Humanity Quotes

The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there. -Yasutani Roshi, Zen master (1885-1973)

~ Yasutani Roshi

To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity.

~ C.s. Lewis

We have so far to go to realize our human potential for compassion, altruism, and love.

~ Jane Goodall

...humanity is a disease, a cancer on the body of the world.

~ Scott Westerfeld

We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.

~ Angela Carter

While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them

~ Henry David Thoreau

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

~ Chuck Klosterman

One of my rules is never to look sideways at what other people are doing but instead, do what I feel is right.

~ Annie Bryant

I am dying: it's a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of the cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it.

~ Sonya Hartnett

We are such small, stupid things. For most of my life I thought of nature as the stupid thing: Blind, animal, destructive. We, the humans, were clean and smart and in control: we had wrestled the rest of the world into submission, battered it down, pinned it to a glass slide and the pages of The Bool of Shhh.

~ Lauren Oliver

We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.

~ Carl Bernstein

It wasn't so long ago when all the so-called scientists said that humans were intelligent and that animals weren't, humans were the solitary unchallenged masters of the globe and probably the universe and the only question was whether we were handling our mastery well. (No. Next question.)

~ Robin Mckinley

I thought: this is how you make a human being. A human being is beautiful and sick. A human being glitters and starves.

~ Catherynne M. Valente

The people knew what had made them human. It was not their shortcomings, but their hearts.

~ Vanna Bonta

Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals.

~ Leo Tolstoy

He stood breathing, and the more he breathed the land in, the more he was filled up with all the details of the land. He was not empty. There was more than enough here to fill him. There would always be more than enough.

~ Ray Bradbury

I remember one night at Muzdalifa with nothing but the sky overhead I lay awake amid sleeping Muslim brothers and I learned that pilgrims from every land--every color, and class, and rank; high officials and the beggar alike--all snored in the same language.

~ Malcolm X

We are all brothers under the skin - and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it.

~ Ayn Rand

I believe in energies. Good energy has served me well. Being fair with others, compassionate towards them, remaining humble, and making a difference to someone are just a few of the things that I have seen create good energy. Beautiful things. Human things. I do my best to surround myself with these types of things, to generate an atmosphere thick with such energy. It has kept me safe in many situations. I have taken risks in the past, and managed to avoid harm by the protection of the good energy I have created around me. I believe that ugliness creates more ugliness. And no matter how touched by ugliness you are, you do not have to give in to it and start spreading it beyond yourself. I have seen this sickness and what it does to a person, and those around them.

~ Ashly Lorenzana

But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you.

~ Orson Scott Card

One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.

~ Alan Bennett

One expects decent people to stand up for the good of all. Decent people shut their doors and hide behind them as decent people do. Massacres could never happen if it weren't for decent people.

~ Jennifer Donnelly

. . . Moon-Watcher felt the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy--of dissatisfaction with his life. He had no idea of its cause, still less of its cure; but discontent had come into his soul, and he had taken one small step toward humanity.

~ Arthur C. Clarke

Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave, let him know he has enough.

~ Walt Whitman

All that we can't say is all we need to hear.

~ Ben Harper

In solitude we realize that nothing human is alien to us.

~ Henri J.m. Nouwen

If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.

~ Jonathan Swift

The best place for discovering what a man is is the heart of the desert. Your plane has broken down, and you walk for hours, heading for the little fort at Nutchott. You wait for the mirages of thirst to gape before you. But you arrive and you find an old sergeant who has been isolated for months among the dunes, and he is so happy to be found that he weeps. And you weep, too. In the arching immensity of the night, each tells the story of his life, each offers the other the burden of memories in which the human bond is discovered. Here two men can meet, and they bestow gifts upon each other with the dignity of ambassadors.

~ Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

If there is one sound the follows the march of humanity, it is the scream.

~ David Gemmell

There are such repulsive faces in the world.

~ Leo Tolstoy

You didn’t feed from her,” he said, and this was not a question.“Swill poison? Not my kind of fun, little brother.”One corner of Stefan’s mouth quirked up. He made no response to this, but simply looked at Damon with eyes that were... knowing. Damon bridled.“I told the truth!”“Going to take it up as a hobby?

~ L.j. Smith

There are those wonderful moments of clarity in life when one is reminded how irreparably flawed we humans are. Once, when I was nineteen, on the subway in Boston I lost my balance slightly and bumped into an elderly woman. I quickly apologized and she replied, Well, hold on to something, stupid. There it is. That's it. That's it in a nutshell. I don't want to sound negative, but I think every fetus should be shown a film of that incident, maybe projected up on the uterine wall, and then asked if it wants to come out. I am a strong believer in a woman's right to choose, but I also think that in the last trimester, the kid should be given every opportunity to back out.

~ Paula Poundstone

People have always wanted to 'improve' human beings; for the most part, this has been called morality.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Caring is open-hearted, keeping us available to transmit love to a stranger through simple eye contact and without condition. This is not the opportunistic sizing-up of sexual cruising; instead, it’s the felt recognition of the divinity and humanity in another individual.

~ Alexandra Katehakis

In all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.

~ Carl Sagan

It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.

~ Anthony Burgess

If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us--through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives--we are each of us unique.

~ Oliver Sacks

We laugh at sheep because sheep just follow the one in front. We humans have out-sheeped the sheep, because at least the sheep need a sheep dog to keep them in line. Humans keep each other in line. And they do it by ridiculing or condemning anyone who commits the crime, and that’s what it’s become, of being different.

~ David Icke

I'm a giant pimple on the face of humanity.

~ Katie Alender