Quotes About Humanity

Around the world his pity flies, its wingspan as wide as an albatross's.

The problem in the world is that we aren't kind to one another. It's kindness and human spirit that drives us. We have one another. That's all we have. We must celebrate them. Remember that. I don't care who you love, but if you love someone…if you love someone, you have to love them every day. You have to choose them every day.

You are seeing suffering, Robert used to say when confronted with a horrible person. You are seeing someone in pain.

the truth of existence has not quite pierced his soul: That in real life, there are no protagonists. Or, rather, the reverse: It's nothing but protagonists. It's protagonists all the way down.

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

There's always somebody who wants to confiscate our humanity. And there are always stories that restore it

Despite every advancement, language remains the defining nexus of our humanity; it is where our knowledge and hope lie. It is the precondition of human tenderness, mightier than the sword but also infinitely more subtle and ultimately more urgent.

A veces me pregunto cómo se las arreglan todos aquellos que no escriben, componen o pintan para liberarse de la locura, la melancolía y el miedo al pánico inherente a la condición humana».

Thinking seems to me less persuasive evidence of being than does choosing. Not in our chemistry and not in circumstance does our humanity lie, but in our will to work with the technologies available to us through the era in which we live, through our own character, through our circumstances and age.

Swiat nie bylby taki zly, gdyby ludzie nie chcieli go naprawiac.

When we try to establish justice apart from worship of the true God, at best we will, as Jayakumar reminded me, simply replace one set of god players with another. What will never be addressed by these thin, secular conceptions of justice is the heart of the biblical understanding of justice: the restoration of the human capacity to bear the image in all its fullness.

Many evangelical tellings of the biblical story, especially those designed to deliver an evangelistic message, effectively began with Genesis 3: the fall of humanity. And they ended with Revelation 20: the casting of Satan and all his works into the lake of fire. Understood this way, the gospel runs an abbreviated gamut from original sin to final judgment. The original good creation and the glorious new creation are afterthoughts when they are mentioned at all.

Like the firefly trying to match the brilliance of the stars, I had let the limits of my knowledge rule me. Man cannot change the movement of the planets with the sweep of his hands. Every man is guided by a force that is individual and unfathomable. Man can heal, but a little. Man can aid self-discovery, but only a little. No man is the master of another man's destiny. For man is no God. And fireflies are not stars.

Do you recognize suffering? -I hope I do. -Injustice? -Again, I hope I would. -Then you are a political man.

I think the true ascent of man, the moment when humans divided irrevobably from apes and other fellow creatures, occurred with the birth of the first distinct soul. And much happiness ensued.

The theories of the French revolutionaries, as summarized by historian Roger Hancock, were founded on respect for no humanity except that which they proposed to create. In order to liberate mankind from tradition, the revolutionaries were ready to make him altogether the creature of a new society, to reconstruct his very humanity to meet the demands of the general will.

I think of us humans as a family of amnesia victims who kept making up stories about our past until we found a means to reconstruct it—the sciences.

If you could change one thing about this world, what would it be?" Mrs. Peabody asked her. "It would be wars," Myriah replied seriously. "I would stop them. I would say to the people who were making the wars, 'Now you stop that. You settle this problem yourselves like grown-ups. Our children want peace.' That's what I'd change.

Despite the beauty of our world and the scope of human accomplishment, it is hard not to worry that the forces of chaos will triumph—not merely in the end but in every moment.

Our common humanity is reason enough to protect our fellow human beings from coming to harm.

Our world is dangerously riven by religious doctrines that all educated people should condemn, and yet there is more to understanding the human condition than science and secular culture generally admit.

If pain were all that mattered, it would be as important to protect the rabbits from the foxes as to protect the Jews from the Nazis."16

Once you stop swaddling the reality of the world's suffering in religious fantasies, you will feel in your bones just how precious life is—and, indeed, how unfortunate it is that millions of human beings suffer the most harrowing abridgements of their happiness for no good reason at all.

My view is that no idea is above scrutiny, and no people are beneath dignity.