Quotes About Humanity

The gray light was unforgiving, and the road in was a hard, fast slide to the bottom rung of the human experience.

The crux of the matter is whether total war in its present form is justifiable, even when it serves a just purpose. Does it not have material and spiritual evil as its consequences which far exceed whatever good might result? When will our moralists give us an answer to this question?

It seems logical that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of a war against civilians.

Under many houses, people screamed for help, but no one helped; in general, survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neighbors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery.

This is one of the defining sorrows of books: that we cannot see one another.

I was picked up by a man in a hurry - a Franciscan monk who took pity on me...As we raced through the orange groves...I asked him to explain the difference between our god and theirs. His reply, "There is no difference; the difference is us.

If you think you are advancing toward unity with God or the absolute," he said, "and are not growing in love and charity toward your fellow person, you're just deluding yourself.

He who is less than just is less than man.

I'm annoyed by those who love mankind but are discourteous to people.

Humanity does not differ in any profound way; there are not essentially different species of human beings. If we could only put ourselves in the shoes of others to see how we would react, then we might become aware of the injustice of discrimination and the tragic inhumanity of every kind of prejudice.

In reality, the Us-and-Them or I-and-Thou dichotomies do not exist. There is only one universal We - one human family united by the capacity to feel compassion and to demand equal justice for all.

I spent years," he told me, "studying the phenomenon of love." "And I spend years studying the phenomenon of justice." "At base, we spend years studying the same thing.

Incarnation' does not originally mean (as it tends to today in some theologies of history, and in some kinds of Anglican today) that God took all of human nature as it was, put his seal of approval on it and thereby ratified nature as revelation. The point is just the opposite; that God broke through the borders of man's definition of what is human, and gave a new, formative definition in Jesus.

What is necessary, he explains, is an understanding that the youth are not the Other. It is being able to see your humanity reflected in them.

We stopped being perfect around the time when Eve picked the apple and started coming on to Adam. That

But for at least fifty thousand years, all humans have been connected to one another through travel, trade networks, and migration. The result is a genetically homogeneous population. As a practical matter, this means when we speak of human nature, we speak of all humans, both through the time span of fifty thousand years and across the planet. Our long-standing networks of connection mean there is no pressure to drift toward a new species, no pressure to evolve.

Human beings may be inconsistent, but human nature is true to itself

Guilty she might be. But what human being was not? There were things in her past she needn't be ashamed of, things to be proud of; she wouldn't surrender so meekly to a condemning judgment.

Remember, men. it is better to wound than to slay, since it takes time to carry an injured man to the rear and sometimes requires two of the enemy rather than one.

In the democracy of the dead all men at last are equal. There is neither rank nor station nor prerogative in the republic of the grave.

The New Testament, and to a very large extent the Old, is the soul of man. You cannot criticize it. It criticizes you.

If an inhabitant of another planet should visit the earth, he would receive, on the whole, a truer notion of human life by attending an Italian opera than he would by reading Emerson's volumes. He would learn from the Italian opera that there were two sexes; and this, after all, is probably the fact with which the education of such a stranger ought to begin.

Century after century, we have prosecuted our insane conflicts from atop their backs, resting on their sturdy necks when we grew weary, eating their flesh when we were starving, disemboweling them and crawling inside their bodies when we were freezing.

he should be remembered as the first pope in history to undertake an active defense of the Jewish people, wherever they might be found.