Quotes About Humanity

A brain the size of a planet," said Aristide, "and you're as fucked by Sartre as the rest of us.

I'm not afraid of werewolves or vampires or haunted hotels, I'm afraid of what real human beings to do other real human beings.

I hate it!" he said. "I don't want to be human anymore." "Neither do I," she said. "It's not a good place to be.

Why do I feel that ghosts are more real Than these creatures of substance and matter? Why does their song seem to drive me along More than humanity's drivel and pratter?

Man stands alone in the universe, responsible for his condition, likely to remain in a lowly state, but free to reach above the stars.

Since the Renaissance, Shakespeare, Rembrandt, Mozart, and a host of others have shown that this religious dimension can be experienced and communicated apart from any religious context. But that is no reason for closing my heart to Job's cry, or to Jeremiah's, or to the Second Isaiah. I do not read them as mere literature; rather, I read Sophocles and Shakespeare with all my being, too.

Sometimes, when a person is truly lost in this world, suffocating inside her private bubble where all she can hear is her own droning heartbeat, a touch can be enough.

Literature had torn Tessa and me apart, or prevented us from merging in the first place. That was its role in the world, I'd started to fear: to conjure up disagreements that didn't matter and inspire people to act on them as though they mattered more than anything. Without literature, humans would all be one. Warfare was simply literature in arms. The pen was the reason man invented the sword.

How soon human beings forget what a privilege it is to live in freedom. A privilege, not an honor. An honor would mean we deserved it. We do not.

Because it is such a powerful force in the world today, the Western Judeo-Christian tradition is often accepted as the arbiter of 'natural' behavior of humans. If Europeans and their descendant nations of North America accept something as normal, then anything different is seen as abnormal. Such a view ignores the great diversity of human experience.

This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement -- that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it -- that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings.

The world is a better place to live in because it contains human beings who will give up ease and security and stake their own lives in order to do what they themselves think worth doing.

As you go further away from experience, you go higher into generalization or subtlety. As you go up in the balloon you throw more and more concrete objects overboard, and when you have reached the top with some phrase like the Rights of Humanity or the World Made Safe for Democracy, you see far and wide, but you see very little.

Those whom we love and admire most are the men and women whose consciousness is peopled thickly with persons rather than with types, who know us rather than the classification into which we might fit.

War is the greatest human experience that men have passed through for many centuries. But only when we know, through their own words, the full horror of what they experienced, and the depth and complexity of their feelings when under duress, can we appreciate how they held together and saved the world from despotism.

The night was a magnificent confirmation of "women and children first," yet somehow the loss rate was higher for Third Class children than First Class men.

We are all poets, really.

Things without people are as dead as the dead. It takes people to make them appear to breathe & live & have quality.

Let's say that the average age in the audience is twenty-five years. Six hundred times twenty-five equals fifteen thousand years of human experience assembled in that darkness—well over twice the length of recorded human history of hopes, dreams, disappointments, exultation, tragedy. All focused on the same series of images and sounds, all brought there by the urge, however inchoate, to open up and experience as intensely as possible something beyond their ordinary lives.

History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same.

Y no podemos, porque el fenómeno humano se forja precisamente en la relación con los otros: los demás son el caldo de cultivo donde se cristaliza nuestra identidad. No podemos renunciar al prójimo.

La defensa de la identidad personal es un proceso natural y saludable. Detrás del ego que acapara está el yo que vive y ama, pero también está el yo lastimado, el yo que exige respeto, el yo que no quiere doblegarse, el yo humano: el yo digno. Una cosa es el egoísmo moral y el engreimiento insoportable del que se las sabe todas, y otra muy distinta, la autoafirmación y el fortalecimiento del sí mismo.

Ésa es la esencia del cambio: aceptar que más allá de las apariencias, en el resguardo más escondido de la humanidad que cargamos, hay un sitio especial en el que somos tan crudamente iguales, tan desesperadamente humanos, tan misteriosamente frágiles, que nadie merece sentirse inferior. No hay otra forma de vencer la vergüenza privada que aceptarse incondicionalmente, a pesar de todo, y de todos.

El apego enferma, castra, incapacita, elimina criterios, degrada y somete, deprime, genera estrés, asusta, cansa, desgasta y, finalmente, acaba con todo residuo de humanidad disponible.