Quotes About Humanity

Besoin inconscient chez l'homme de détruire ce qu'il ne peut ni soumettre ni adorer. (p.401)

Once you have fallen off the edge like all of us have, you will never stop falling. And as you fall you will hold on to other falling people. The sooner you understand that the better. This place where we live, where we made our home, is the place of falling people. Here there is baqeeqat. Arre, even we aren't real. We don't really exist

La maladie, ce n'est pas le terrorisme, c'est l'extrême injustice

He is searching for the beast that lives in him, Comrade Pillai had told them—frightened, wide-eyed children—when the ordinarily good-natured Bhima began to bay and snarl. Which beast in particular, Comrade Pillai didn't say. Searching for the Man who lives in him was perhaps what he really meant, because certainly no beast has essayed the boundless, infinitely inventive art of human hatred. No beast can match its range and power.

If there is a nuclear war, our foes will not be China or America or even each other. Our foe will be the earth herself. The very elements—the sky, the air, the land, the wind and water—will all turn against us. Their wrath will be terrible.

per la libertà che aveva rinunciato ai suoi oggi per i domani degli altri. Un uomo con il volto rigato di lacrime

You can see them from your car window when you drive home every night. Try not to look away. Try to meet their eyes.

Forse agli occhi di uno studioso di storia e conflitti umani è a questo che si sarebbe ridotto in realtà il piccolo corteo, visto in termini relativi: una fila di formiche che si allontanavano con qualche briciola caduta dalla tavola dei potenti.

I mean, it's all a matter of your heart . . . NÂZIM HIKMET

How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything.

Those eyes that stared at us for one and a half hours – they were forgiving eyes, understanding eyes. We Kashmiris do not need to speak to each other any more in order to understand each other. We do terrible things to each other, we wound and betray and kill each other, but we understand each other.

What Esthappen and Rahel witnessed that morning, though they didn't know it then, was a clinical demonstration in controlled conditions (this was not war after all, or genocide) of human nature's pursuit of ascendancy. Structure. Order. Complete monopoly. It was human history, masquerading as God's Purpose, revealing herself to an under-age audience.

Be kind to unkind people, they need it the most.

Sometimes we can offer a cure, sometimes only a salve, sometimes not even that. But whatever we can offer, our interventions, and the risks and sacrifices they entail, are justified only if they serve the larger aims of a person's life. When we forget that, the suffering we inflict can be barbaric. When we remember it the good we do can be breathtaking.

Are doctors who make mistakes villains? No, because then we all are.

At times, in medicine, you feel you are inside a colossal and impossibly complex machine whose gears will turn for you only according to their own arbitrary rhythm. The notion that human caring, the effort to do better for people, might make a difference can seem hopelessly naïve.

Tears wet my eyes. I'm a surgeon. I like solving things. But how do I solve this?

We've divided the world into us versus them—an ever-shrinking population of good people against bad ones. But it's not a dichotomy. People can be doers of good in many circumstances. And they can be doers of bad in others. It's true of all of us. We are not sufficiently described by the best thing we have ever done, nor are we sufficiently described by the worst thing we have ever done. We are all of it.

There is one difference in medicine, though: it is people we practice upon.

No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What

But in the end, I came to think, there was also something more vital and, in a certain way, poignant drawing us in.

We are not omniscient or all-powerful. Even enhanced by technology, our physical and mental powers are limited.

Then comes what still seems surreal to me. You reach in, and instead of finding a tumor or some other abnormality, as surgeons usually do when we go into someone's belly, you find five tiny wiggling toes, a knee, a whole leg. And suddenly you realize you have a new human being struggling in your hands. You almost forget the mother on the table.

Our responsibility, in medicine, is to deal with human beings as they are. People die only once. They have no experience to draw on. They need doctors and nurses who are willing to have the hard discussions and say what they have seen, who will help people prepare for what is to come--and escape a warehoused oblivion that few really want.