Quotes About Humanity

A good teacher sees the commonality of all human beings and helps each individual find his uniqueness.

My teacher said once that every man faces seven enemies in his lifetime. Sickness, hunger, betrayal, envy, greed, old age, and then death.

We are human beings, not 'students' and 'teacher,' coming together and questioning, looking together, not having made up our minds about what we're looking at, but starting afresh.

As far as men go, it is not what they are that interests me, but what they can become.

Trees and fields tell me nothing: men are my teachers.

Jesus, to me, is a great world teacher among others.

We exist in a bizarre combination of Stone Age emotions, medieval beliefs, and god-like technology.

Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has as its ultimate goal the betterment of humanity.

Is the system going to flatten you out and deny you your humanity, or are you going to be able to make use of the system to the attainment of human purposes?

The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers.

The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because of technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human.

annihilation. "Money flows toward short term gain," writes the geologist David Archer, "and toward the over-exploitation of unregulated common resources. These tendencies are like the invisible hand of fate, guiding the hero in a Greek tragedy toward his inevitable doom." This is indeed the essence of humanity's present derangement.

How was possible that a small no of men, in the span of a few hours or minutes, could decide the fate of millions of people yet unborn ? How was it possible that the outcome of those brief moments could determine who would determine who would rule whom, who would be rich or poor, master or servant, for generations to come ? Nothing could be a greater injustice, yet such had been the reality ever since human beings first walked the earth.

Rules, rules, she said softly. All you ever talk about is rules. That's how you and your kind have destroyed everything—science, religion, socialism—with your rules and your orthodoxies. That's the difference between us: you worry about rules and I worry about being human.

As I thought of these things, it seemed to me that this whole world had become a place of animals, and our fault, our crime, was that we were just human beings, trying to live as human beings always have, from the water and the soil. No one could think this a crime unless they have forgotten that this is how humans have always lived—by fishing, by clearing land and by planting the soil.

is morbid individualism that turns crises into tragedies.

at exactly the time when it has become clear that global warming is in every sense a collective predicament, humanity finds itself in the thrall of a dominant culture in which the idea of the collective has been exiled from politics, economics and literature alike.

They taught us always to respect other peoples: every man is made in the image of God, even if he has a tendency to forget it.

Fundamentally, suspicion, enjoyment of persecution, and even hatred of the entire human race are all much less lethal than a love of humanity, which reeks of ancient rivers of blood. In my view, gratuitous hatred is less bad than gratuitous love.

You've held the world in your hands for thousands of years and you've turned it into a horror show.

La vérité est que chacun d'entre nous sait parfaitement ce que signifie la pitié et quel en est le mode d'emploi : nous l'avons tous implorée un jour ou l'autre. Mais au moment où il nous faut ouvrir la porte de la miséricorde, nous faisons comme si nous en avions perdu la clé, comme si avoir un peu de coeur revenait à humilier son prochain ou à manifester une sensiblerie démodée. (p.283)

We are all Judas. Even eighty generations later we are still Judas.

Justice without compassion isn't justice; it's an abattoir.

Of course you can't understand. All you can do is destroy a village without knowing anything about its people or its history, without wanting to know. Just like that. Like a mad bull. Of course you don't understand. What do you understand? Fucking and killing, that's what you understand. And soccer. And shares in the bus cooperative. You're a wild animal, not a human being. A wild, stupid, animal.