Quotes About Humanity

When two people, lovers, or sometimes friends, have an enduring care for each other, allow each other to be human, faulted, flawed, but real, then being human becomes a glorious thing to be. If the human race ever makes progress, that is how.

There have been many signs of a newly awakened caring in recent years, and I need to remember all the signs of goodness and hope, particularly after I look at the paper or listen to the news. We are one planet, a single organism

Expand my love, Lord, so I can help to bear the pain, help your love move my love into the tired prostitute with false eyelashes and bunioned feet, the corrupt policeman with his hand open for graft, the addict, the derelict, the woman in the mink coat and discontented mouth, the high school girl with heavy books and frightened eyes. Help me through these scandalous particulars to understand your love. Help me to pray.

But, like all human beings, she still had unfulfilled longings. She could still be as lonely and frightened as a child, and with as little reason.

think your mother-in-law understands particulars. She's not a do-gooder, because most do-gooders deal in generalities. She never loses sight of the particular person, the unique human need.

Only a human being can say I'm sorry. Forgive me. This is part of our particularity. It is part of what makes us capable of tears, capable of laughter.

The new information technology, indifferent to human suffering, does not accommodate humane needs unless we harness it and make it do so.

Women's status in society has become the standard by which humanity's progress toward civility and peace can be measured."-Architects of Peace: Visions of Hope in Words and Images

But how could you measure your own pain against the pain of the world?

poetry, like all imaginative creations, divines the human enterprise. This is poetry's social value.

But you are involved in the world, and your actions have consequences for other people, and if you don't recognize that, then that's the supreme kind of cruelty. Everyone shares someone else's fate to some extent.

One is congenitally a woman; one tries not to be, but it's a question of one's humanity.

All war is absurd. For thousands of years, human beings have chosen to settle their differences by obliterating one another. And when we are not obliterating one another, we spend an enormous amount of time and attention coming up with better ways to obliterate one another the next time around. It's all a little strange, if you think about it.

as human beings we are a lot more sophisticated about each other than we are about the abstract world.

It was not the privileged and the fortunate who took in the Jews in France. It was the marginal and the damaged, which should remind us that there are real limits to what evil and misfortune can accomplish.

Man evolved to feel strongly about few people, short distances, and relatively brief intervals of time; and these are still the dimensions of life that are important to him.

Good God, if our civilization were to sober up for a couple of days, it'd die of remorse on the third—

Love is the only thing which gives meaning to our poor ways on earth

Bent double, groaning with the weight, an old lame Indian was carrying on his back, by means of a strap looped over his forehead, another poor Indian, yet older and more decrepit than himself. He carried the older man and his crutches, trembling in every limb under this weight of the past, he carried both their burdens.

What is man but a little soul holding up a corpse?

Then this beggar with one leg leaned forward: he dropped a coin into the legless man's outstretched hand. There were tears in the first beggar's eyes.

We declare our right on this earth...to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary.

I believe in the brotherhood of man, all men, but I don't believe in brotherhood with anybody who doesn't want brotherhood with me. I believe in treating people right, but I'm not going to waste my time trying to treat somebody right who doesn't know how to return the treatment

I believe in recognizing every human being as a human being--neither white, black, brown, or red; and when you are dealing with humanity as a family there's no question of integration or intermarriage. It's just one human being marrying another human being or one human being living around and with another human being.