Quotes About Humanity

In 1942, somebody came back to our village from Treblinka. His name was Spivak, he escaped by hiding in a wagon full of clothing. He described what was going on there, and said he got crazy from what he had seen. We didn't believe him, we didn't believe in the crematoria. We thought he was a madman telling an unbelievable tale. How could such a thing be happening in our world, our modern world?

There was one pharmacist in town, a Polish man. He was a friend of my father. I risked my life to go to him for medicine. Two, three times a week, I took off my armband and went. If the Germans would have seen me they would have shot me. I told the pharmacist I couldn't pay, I had no money. He said, "Miriam, take it and go.

La civilización no me impresionó. En todas partes la mejor aportación del hombre a la creación me parecía tan lamentablemente insuficiente como las palabras que tengo para describirla.

Any time while I was a slave, if one minute's freedom had been offered to me, and I had been told that I must die at the end of that minute, I would have taken it just to stand one minute on God's earth a free woman.

I met an old lady once, almost a hundred years old, and she told me, 'There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who's in charge?

In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.

I don't hate humanity and I'm not interested in people who do. Although, it's funny, actually, some of my favorite writers really do. Like Martin Amis. My dirty secret. 'London Fields' is one of my favorite books ever. And it's indefensible! But he's so funny... I forgive him everything.

Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots.

In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.

I met an old lady once, almost a hundred years old, and she told me, 'There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who's in charge?

The tragic capacity of the human race for going off course was a little balanced by the integrity of the animals who were always obedient to the law of their being. We were meant to love like that, thought Mary, simply because that's our law and we were told to obey it.

Unlike Job's comforters he believed there was a supreme goodness that could renew his own soul beyond this wasting sorrow of human life and death.

Marguerite was not so sure. What did human beings know about anything? Their own existence was still a mystery to them, and of the existences beyond their own they knew about as much as field mice know of the world above the heads of the bending ears of corn.

The Abbé was no believer in too much intimacy. Human beings, precariously making their souls, could not press in too closely upon each other without damage, he thought. The instinct for fusion was one of those immortal longings whose complete satisfaction was not for this life.

He saw now that [compassion] was the very first necessity, always and everywhere, and should flow between all men, always and everywhere. Men lived with their nearest and dearest and knew little of them, and strangers passing by in the street were as impersonal as trees walking, and all the while there was this deep affinity, for all men suffered.

The living being is only a species of the dead, and a very rare species at that.

Charity felt rather snoozy after the long sermon, and she was really very grateful when Reverend Meeps offered her a cup of tea. Church was not so bad when the minister remembered you were only human.

He always -- or always tried -- to do things from larger principles, not out of what he felt about people, or any particular people, but what he thought people ought to feel about -- humanity. He wasn't really interested in people singly or personally.

He said, 'Don't mind what happened to me. Don't be angry. I'm a frail creature with certain crude reflexes.

Surely it's better to be human and live with grief, than outgrow your humanity and learn to raise the dead too late to raise your own.

Look,' Taryn said. 'I'm going to try this one more time. It's like that thing in Star Trek. The Starfleet regulation that says the doctor can relieve the captain of his duties. The writers probably got it from the real-life navy. Anyway, human beings are the captain. The doctor is the trees and the grasses and the marshes, and the beasts of the field and birds of the air. We humans were declared unfit for command.

Human activity has transformed between a third and a half of the land surface of the planet. • Most of the world's major rivers have been dammed or diverted. • Fertilizer plants produce more nitrogen than is fixed naturally by all terrestrial ecosystems. • Fisheries remove more than a third of the primary production of the oceans' coastal waters. • Humans use more than half of the world's readily accessible fresh water runoff.

It demonstrates, he has written, that humans "are capable of driving virtually any large mammal species extinct, even though they are also capable of going to great lengths to guarantee that they do not.

Meanwhile, an even stranger and more radical transformation is under way. Having discovered subterranean reserves of energy, humans begin to change the composition of the atmosphere.