humanity Quotes

“It was the time to hear things and talk. These sitters had been tongueless, earless, eyeless conveniences all day long. Mules and other brutes had occupied their skins. But now, the sun and the bossman were gone, so the skins felt powerful and human. They became lords of sounds and lesser things. They passed nations through their mouths. They sat in judgment.”

“He spoke very well about the decency and comradeship natural to animals. ‘Animals don’t behave like men,’ he said. ‘If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill they kill. But they don’t sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures’ lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.‘”

“This is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous.”

“How much is physical, how much in the mind? How much accident and how much fate? Love simply is where it is.”

“The souls were wrong to be here. My humans deserved their world. I could not give it back to them, but I could give them this.”

“How can I not trust another human completely? We’re family—both part of the brotherhood of extinction.”

“’The subjects will eventually recall and understand the purpose of the hard things we have done and plan to do to them. The mission of WICKED is to serve and preserve humanity, no matter the cost. We are, indeed, ‘good’”

“This self-respect and sense of self-worth, the innermost armament of the soul, lies at the heart of humanness.”

“My heart beats fast: this is the aim, the great, the sole aim, that I have thought of in the trenches; that I have looked for as the only possibility of existence after this annihilation of all human feeling.”

“Sometimes I lose faith in human nature for a time; I am assailed by doubt.”

“They won’t be human experiences afterward. You don’t get a second chance at humanity, Bella.”

“We are all broken by something. We have all hurt someone and have been hurt. We all share the condition of brokenness, even if our brokenness is not equivalent […] Our shared vulnerability and imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion. We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, foreswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.”

“You can’t understand most of the important things from a distance, Bryan. You have to get close.”

“What our healthy feeling of shame does is let us know that we are limited. It tells us that to be human is to be limited.”

“borders are man-made they only divide us physically don’t let them make us turn on each other -we are not enemies”

“But compassion is a deeper thing that waits beyond the tension of choosing sides. Compassion, in practice, does not require us to give up the truth of what we feel or the truth of our reality. Nor does it allow us to minimize the humanity of those who hurt us. Rather, we are asked to know ourselves enough that we can stay open to the truth of others, even when their truth or their inability to live up to their truth has hurt us.”

“After learning , please be realistic. Give yourself a permission to keep making mistakes. We must also give ourselves the gift of understanding that we can’t remember everything we learned at once.”

“The clock is a conspiracy & a crime against humanity and I would not own one except I miss appointments without it.”

“Have you ever wondered what a human life is worth? That morning, my brother’s was worth a pocket watch.”

“Outwardly: dumbly, I shamble about, a thing that could never have been known as human, a thing whose shape is so alien a travesty that humanity becomes more obscene for the vague resemblance.”

“...all human situations are painful because they are distractions from the true source of bliss and abiding happiness within the heart.”

“She tore off one garment and clothed him with it. With a second garment she clothed herself.”

The better organized the state, the duller its humanity.

“What had human beings become? Did war make us evil or just activate an evil already lurking within us?”

“Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?”

“I really am only one infinitely small part of an aching humanity.”

“No…I should have listened to you. That’s all human beings are! Just blind people.”

“Every child born into the world is nature’s attempt to make a perfect human being.”

“True generosity lies in striving so that these hands – whether of individuals or entire peoples – need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world. This lesson and this apprenticeship must come, however, from the oppressed themselves and from those who are truly solidary with them.”

“The oppressed must not, in seeking to regain their humanity… become in turn oppressors of the oppressors, but rather restorers in the humanity of both.”

“The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity.”

“The particularity of our problems can be made bearable only through the recognition of our universal humanity. We suffer uniquely, but we survive the same way.”

“If a man be without the virtues proper to humanity, what has he to do with the rites of propriety? If a man be without the virtues proper to humanity, what has he to do with music?”

“Only androids show up with false memory systems; it’s been found ineffective in humans.”

“I change into the clothes he brought me. A pair of khakis, a white T-shirt, some slippers. They’re warm and soft and they feel good. I almost feel human.”

“This was evil’s hour: we could not run from it. Perhaps only when human effort had done its best and failed, would God’s power alone be free to work.”

“People are drawn deeper into tragedy not by their defects but by their virtues.”

“Sometimes, when people get treated as less than human, the best way to help them feel better is to simply treat them as human. Not as victims. Just you as you.”

“Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that restless energy, that with us is strength, would become weakness.”

“Humanity had been strong, energetic, and intelligent, and had used all its abundant vitality to alter the conditions under which it lived. And now came the reaction of the altered conditions.”

“The particularity of our problems can be made bearable only through the recognition of our universal humanity. We suffer uniquely, but we survive the same way.”

“One cannot bring children into a world like this. One cannot perpetuate suffering, or increase the breed of these lustful animals, who have no lasting emotions, but only whims and vanities, eddying them now this way, now that.”

“But even the worst decisions we make don’t necessarily remove us from the circle of humanity.”

“Humanity yearns so desperately to equal God’s great creativity. In some creations, how we shine: music, dance, storyweaving, wine.”

“Courage, love, friendship, compassion, and empathy lift us above the simple beasts and define humanity.”

“We don’t care about assigning blame for the human condition, we just want to cure it.”

“But really, all we want, and I speak for the entire human race here, is contact. Someone to let us know that we aren’t alone. That the world isn’t a dream and you and I really are happening at the same time, even if it’s not in the same place. That this is real. You’re really there. I’m really here. We’re real. This is real.”

“For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.”

“What matters today, the issue which blocks the horizon, is the need for a redistribution of wealth. Humanity will have to address this question, no matter how devastating the consequences may be.”

“If I am the last one, then I am humanity. And if this is humanity’s last war, then I am the battlefield.”

“If anything could dissipate my love to humanity, it would be ingratitude. In short, I am a hired servant, I expect my payment at once—that is, praise, and the repayment of love with love. Otherwise I am incapable of loving any one.”

“He said patients came first, prisoners second, and students third, but this didn’t leave out much of humanity.”

“The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.”

“Humanity will find in itself the power to live for virtue even without believing in immortality. It will find it in love for freedom, for equality, for fraternity.”

“I’ve had enough of someone else’s propaganda.…I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”

“Condemn the fault and not the actor of it?”

″...in respect of riches, no citizen shall ever be wealthy enough to buy another, and none poor enough to be forced to sell himself.”

“A man who cannot choose ceases to be a man.”

“To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights [and duties] of humanity.”

“For ... years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible.”

“She told me about the scales on butterflies, and the way animals lived in ducts, sometimes whole herds. People would hear the stampeding through their walls. There were new kinds of fungus, she said, that were making jungles where the cables ran. There were slugs so big a toddler could ride them sidesaddle. ‘The natural world is so adaptable,’ she said. ‘So adaptable you wonder what’s natural.‘”

“Nature, in these respects, may safely be left to herself; let women only acquire knowledge and humanity, and love will teach them modesty.”

“Medea: I had rather stand my ground three times among the shields than face a childbirth once.”

“Medea: Of all creatures that can feel and think, we women are the worst treated things alive.”

“Medea: we (women) bid the highest price in dowries just to buy some man to be dictator of our bodies… How that compounds the wrong!”

“Medea: Divorce is a disgrace (at least for women), to repudiate the man, not possible.”

“Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any time before, and men–each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on part of nature–are therefore shot wholesale nowadays.”

“Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space . . . I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification.”

“You know that we were born of sacrifice, and that we have had to live by a different truth and that that truth is good and the vision of manhood it stands for is more human, more desirable, more real.”

“In the long war which humanity wages with the elements of nature the main body of the army has won its victory.”

“Since then I have come to understand the truth of all the religions of the world: They struggle with the evil inside a human being (inside every human being). It is impossible to expel evil from the world in its entirety, but it is possible to constrict it within each person.”

“Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.”

Morpurgo here spins a yarn which gently captures the adventurous elements one would expect from a desert-island tale, but the real strength lies in the poignant and subtle observations of friendship, trust and, ultimately, humanity.

“Before he had come to the town he had known about nothing but death: here he had learnt to live, to decide things for himself…he had learnt the sound of laughter that was free from cruelty; he had learnt the meaning of beauty”

“The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular.”

“Estrangement from the collective consciousness of humanity’s wisdom is just one more thing that sets scythes apart from others.”

″‘Never lose your humanity,’ Scythe Faraday had told him, ‘or you’ll be nothing more than a killing machine.‘”

“Humanity is innocent; humanity is guilty, and both states are undeniably true.”

“We worship perfection because we can’t have it; if we had it, we would reject it. Perfection is inhuman, because humanity is imperfect.”

“The clock is a conspiracy & a crime against humanity and I would not own one except I miss appointments without it.”

“In every important way we are such secrets from each other, and I do believe that there is a separate language in each of us, also a separate aesthetics and a separate jurisprudence.”

“Humanity can be roughly divided into three sorts of people- those who find comfort in literature, those who find comfort in personal adornment, and those who find comfort in food; and Miss Heliotrope, Maria, and Wiggins were typical representatives of their own sort of people.”

“Such moments come rarely in any life, but when they do come they are inexpressibly wonderful - as if the finite were for a second infinity - as if humanity were for a space uplifted into divinity - as if all ugliness had vanished, leaving only flawless beauty.”

“I will do what I can in the interests of humanity.”

“It was easy to see that, within a few hundred thousands years, Humanity could start over again with these titanic primitives.”

“Sooner or later, human intelligence returned to the cosmos. But except from their shared ancestry, these new people had nothing in common with ‘people’ of today, or even each other.”

I long to go through the crowded streets of your mighty London, to be in the midst of the whirl and rush of humanity, to share its life, its change, its death, and all that makes it what it is.

“A knowledge of men″s hearts will be needful to the completest solution of that problem.”

“And I thee,” answered Hester Prynne, “for the hatred that has transformed a wise and just man to a fiend! Wilt thou yet purge it out of thee, and be once more human? If not for his sake, then doubly for thine own! Forgive, and leave his further retribution to the Power that claims it!

“And who can figure the cost of war to humanity—

And even if science were allowed to try, it could do little, because the majority of human beings are not yet human beings at all, but simply machines for the creating of wealth for others.

The whole power of mankind belongs to them, forever and beyond recall—do what it can, strive as it will, humanity lives for them and dies for them!

“Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world’s original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have been different.”

“The man of genius is one of millions, and the great geniuses, the crown of humanity, appear on earth perhaps one in many thousand millions.

“And, if so, could you bring yourself in case of worldly difficulties and hardship or for some service to humanity—to overstep obstacles?... For instance, to rob and murder?”

“Did you suppose I was such a monster, such a reactionary, such a slave driver?”

“I did not bow down to you, I bowed down to all the suffering of humanity,”

″...it is noble to write as one thinks; this is the privilege of humanity.”

“Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy and prosperous, guarded by the especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature, but I was wretched, helpless, and alone.”