Quotes About Humanity

and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse–hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.

The aim of the joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does.

men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.

The food crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in the hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.

The birds sang, the proles sang. the Party did not sing. All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan — everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals.

The mere words "Socialism" and "Communism" draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, "Nature Cure" quack, pacifist, and feminist in England. . . . The food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.

Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.

it is perhaps one's own fault, to see oneself drifting, rotting, in dishonour and horrible futility, and all the while knowing that somewhere within one there is the possibility of a decent human being.

A not-too-distant explosion shakes the house, the windows rattle in their sockets, and in the next room the class of 1964 wakes up and lets out a yell or two. Each time this happens I find myself thinking, Is it possible that human beings can continue with this lunacy very much longer? You know the answer, of course.

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put if off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.

The great mass of human beings are not acutely selfish. After the age of about thirty they abandon individual ambition—in many cases, indeed, they almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all—and live chiefly for others, or are simply smothered under drudgery.

You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.

Na bojnom polju, u mu?ilištu, na brodu koji tone, razlozi zbog kojih se boriš uvijek se zaborave jer se tijelo nadimlje sve dok ne ispuni cijeli tvoj svemir, pa ?ak i onda kad te nije paralizirao strah ili ne vrištiš od boli, život je od trenutka do trenutka, samo borba protiv gladi ili hladno?e ili sna, protiv pokvarena želuca ili zuba koji boli.

even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp.

That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness and for the bulk of mankind happiness was better.

It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same—everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same—people

Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings.

The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.

Mientras los humanos sigan siendo humanos, la vida y la muerte seran la misma cosa

this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.