Quotes About Mankind

We still talk in terms of conquest," she observed. "We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe." Without hesitating, she delivered her final blow: "I think we're challenged as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.

Widmerpool had tidied himself up a little since leaving school, though there was still a kind of exotic drabness about his appearance that seemed to mark him out from the rest of mankind.

There is, perhaps, no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilized and free countries than the necessity of listening to sermons.

they equally entertained a deep-rooted contempt for that portion of mankind who thought that property could be managed and protected without the intervention of lawyers. The outside world to them was a world of pretty, laughing, ignorant children; and lawyers were the parents, guardians, pastors, and masters by whom the children should be protected from the evils incident to their childishness

You're looking at me as though I'm weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It's in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.

Variety is precious when it expresses nature more richly by developing various aspects of it; but the variety that consists in producing cripples and abortions instead of normal human beings has nothing to commend it to the lover of mankind.

Freedom is not utopia, because it is a basic aspiration; the whole history of mankind consists of struggles and efforts to creates social institutions capable of ensuring a maximum of freedom.

As far as the name goes, we may almist say that the great majority of mankind are agreed about this; for both the multitude and the persons of refinement speak of it as happiness, and conceive 'the good life' or 'doing well' to be the same thing as 'being happy.

And the avarice of mankind is insatiable; at one time two obols was pay enough; but now, when this sum has become customary, men always want more and more without end; for it is the nature of desire not to be satisfied, and most men live only for the gratification of it.

and this is a union which is formed, not of deliberate purpose, but because, in common with other animals and with plants, mankind have a natural desire to leave behind them an image of themselves)

to be learning something is the greatest of pleasures not only to the philosopher but also to the rest of mankind, however small their capacity for it; the reason of the delight in seeing the picture is that one is at the same time learning--gathering the meaning of things...

To be learning something new is ever the chief pleasure of mankind .

Good fiction is autobiography dressed in the colours of all mankind.

They would never know how lucky they had been. For a lifetime, mankind had achieved as much happiness as any race can ever know. It had been the Golden Age. But gold was also the color of sunset, of autumn: and only Karellen's ears could catch the first wailings of the winter storms.

It is a good principle in science not to believe any 'fact'---however well attested---until it fits into some accepted frame of reference. Occasionally, of course, an observation can shatter the frame and force the construction of a new one, but that is extremely rare. Galileos and Einsteins seldom appear more than once per century, which is just as well for the equanimity of mankind.

He felt like a young student again, confronted with all the art and knowledge of mankind. The experience was both exhilarating and depressing; a whole universe lay at his fingertips, but the fraction of it he could explore in an entire lifetime was so negligible that he was sometimes overwhelmed with despair.

had often been said that the only thing that could unite Mankind was a threat from space.

And history could never take from him the privilege of being the first of all mankind to gaze upon the works of an alien civilization.

Within a few days, all mankind's multitudinous messiahs had lost their divinity. Beneath the fierce and passionless light of truth, faiths that had sustained millions for twice a thousand years vanished like morning dew.

Nowhere in Rama had there been any trace of artistic expression; everything was purely functional. Perhaps the Ramans felt that they already knew the ultimate secrets of the universe, and were no longer haunted by the yearnings and aspirations that drove mankind.

Sometimes I think that it is only the monstrous conceit of mankind which makes him think that all this stage was erected for him to strut upon.

It is unholy because it is heretic. It is foul. It is abominable to need something so badly that you cannot picture living without it. It is a contradiction to the condition of mankind.

It was as though peace were a lethargy, a miasma that filled mankind with a sense of ennui, and it was only war that could stimulate man to the full exhilaration of life.

If our research leads us to a result that reduces religion to the status of a neurosis of mankind and explains it's grandiose powers in the same way as we sould neurotic obsession in our individual patients, then we may be sure we shall incur in this country the greatest resentment of the powers that be.