Quotes About Humanity

quante, sta 'sti piviri miserabili, erano pirsone capaci di arricchiri il munno con la loro arti? quanti tra i tanti cataferi che oramà erano nell'invisibili cimitero marino sarebbiro stati capaci di scriviri 'na poesia le cui parole avrebbiro consolato, ralligrato, inchiuto il cori di chi stava a liggirla?»

Women are objects, commodities, some deemed more expensive than others. But it is only by asserting one's humanness every time, in all situations, that one becomes someone as opposed to something. That, after all is the core of our struggle.

The discovery is, of course, that "man" and "woman" are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs. As models they are reductive, totalitarian, inappropriate to human becoming. As roles they are static, demeaning to the female, dead-ended for male and female both. The conclusion is inescapable: we are, clearly, a multisexed species which has its sexuality spread along a vast continuum where the elements called male and female are not discrete.

You damn well better believe that you're involved in this tragedy and that it's your tragedy too. Because you're turned into little soldier boys from the day that you are born and everything that you learn about how to avoid the humanity of women becomes part of the militarism of the country in which you live and the world in which you live.

I believe in pure love, I-Thou, love without boundaries or categories or conditions or making someone less than you are; not treating people like they are foreign or lower or things, I-It.

It is this superiority, this contemptuous but absolutely normal and unremarkable arrogance, that he now sees as the essence of sexual depravity, and also as a first step toward killing his wife. Having actually killed, he sees the sex he took for granted as murderous in its diminution of human life-how it made women's humanity invisible, meaningless; but the prerogatives of both sex and class made the exploitation as invisible as gravity, as certain.

Are you in pain?' I asked, because I know that everything in the world that matters shows up as some kind of pain. Or pang. Joy included.

It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.

It is obvious to everyone that man's material aggrandisement has not been synchronous with spiritual progress. The point has been reached where we seem to have a fatal incapacity for mastering our material achievements in order to use them for our own good. We have created a civilisation which threatens to annihilate mankind.

How strangely people live. They seem to be in command of the situation and they do not understand that they have been given the chance of living and actually using the opportunity to be free. Everything in this life is terrible, apart from the freedom of will that we possess.

Now only a genius can save humanity—not a prophet, no!—a genius who will formulate a new moral ideal. But where is he, this Messiah ? There is nothing left for us but to learn to die with dignity. Cynicism has never saved anyone yet; it's the lot of the faint-hearted.

Man is made up of opposing characteristics. History demonstrates vividly the fact that it always moves in the worst possible direction. Either man is not capable of directing history, or else he does direct it, but only by pushing it down the most terrible, wrong path there is. There is not a single example to prove the opposite. People are not capable of governing others. They are only capable of destroying. And materialism—naked and cynical—is going to complete the destruction.

That best portion of a good man's life— His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love.

Virtue, whatever else it means, at least means being more human; it would not be virtuous if it did not. Sin, whatever else it means, means being less human, more still, cold, proud, selfish, mean, cruel, and all the rest of it.

I'm in this business for the defence of humanity,' he explained. 'You have to prepare for war to make peace.

Poems are a hotline to our hearts, and we forget this emotional power at our peril.

La tentazione della barbarie passa immutata da generazione a generazione, e riaffiorerà sempre ogni volta che ce ne sarà l'occasione adatta.

The great difference between the carnal and the spiritual Christian is that the latter acknowledges God, under whatever low and poor and human appearances He manifests Himself.

One of the worst things sin did for man was to make him selfish, for selfishness cannot love.

God formed man to be a vessel in which He could show forth His power and goodness.

cannot love him." Oh, friend, you have not learned the lesson that Christ wanted to teach above everything. Let a man be what he will, you

Death is more universal than life. Everyone dies, but not everyone lives.

That in real life, there are no protagonists. Or, rather, the reverse: It's nothing but protagonists. It's protagonists all the way down.

Why is it so impossible to believe: that we are as many headed as monsters, as many armed as gods, as many hearted as angels?