Quotes About Humanity

Homo homini lupus est. Man is wolf to man.

human nature" had, of course, been going on for some time. The earliest examples of "natural men" had been the American Indians. It had been they who had provided Montaigne with much of the material he had used to cast doubt on the civility and humanity of his Christian contemporaries, both Catholic and Protestant, and to suggest that, after all, "barbarian" might be nothing more than a word we use to describe what is unfamiliar to us.

Live life fully while you're here. Experience everything. Take care of yourself and your friends. Have fun, be crazy, be weird. Go out and screw up! You're going to anyway, so you might as well enjoy the process. Take the opportunity to learn from your mistakes: find the cause of your problem and eliminate it. Don't try to be perfect; just be an excellent example of being human.

Thirdly, we have to raise human beings with a philosophy of ethics. If it's Judaism, wonderful, because it has a basic ethic. If it's Christianity, it has a basic ethic. But we have to raise people with a conscience.

Archetypes are 'identical psychic structures common to all' (CW V, para. 224), which together constitute 'the archaic heritage of humanity' (CW V, para. 259).

My patients brought me so close to the reality of human life that I could not help learning essential things from them. Encounters with people of so many different kinds and on so many different psychological levels have been for me incomparably more important than fragmentary conversations with celebrities

Man is a creature inescapably, and often unhappily, divided; and the divisions within him recurrently impel the use of his imagination to make new syntheses. The creative consequences of his imaginative strivings may never make him whole; but they constitute his deepest consolations and his greatest glories.

Every war is different. Every war is the same.

If wars were fought only by the men on the ground, the men facing one another in real battle, most wars would end quickly and sensibly. Men are smart and men are animals, in that they don't want to die so simply for so little.

And everyone wants to know: Who? Why? The victims ask the hardest of all the questions: How is it possible that the person I loved so much lit no spark of humanity in you?

Oblivion is the rule and fame the exception, of humanity.

Where are the people?" resumed the little prince at last. It's a little lonely in the desert…" It is lonely when you're among people, too," said the snake.

We say nothing essential about the cathedral when we speak of its stones. We say nothing essential about Man when we seek to define him by the qualities of men.

Man is a knot into which relationships are tied.

I have no right, by anything I do or say, to demean a human being in his own eyes. What matters is not what I think of him; it is what he thinks of himself. To undermine a man's self-respect is a sin.

War is not an adventure. It is a disease. It is like typhus.

Si des critiques avaient survécu, sans doute auraient-ils reproché à l'auteur quelque chose comme un pessimisme trop caricatural et un manque de foi dans les capacités de l'humanité à se régénérer après le malheur, mais, par chance pour la réception de la pièce, les journalistes et les juges littéraires avaient, comme toute le monde ou presque, été réduits en mottes charbonneuses (Black Village, page 74)

Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one who kills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years?

Reason and justice tell me there's more love for humanity in electricity and steam than in chastity and vegetarianism.

Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he's been given. But up to now he hasn't been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild life's become extinct, the climate's ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.

if it comes to a choice between being a good soldier and a good human being -- try to be a good human being".

We stand at an immense fork in the raod. One way is the path of generosity, dignity and a respect for other races and customs; the other leads most certainly to greed, suspicion, hatered and the old, bloody course of violence and waste - and now, God help us, to the very destruction of all the struggles and triumphs of the human race on this earth. My old friends and fellow townsmen: which will it be?

Everyone has the same God; only people differ.

The world is a fine place. The only thing wrong with it is us. How little justice and humility there is in us, how poorly we understand patriotism!