Quotes About Humanity

All that is human must retrograde if it does not advance.

War, in its fairest form, implies a perpetual violation of humanity and justice.

I am a person before I am anything else. I never say I am a writer. I never say I am an artist...I am a person who does those things.

Maybe I am not very human - all I ever wanted to do was to paint sunlight on the side of a house.

The average adult slave cost about 1,200 dollars in 1860, the equivalent to about 24,000 dollars today, so the 5,500 enslaved people of Augusta were worth over 6 million dollars to their owners, equal to 120 million dollars today.

And yet...somehow Sol had the vague feeling that there were certain horrors this boy would not commit. In Sol Nazerman's eyes, this was a great deal; there were few people to whom he attributed even that limitation of evil.

It shames man not to feel man's human fear, It shames man only if the fear subdue

never before has it been so easy to stay in touch with so many people electronically, but rarely has it seemed so difficult to maintain genuine human closeness.

Science, its imperfections notwithstanding, is the sword in the stone that humanity finally pulled. The question it poses, of universal and orderly materialism, is the most important that can be asked in philosophy and religion.

Human beings and their social orders are intrinsically imperfectible and fortunately so. In a constantly changing world, we need the flexibility that only imperfection provides.

It should not be thought that war, often accompanied by genocide, is a cultural artifact of a few societies. Nor has it been an aberration of history, a result of the growing pains of our species' maturation. Wars and genocide have been universal and eternal, respecting no particular time or culture.

The mind seeks but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.

If the heuristic and analytic power of science can be joined with the introspective creativity of the humanities, human existence will rise to an infinitely more productive and interesting meaning.

When the great theologian and philosopher Rabbi Hillel was challenged to explain the Torah in the time he could stand on one foot, he replied, "Do not do unto others that which is repugnant to you. All else is commentary.

Like the sunlight and the firelight that guided our birth, we need a unified humanities and science to construct a full and honest picture of what we truly are and what we can become.

HISTORY IS A bath of blood," wrote William James

We are all genetic chimeras, at once saints and sinners, champions of the truth and hypocrites – not because humanity has failed to reach some foreordained religious or ideological ideal, but because of the way our species originated across millions of years of biological evolution.

if our conception of human nature is to be altered, it must be by means of truths conforming to the canons of scientific evidence and not a new dogma however devoutly wished for.

From the freedom to explore comes the joy of learning. From knowledge acquired by personal initiative arises the desire for more knowledge. And from mastery of the novel and beautiful world awaiting every child comes self-confidence. The growth of a naturalist is like the growth of a musician or athlete: excellence for the talented, lifelong enjoyment for the rest, benefit for humanity.

Science has become the most democratic of all human endeavors. It is neither religion nor ideology. It makes no claims beyond what can be sensed in the real world. It generates knowledge in the most productive and unifying manner contrived in history, and it serves humanity without obeisance to any particular tribal deity.

The origin of modern humanity was a stroke of luck—good for our species for a while, bad for most of the rest of life forever. All

except for behaving like apes much of the time and suffering genetically limited life spans, we are godlike.

The ongoing mass extinction of species, and with it the extinction of genes and ecosystems, ranks with pandemics, world war, and climate change as among the deadliest threats that humanity has imposed on itself.

A cheerful faith in human destiny dismisses the rest of life through successive denials.