has its benefits: man could not survive here without it, for otherwise the biological, animal part of his nature would bite to death everything that is still human in him.

A journalist can not be a cynic, can not forget his humanity and that of the people he meets

However, man when he is alone is usually more 'human' than when he is a member of a crowd, an excited mass. Individually we are wiser and better, less inscrutable. Becoming part of a group can change the same quiet, friendly individual into a devil.

see on kõige hirmsam kannatus inimlikes asjades, paljut mõista ja mitte mingit võimu omada

Ah yes it took a long time before I learned to think about man as a human being before I discovered his way of thinking before I took this path in this salutary direction and speaking of man or contemplating him I stopped asking such questions as is he white or black an anarchist or monarchist fashionable or outmoded ours or theirs and I began to ask what in him is of human being . . .

Here it is different, here the past is as alive as the present, the unpredictable cruel Stone Age coexists with the calculating, cool age of electronics—the two eras live in the same man, who is as much the descendant of Genghis Khan as he is the student of Edison… if, that is, he ever comes into contact with Edison's world.

People have been making war for thousands of years, but each time it is as if it is the first war ever waged, as if everyone has started from scratch. A

La storia è spesso frutto di una leggerezza. Il frutto bastardo della stupidità umana, un parto dell'obnubilazione, dell'idiozia e della pazzia. In questi casi la storia è opera di gente che non sa quello che fa, anzi che neanche lo vuole sapere, che respinge quest'eventualità con rabbia e disgusto. La vediamo precipitarsi verso la propria rovina, irretirsi da sola, annodarsi il cappio, verificare con cura che reti e cappi siano solidi, resistenti, efficaci.