Quotes About Humanity

At Rheims, the serfs and farmers and peasants filled gigantic spaces with the most incredible stained-glass windows in the world, but they never bothered to sign even one of them. No one knows who designed or made them, because our modern form of institutional boasting did not yet exist as a corruption of communitarian feeling. After all these centuries, they still announce what being human really means.

School takes our children away from any possibility of an active role in community life—in fact, it destroys communities by relegating the training of children to the hands of certified experts—and by doing so it ensures our children cannot grow up fully human. Aristotle taught that without a fully active role in community life one could not hope to become a healthy human being. Surely he was right.

Human beings are tool-making animals. Since the prehistoric era, we have created and used a wide variety of objects. But now a significant change is about to occur. In the near future, we will simply become another object that can be monitored, tracked and controlled within a vast machine.

I like hotels where you can check in at an electronic kiosk and never have to speak to a desk clerk. I dislike a gold-wrapped chocolate on my pillow, a turned-down sheet, a bathroom towel folded so that it resembles a flower, or any other "personal touch" that gives humans the illusion that they are surrounded by a friendly universe. In reality, the universe is neutral about our existence. Only dogs care.

Religious feeling is as much a verity as any other part of human consciousness; and against it, on the subjective side, the waves of science beat in vain.

The world keeps ending but new people too dumb to know it keep showing up as if the fun's just started.

Children are not a zoo of entertainingly exotic creatures, but an array of mirrors in which the human predicament leaps out at us.

We all love after-the-bomb stories. If we didn't, why would there be so many of them? There's something attractive about all those people being gone, about wandering in a depopulated world, scrounging cans of Campbell's pork and beans, defending one's family from marauders. But some secret part of us thinks it would be good to survive. All those other folks will die. That's what after-the-bomb stories are all about.

But I don't believe in heroes anymore. I just believe in people coping with their lives as best they can. You do what you have to do, and in some ways you have no more choice about it than a rock has about falling from a high place.

Vatican II thus became, I repeat, a meeting in which the church explored and articulated anew its identity, recalled and developed its most precious values, and proclaimed to the world its sublime vision for humanity.

The human race is at war. Our biggest enemy, pure and simple, is ignorance.

We've been a universal power for so long, I struggle to accept a reality where we are not. Humanity lost a lot more than a planet and a bunch of ships. We lost our standing, our reputation, our strength in the eyes of the others.

L'humain, comme l'épice, ne se révèle que broyé

Jesus' passion shows us up for what we are. It's the hour of the world's judgment, because it is the hour when God lets the world have its own way.

We are not just humans learning to become buddhas, but also buddhas waking up in human form, learning to become fully human.

That execrable sum of all villainies, commonly called the Slave Trade.

Do you not know that God entrusted you with that money (all above what buys necessities for your families) to feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, to help the stranger, the widow, the fatherless; and, indeed, as far as it will go, to relieve the wants of all mankind? How can you, how dare you, defraud the Lord, by applying it to any other purpose?

Do not impute to money the faults of human nature.

Although every man necessarily believes that every particular opinion which he holds is true (for to believe any opinion is not true, is the same thing as not to hold it); yet can no man be assured that all his own opinions, taken together, are true. Nay, every thinking man is assured they are not, to be ignorant of many things, and to mistake in some, is the necessary condition of humanity.

He said slowly, "You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do.

Todos somos unos pobres diablos, y todos tenemos frio

För den mänskliga rasen finns krig och nederlag och segrar som inte är militära och som inte nedtecknats i historien annaler. Kom ihåg det medan ni försöker besluta vad ni ska göra.

pag.36 You must remeber what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remeber that while tou're trying to decide what to do.

war doesn't merely kill off a few thousand or a few hundred thousand young men. It kills off something in a people that can never be brought back. And if a people goes through enough wars, pretty soon all that's left is the brute, the creature that we—you and I and others like us—have brought up from the slime.