Quotes About Humanity

When you befriend old men you realize how innocent the human race is.

It is not humanity that will tear the land asunder, but a certain inhumanity born from ingratitude and the explosion of souls_ in the usual name of progress.

To photograph truthfully and effectively is to see beneath the surfaces and record the qualities of nature and humanity which live or are latent in all things.

I still find it strange, incomprehensible, unnatural, inhuman, to devote oneself to the happiness of people whom one does not do not know; and I declare that I do not have the honor of being known to the men who govern me.

The exceptional status of each human being derives from the unique significance of suffering and flourishing in the context of our remembrances of the past and of the memories we have constructed of the future we incessantly anticipate.

Feelings are the mental expressions of homeostasis, while homeostasis, acting under the cover of feeling, is the functional thread that links early life-forms to the extraordinary partnership of bodies and nervous systems. That partnership is responsible for the emergence of conscious, feeling minds that are, in turn, responsible for what is most distinctive about humanity: cultures and civilizations. Feelings are at the center of the book, but they draw their powers from homeostasis.

The idea, in essence, is that cultural activity began and remains deeply embedded in feeling. The favorable and unfavorable interplay of feeling and reason must be acknowledged if we are to understand the conflicts and contradictions of the human condition.

The sciences alone cannot illuminate the entirety of human experience without the light that comes from the arts and humanities.

La historia de nuestra civilización es, hasta cierto punto, la historia de un esfuerzo persuasivo por extender los mejores «sentimientos morales» a círculos cada vez más amplios de humanidad

This is not to say that human feelings are not more complex and layered and elaborate than those of animals. How could they not be? But as I see it, the distinction in humans has to do with the web of associations that feeling states establish with all sorts of ideas and especially with the interpretations we can make of our present moment and of our anticipated future.

The humans who first devised the Golden Rule, that we should treat others the way we want others to treat us, formulated the precept with the help of what they felt when they were treated badly or when they saw others badly treated. Logic played a role as it worked on facts, to be sure, but some of the critical facts were feelings.

e seres humanos que inventam flautas, escrevem poesia, acreditam eu Deus, conquistam o Planeta e o espaço em seu redor, combatem doenças para atenuar o sofrimento, mas também não hesitam em destruir outros seres humanos para seu ganho pessoal, inventam a internet, descobrem maneiras de a transformar num instrumento de progresso e de catástrofe e, ainda por cima, se interrogam sobre as bactérias, formigas, abelhas - e si próprios.

The rise of human cultures should be credited to both conscious feeling and creative intelligence.

And it seems to me, Miss O'Breen, that to forswear mercy is to forswear humanity. If to destroy evil we take up its very weapons, we shall learn in time that all we have destroyed is the best in ourselves. [Jonadab Evans]

If the world is to be improved it must be by the exercise of individual charity.

I suppose the only real reason for travelling is to learn that all people are the same.

When a man cannot chose, he ceases to be a man.

Goodness is something chosen. When a man cannot choose he ceases to be a man.

It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.

Civilised my syphilised yarbles.

Do I know I'm right? Judgements aren't the same as facts. Instinct is not science. I'm like any other human being, as fallible and as capable of being wrong. I only know what I believe.

What's the earthly use of putting a man on the moon when we cannot live on the earth?

God went mad out of love for us. Then we must be very lovely. What we have stressed in the past is how lovely God must be that he can love us like this. But nobody has yet said how lovely we must be, that God could fall for us like this. Both are true.

That's why you'll never catch me saluting a flag. I abhor all national flags because they are idols. What are we saluting? I salute humanity, not a flag with an army around it.