Quotes About Humanity

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.

A 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.' He paused for a long moment; then he smiled slightly. 'The scholar should not be asked to destroy what he has signed his life to build.

Stoner tells of the conflicts, defeats and victories of the human race that pass unrecorded by history, and reclaims the significance of an individual life.

Una guerra non solo uccide qualche migliaio, o qualche centinaio di migliaia di giovani. Uccide anche qualcosa dentro le persone, qualcosa che non si può più recuperare. E quando una persona attraversa molte guerre, ben presto si riduce come un bruto, come quella stessa creatura che noi - lei e io, e tutti quelli come noi - abbiamo sollevato dal fango.

What you are as a person is far more important that what you are as a basketball player.

You can't live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.

You can't live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.

You can't live a perfect day until you do something for someone who will never be able to repay you.

I'm not romancing. I'm talking about the inevitable time when, unless we do something to stop it, men will be hunting men through the ruins, for food. We're letting it drift towards that, with an evil irresponsibility, because with our ordinary short lives we shan't be here to see it. Does our generation care about the misery it is bequeathing? Not it. "That's their worry," we say. "Damn our children's children; we're all right.

Odd, don't you think? We could drown a litter of kittens that is no sort of threat to us – but these creatures we shall carefully rear.

A world where a man is able to hunt his fellow man! How could he be called a man?

The idea of completed man is the supreme vanity

I don't think it had ever occurred to me that man's supremacy is not primarily due to his brain, as most of the books would have one think. It is due to the brain's capacity to make use of the information conveyed to it by a narrow band of visible light rays. His civilization, all that he had achieved or might achieve, hung upon his ability to perceive that range of vibrations from red to violet. Without that, he was lost.

I'm just telling you, Tommy. He wasn't supposed to go and do those things in the war that he had to do. People aren't supposed to murder people. And he did, and he did awful things, and awful things happened to him, and he couldn't live inside himself, Tommy. That's what I'm trying to say. Other men could do it, but he couldn't, it ruined him, and—

Tommy told Pete about what his brother had seen in the war, the women who had walked through the camps, how some had wept and others had looked furious and would not be made to feel bad. "And so there's a struggle, or a contest, I guess you could say, all the time, it seems to me. And remorse, well, to be able to show remorse—to be able to be sorry about what we've done that's hurt other people—that keeps us human.

A certain indefinable humanness softens his eyes and tones, and seems to be creeping into everything that he says.

It is bad enough that people are dying of AIDS, but no one should die of ignorance.

It is dangerous to think people human, who once have been divine.

Sabes?, si no alientas de entrada a las personas, aunque sea de vez en cuando, se mueren de tristeza o se transforman en Hitler

So powerful, in fact, is simple string in taming the world to human will and ingenuity that I suspect it to be the unseen weapon that allowed the human race to conquer the earth, that enabled us to move out into every econiche on the globe during the Upper Paleolithic. We could call it the String Revolution.

People are complicated. There is so much more to everybody than you realise.

How can you grow to love a handful of strangers so fiercely just because you have to sleep on the same couple of wooden planks with them, when half the time you were there you wanted to strangle them, and all you ever talked about is death and imaginary strawberries?

So many gods, so many creeds, So many paths that wind and wind, While just the art of being kind Is all the sad world needs.

In time the earth will be inhabited by almost god-like beings who shall analyze and discuss the remnants of humanity as we now discuss the chimpanzee.