Quotes About Humanity

This is perhaps the most beautiful time in human history; it is really pregnant with all kinds of creative possibilities made possible by science and technology which now constitute the slave of man - if man is not enslaved by it.

Andre Royo: I think that's the real beauty that you find in every human being that scares you. When a human being stops trying, when we don't give a fuck, when we say, "Ah, fuck it. I don't care," once that aspect comes into the human psyche, humanity is lost. You got to want to try. Whether you know you're pushing that rock up a hill or you're going to bang your head against a brick wall, the idea to not try cannot seep into our society. We got to try. (275)

Nowhere in the Constitution of the United States or the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights or the Emancipation Proclamation, the Old Testament or the New Testament, do you find the words 'economy' or 'efficiency.' Not that these two words are unimportant. But you discover other words like honesty, integrity, fairness, liberty, justice, love.… Words which describe what a government of human beings ought to be.

People don't expect too much from literature. They just want to know they're not alone with being confused.

O, you heavenly charmers, What things you make of us! For what we lack We laugh, for what we have are sorry, still Are children in some kind. Let us be thankful For that which is, and with you leave dispute That are above our question. Let's go off, And bear us like the time.

People who truly love us can be divided into two categories: those who understand us, and those who forgive us our worst sins. Rarely do you find someone capable of both.

This glorious Person came down from heaven to be 'the Light of the world,' that by him the beauty of the Deity might shine forth, in the brightest and fullest manner, to the children of men.

There are sufficient and suitable accommodations for all the different sorts of persons that are in the world: for great and small, for high and low, rich and poor, wise and unwise, bond and free, persons of all nations and all conditions and circumstances, for those that have been great sinners as well as for moral livers; for weak saints and those that are babes in Christ as well as for those that are stronger and more grown in grace.

It's other people make be bad, love,' I said with conviction. 'Like you, I start out holy every single morning.

If torture is permitted, it's hard to imagine what isn't.

No animal could ever be so cruel as a man, so artfully, so artistically cruel.')

When David wasn't ruling, he would ponder all the various forms of laughter there could be. So far, he had only categorized four: laughter at your own expense, laughter at the expense of others, laughter at the human predicament, and laughter at small animals falling off tables.

I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, not to hate them, but to understand them.

It would be nice to believe that we humans were designed to love everyone unconditionally. Nice, but rather unlikely from an evolutionary perspective. Parochial love—love within groups—amplified by similarity, a sense of shared fate, and the suppression of free riders, may be the most we can accomplish.

If we want to create welcoming, inclusive communities, we should be doing everything we can to turn down the tribalism [us-versus-them thinking] and turn up the sense of common humanity.

We have paid a price for our inclusiveness, but but we have bought ourselves a more humane society, with greater opportunity for racial minorities, women, gay people, the handicapped, and others - that is, for most people. And even if some people think the price was too steep, we can't go back, either to a pre-consumer society or to ethnically homogeneous enclaves. All we can do is search for ways that we might reduce our anomie without excluding large classes of people.

If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.23

We humans have a dual nature—we are selfish primates who long to be a part of something larger and nobler than ourselves. We are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee.93 If you take that claim metaphorically, then the groupish and hivish things that people do will make a lot more sense. It's almost as though there's a switch in our heads that activates our hivish potential when conditions are just right.

The dean seemed to believe that if students talked about their suffering, it would harm their friends. It is an illustration of the Untruth of Fragility (What doesn't kill you makes you weaker) trumping common sense and basic humanity.

Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder. Leon Cass

Conservatives, in contrast, are more parochial—concerned about their groups, rather than all of humanity.

moral monism—the attempt to ground all of morality on a single principle—leads to societies that are unsatisfying to most people and at high risk of becoming inhumane because they ignore so many other moral principles

Indeed, in this age in which everything is held to be permissible so long as it is freely done, in which our given human nature no longer commands respect, in which our bodies are regarded as mere instruments of our autonomous rational wills, repugnance may be the only voice left that speaks up to defend the central core of our humanity. Shallow are the souls that have forgotten how to shudder.48

It seems to take more than just a high level of social intelligence to get reciprocal altruism going. It takes the sort of gossiping, punitive, moralistic community that emerged only when language and weaponry made it possible for early humans to take down bullies and then keep them down with a shared moral matrix.43