Quotes About Humanity

And one day I got it. I lifted my head from the child's chest I was listening to and realized, with a shock of relief: whatever is coming, comes. That's what holds it all together. We are all of us here in the mess. There's no way around it. And all that I am in the face of it is a single voice and a pair of hands...Anonymous but necessary. Vital.

Nothing is inevitable; everything is tangential, particular—human.

You're just like the rest, only kind.

Wars, plagues, names upon tombs tell us only what happened. But history lies in the cracks between

Not a war. Two wars, which unleashed two genocides, mass starvation in Europe, and a pandemic of proportions unseen since the bubonic plague; two wars that debased humanity as no events before them ever had. And a global economic collapse. That's what it took. That was the price the world paid to break the grip of the hydra.

Consider the implications. Last time humanity was locked onto this course, it led to the collapse of the global economy and two world wars—and genocide, starvation, plague, and the detonation of nuclear bombs that wiped some 200,000 human beings off the earth and gave us the power to end our species. What manner of calamity lies ahead of us now?

I know nothing of man's rights, or woman's rights; human rights are all that I recognise.

People were made up of shit and piss and phlegm and bits and pieces of experience.

We made love, and then she threw up.

Once you have perceived that life is very cruel, the only response is to live with as much humanity, humour and freedom as you can.

I have seen the best of you, and the worst of you, and I choose both.

Such a little thing really, a kiss... most people don't give it a moment's consideration. They kiss on meeting, they kiss on parting, that simple touching of flesh is taken entirely for granted as a basic human right.

Whatever you're feeling, billions already have. Feel for them.

I read obituaries every day to learn what sorts of lives are available to us, to see an entire life compressed into a few column inches, to fit the whole story in my eye at once.

Talking to Daniel is like watching the news. You come away thinking the world is ending. It distorts your view of reality, which is that every day, all over the world, people are doing good things for other people and those things are never made public.

Man has done his best to ruin the world he lives in.

the theater is one of the few places left in the bright and noisy world where we sit in the quiet dark together, to be awake.

I wonder how it is that we are all connected despite our tremendous differences.

Being insulted by your child and loving them anyway is the human condition.

Any pain that human beings can create, human beings can transcend.

As Will Burton says, "pain has a story, a narrative," and knowing it reveals human complexity which is an invitation to decency. When we try to understand, we discover causes, origins, and consequences about each other and our selves.

I am grateful to the men and women who create books, and I forgive the men and women who make books necessary." — VOICE AT QUAKER MEETING, Peterborough New Hampshire

Good fiction often gives us characters in extremity, which ironically gives us a clearer mirror in which to see ourselves.

We are flawed creatures, all of us. Some of us think that means we should fix our flaws. But get rid of my flaws and there would be no one left.