Quotes About Humanity

The line between immediate need and breaking the law is blurry at the best of times. And I'm not talking about the laws of states or nations. I'm talking about the laws of basic humanity.

He deplored the victims as much as their murderer but most of all deplored the hours they all spent crowding his head; his job, he felt, was merely to punctuate a sentence he wished he'd never read. "From my earliest childhood," he says, "it was always my goal to live in a state of astonishment. But this was the wrong kind of astonishment. This was astonishment at humanity's capacity for evil, depravity, for greed, for apathy. It was too much for me. I wanted to be amazed by something greater.

What I can tell you is what I learned from Jeff, and that is this: If you watch the strange, the other, the bizarre long enough, if you really see these people, you will find familiar pieces of yourself in their experiences. Empathy may be our only hope. I found in Jeff not just something familiar but also a better way to live.

On the surface, these stories of correction might seem different, but really, at their core, they are all the same. To be abnormal is to be delegitimized as a full human being, and to be made normal through remediation and intervention hurts. When a human being is pathologized, they become less than human, and then we humans do terrible things.

We are all only temporarily able bodies and minds. Statistically, what have been labeled mental and physical "abnormalities" or disabilities are essential to the human condition, are in fact the human condition.

As any psychiatrist will tell you, it is a fact of life, a psychological home truth, that every human being from Mother Teresa to Jack the Ripper operates from the same basic needs, using the same basic defenses, and accessing the same basic pool of emotions as every other human being. Deep down below the surface, we all want to be safe, we all want to be loved, and we all want to be respected. (15)

For a few minutes of every day, every man becomes a genius. This is the tragedy of life.

They was just starving people is all. I fed them. Talked to them. Listened. That ain't hoodoo. Just plain sense. The magic weren't in the food. It was in the seeing.

I was not comparing my forty-year-old self to my twenty-year-old self, as the twenty-year-old version of me had assumed I would. I was comparing myself to other fortysomethings in my peer group, many of whom also had sustained relationships (often longer), accumulated wealth (often more), and achieved professional status (often higher). True, I was better off than most of humanity, but most of humanity was not my comparison group.

Daily we should take account and ask: What have I done today to alleviate the anguish, to mitigate the evil, to prevent humiliation."15 Tellingly,

The time is always right to do what is right. Now is the time to realize the American dream. Now is the time to transform the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man into a glowing daybreak of justice and freedom." Such

Since Hiroshima and the Holocaust, science no longer holds its pristine place as the highest moral authority. Instead, that role is taken by human rights. It follows that any assault on Jewish life - on Jews or Judaism or the Jewish state - must be cast in the language of human rights.

Our inclination to act well towards others, whatever its source, tends to be confined to those with whom we share a common identity. The Greeks, the world's first philosophers and scientists, regarded anyone who was not Greek as a barbarian – a word derived from the sound of a sheep bleating. Our radius of moral concern has limits. The group may be small or large, but in practice as opposed to theory, we tend to see those not like us as less than fully human.

If we want God to listen to us, we have to be prepared to listen to Him. And if we learn to listen to Him, then we eventually learn to listen to our fellow humans: the silent cry of the lonely, the poor, the weak, the vulnerable, the people in existential pain.

A civilisation that had space for science but not religion might achieve technological prowess. But it would not respect people in their specificity and particularity. It would quickly become inhuman and inhumane. Think of the French Revolution, Stalinist Russia and Communist China, and you need no further proof.

We shed a tear because, for a moment, we allow ourselves to think of the victims of our victories, the pain of the other side, who were enslaving us, but they were still human and they were still suffering. It's when you can feel your opponent's pain that you're beginning the path that leads to reconciliation.

A creed that tells us that we are no more than selfish genes, with nothing in principle to separate us from the animals, in a society whose strongest motivators are money and success, in a universe that came into existence for no reason whatsoever and for no reason will one day cease to be, will never speak as strongly to the human spirit as one that tells us we are in the image and likeness of God in a universe he created in love.

God] gave us only over beast, fish, fowl, Dominion absolute; that right we hold By his donation; but man over men He made not lord; such title to himself Reserving, human left from human free.

Narrative teaches us the complexity of the moral life and the light-and-shade to be found in any human personality. Without this, self-righteousness can destroy the very perceptions and nuances, the tolerance and generosity of spirit on which society depends.

Homo sapiens, discovering God singular and alone, discovered the human being singular and alone. There is no greater dignity than that

When a human being makes many coins in a single mint, they all come out the same. God makes every human being in the same image, His image, yet they all emerge different.

The home God makes for humanity is counterbalanced by the home humanity makes for God.

A humanitarian as opposed to a group ethic requires the most difficult of all imaginative exercises: role reversal – putting yourself in the place of those you despise, or pity, or simply do not understand. Not only do most religions not do this.

Within us is the breath of God. Around us is the presence of God. Near us is the home we build for God. Ahead of us is the task set by God: to be His agents of justice and compassion. Never has a nobler account been given of the human condition, and it challenges us still.