Quotes About Humanity

He was a heartless monster, she told him; did he not understand—O abominable one!—that human life was short and that each day of love stolen from it was a crime against life itself?

Medeniyet, gerçek doÄŸam?z? kendimizden gizleyen bir el çabukluÄŸudur.

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

For, as the myths tell us, it is by defying the gods that human beings have best expressed their humanity.

Another lesson to be learned: never underestimate your fellow man. One man's ceiling is another man's floor.

We live in a world of disappointment. You begin with high hopes and the beautiful innocence of childhood but you discover that the world isn't good enough, nor are our lives and nor are we. But there are moments in life when we can have an experience of transcendence, feel part of something larger, or simply our hearts burst inside.

But now living women wanted to be doll-like, to cross the frontier and look like toys. Now the doll was the original, the woman the representation. These living dolls, these stringless marionettes, were not just dolled up on the outside. Behind their high-style exteriors, beneath that perfectly lucent skin, they were so stuffed full of behavioral chips, so thoroughly programmed for action, so perfectly groomed and wardrobed, that there was no room left in them for messy humanity.

Why even try to understand the human condition if humanity revealed itself as grotesque, dark, not worth it.

When we are born, we are not automatically human beings. We have to learn how to be human beings. And some of us get there and some of us don't.

Desde el principio, los hombres han utilizado a Dios para justificar lo injustificable.

The heart flutters. Life damages the living. None of us are ourselves.

and do not speak to me, please, of African Eve or LUCA, the three-and-a-half-billion-year-old blob of goo that was our Last Universal Common Ancestor. I am aware of the family tree of the human race and of pre-Homo sap life on earth and to insist upon those genealogies now would be wilfully to miss my point.

I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. 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,...contains a similar multitude. To understand me, you'll have to swallow a world.

An ancient Jewish teaching holds that to save a life is to save the whole world.

Religious moderation is the direct result of taking scripture less and less seriously. So why not take it less seriously still? Why not admit the the Bible is merely a collection of imperfect books written by highly fallible human beings.

Spirituality must be distinguished from religion—because people of every faith, and of none, have had the same sorts of spiritual experiences.

It is time we recognized that the only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-minded way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts.

It really isn't hard to write a book that prohibits sexual slavery—you just put in a few lines like "Don't take sex slaves!" and "When you fight a war and take prisoners, as you inevitably will, don't rape any of them!" And yet God couldn't seem to manage it.

Every person you have ever met, every person you will pass in the street today, is going to die. Living long enough, each will suffer the loss of his friends and family. All are going to lose everything they love in this world. Why would one want to be anything but kind to them in the meantime?

One of the most pernicious effects of religion is that it tends to divorce morality from the reality of human and animal suffering. Religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are not--that is, when they have nothing to do with suffering or its alleviation. Indeed, religion allows people to imagine that their concerns are moral when they are highly immoral--that is, when pressing these concerns inflicts unnecessary and appalling suffering on innocent human beings.

Most moral relativists believe that tolerance of cultural diversity is better, in some important sense, than outright bigotry. This may be perfectly reasonable, of course, but it amounts to an overarching claim about how all human beings should live. Moral relativism, when used as a rationale for tolerance of diversity, is self-contradictory.

Despite our perennial bad behavior, our moral progress seems to me unmistakable.

It is time we recognized that the only thing that permits human beings to collaborate with one another in a truly open-ended way is their willingness to have their beliefs modified by new facts. Only openness to evidence and argument will secure a common world for us.

The moment one begins thinking about morality in terms of well-being, it becomes remarkably easy to discern a moral hierarchy across human societies.