Quotes About Humanity

When you've fallen from the sky, been abandoned by your friend, suffered police brutality, metamorphosed into a goat, lost your work as well as your wife, learned the power of hatred and regained human shape, what is there left to do but, as you would no doubt phrase it, demand your rights?

Perhaps we, who are language animals, possess a song and story instinct; we need and move toward stories and songs not because we are taught to do so but because it is in our nature to need them.

Our group takes what I'll call a Post-Atheist stance. Our position is that god is a creation of human beings, who only exists because of the clap-hands-if-you-believe-in-fairies principle. If enough people were sensible enough not to clap hands, then this Tinker Bell god would die. However, unfortunately, billions of human beings are still prepared to defend their belief in some sort of god-fairy, and, as a result, god exists. What's worse is that he is now running amok.

and I began to wonder if we were moral beings at all or simply savages who defined their private bigotries as necessary ethics, as the only ways to be.

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

We, the living, must find what space we can alongside them; the giant dead whom we cannot tie down, though we grasp at their hair, though we rope them while they sleep

love is an emotion that recognizes itself in others.

The human race is a life sentence...it's a rough confinement, and sometimes we all need to break out of jail.

It was the resilience in human beings that represented their best chance of survival, their ability to look the unimaginable, the unconscionable, the unprecedented in the eye.

Why demons, when man himself is a demon?' the Nobel Laureate Singer's 'last demon' asked from his attic in Tishevitz. To which Chamcha's sense of balance, his much-to-be-said-for-and-against reflex, wished to add: 'And why angels, when man is angelic too?

Man is the storytelling animal, the only creature on earth that told itself stories to understand what kind of creature it was. The story was his birthright, and nobody could take it away.

Little rich boy, that's all just wind. All that importance-of-the-individual. All that possibility-of-humanity. Today, what people are is just another kind of thing.

Civilsation is the sleight of hand that conceals our natures from ourselves.

people understood for the first time [...] that in the end the salvation of human beings came from other human beings and not from things, no matter how large and imposing – and even magical – those things might be

But great tragedy is universal

Robert Hughes, Time magazines's art critic, told him on the phone that after he saw the planes flying over SoHo he had walked around in shock. On his way home he had stopped by a bakery and found the shelves cleaned out. Not a loaf remained, not a bagel, and the old baker standing amid the emptiness spread his arms and said, 'Should happen every day.

Een man hoeft slechts zijn intellectuele tienertijd te bereiken, of hij gaat vermoeden dat het leven geen klucht is; dat het zelfs geen elegant blijspel is; dat het integendeel bloeit en vrucht draagt uit de onpeilbare tragische diepten van wezenlijk gebrek waarin de wortels steken van wie het leeft.

This may be the curse of the human race, not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike.

The curse of the human race is not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike.

I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come. Nor am I particularly exceptional in this matter; each "I," every one of the now-six-hundred-million-plus of us, contains a similar multitude. I repeat for the last time: to understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

We underestimate our fellow humans because we underestimate ourselves. They - we - are capable of being much more than we seem

I am being flayed,' he told her in his dream. 'It is my holy calling. We will never gain our humanity until we lose our skins.

by your example you have taught me kindness, and shown me that it expands to include all people, not only the true believers but the unbelievers and other-believers also, not only the virtuous but also those who know not virtue

I learned that love is for the most part absent and, when it appears, is usually fitful, fleeting, and finally unsatisfactory. I learned that the communities men build are based on the oppression of the many by the few, and I did not understand, I still do not understand, why the many accept this oppression