Humanity Quotes

Human beings have always been an unfinished species, a story in the middle, a succession of families, tribes, and societies in transition to new awarenesses. Although we have always prided ourselves on our willingness to adapt to all habitats, and on our skill at prospering and making ourselves comfortable wherever we are -- in a meadow, in a desert, on the tundra, or out on the ocean -- we don't just adapt to places, or modify them in order to ease our burdens. We're the only species that over and over again has deliberately transformed our surroundings in order to stretch our capacity for understanding and provoke new accomplishments. And our growing and enhanced understanding is our most valuable, and our most vulnerable, inheritance.

~ Anthony Hiss

People have traditionally turned to ritual to help them frame and acknowledge and ultimately even find joy in just such a paradox of being human - in the fact that so much of what we desire for our happiness and need for our survival comes at a heavy cost. We kill to eat, we cut down trees to build our homes, we exploit other people and the earth. Sacrifice - of nature, of the interests of others, even of our earlier selves - appears to be an inescapable part of our condition, the unavoidable price of all our achievements. A successful ritual is one that addresses both aspects of our predicament, recalling us to the shamefulness of our deeds at the same time it celebrates what the poet Frederick Turner calls the beauty we have paid for with our shame. Without the double awareness pricked by such rituals, people are liable to find themselves either plundering the earth without restraint or descending into self-loathing and misanthropy. Perhaps it's not surprising that most of us today bring one of those attitudes or the other to our conduct in nature.

~ Michael Pollan

Humanity does not pass through phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still.

~ C.s. Lewis

Perhaps nothing is so fraught with significance as the human hand, this oldest tool with which man has dug his way from savagery, and with which he is constantly groping forward.

~ Jane Addams

Directly overhead the Milky Way was as distinct as a highway across the sky. The constellations shown brilliantly, except the north, where they were blurred by the white sheets of the Aurora. Now shimmering like translucent curtains drawn over the windows of heaven, the northern lights suddenly streaked across a million miles of space to burst in silent explosions. Fountains of light, pale greens, reds, and yellows, showered the stars and geysered up to the center of the sky, where they pooled to form a multicolored sphere, a kind of mock sun that gave light but no heat, pulsing, flaring, and casting beams in all directions, horizon to horizon. Below, the wolves howled with midnight madness and the two young men stood in speechless awe. Even after the spectacle ended, the Aurora fading again to faint shimmer, they stood as silent and transfixed as the first human beings ever to behold the wonder of creation. Starkmann felt the diminishment that is not self-depreciation but humility; for what was he and what was Bonnie George? Flickers of consciousness imprisoned in lumps of dust; above them a sky ablaze with the Aurora, around them a wilderness where wolves sang savage arias to a frozen moon.

~ Philip Caputo

If God in all of His infinite power and love were real to us, the opinions of men, either for or against us, and the honor or dishonor they may bestow would shrink into nothingness in comparison.

~ Dave Hunt

A human's best training is with his shadow. You have to fight with your shadow.

~ Manuel Rivas

Ah, but is it not the mind that is the real grace of Homo sapiens? All the things to think about! All the things to read and appreciate! All the arts! All the things of the spirit!

~ Carol Emshwiller

The day you give priority to bogus ethics over human reactions, you become a loser. Human reactions are priceless. Rules should never, ever stifle emotions. Tennis is a very human game facing a great danger that it will be strangulated in a cat's cradle of unnecessary or inhumane rules.

~ Ted Tinling

The 90’s map the decades to come – full of invisible technologies that will ‘sub-contract’ many of the functions of the central nervous system.

~ J.g. Ballard

Like most conversations and most chess games, we all start off the same and we all end the same, with a brief moment of difference in between. Fertilization to fertilizer. Ashes to ashes. And we spark across the gap.

~ Brian Christian

In God's scheme what is a few billion years here and there. Perhaps there have come and gone a dozen human civilizations in the past billion years that we know nothing about. And after this civilization we are living in destroys itself, it will all start up again in a million years when the planet has all its messes cleaned up. Then, finally, one of these civilizations, say five billion years from now, will last because people treat each other the way they ought to.

~ Leon Uris

No one alive today has a single ancestor in his or her past who died in infancy. We are the champions, my friend!

~ Daniel J. Levitin

Without the errors which are active in every psychical pleasure and displeasrue a humanity would never have come into existence--whose fundamental feeling is and remains that man is the free being in a world of unfreedom, the external miracle worker whether he does good or ill, the astonishing exception, the superbeast and almost-god, the meaning of creation which cannot be thought away, the solution of the cosmic riddle, the mighty ruler over nature and the despiser of it, the creature which calls its history world history!--Vanitas vanitatum homo.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Turn back to humanity – to the world – to love! Become gardeners – whatever you want! – become nothing! – and the whole of space will be free for you.

~ Alfred Wolfenstein

Being human trespass the conditionings of the laws of the worlds that have been created by the conditioned society — these reflective of a conditioned mind reflect the facets of the self, to discipline and educate indirectly; restrict evolution for pardon, and affliction

~ Aainaa-Ridtz

Human looks sure on face, while the earth lost in space.

~ Toba Beta

They are always the problem. There is no evil in this world you cannot blame on them. The world will never be right as long as they exist. Whereas we are right, we are always right. We desire to make the world a better place whereas they either consciously desire to make it worse or else are willing to make it so through wrong ideas. There is only one way to make the world we are trying to create, and that is to get rid of them, get rid of every last one of them. And the only way to do that is to stop creating them. Because there is no “they” until we choose to see someone as such. When we choose to see the humanity in everyone, then there is no more they, there is only us.

~ James Rozoff

Every new discovery about the genome is consistent with evolution having happened. Whether we find it appealing or not is another question, but personally I like being fourth cousin to a mushroom and having a bonobo as my closest living relative. It makes me feel a real part of the world.

~ Richard Fortey

We don't even know we are brothers and sisters.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

History is full of paths and the most useful, the most rational paths for humanity is mostly empty!

~ Mehmet Murat Ildan

...the pleasures of the world are chiefly folly, and the business of it mostly knavery, and both nothing better than vanity; the men of pleasure tearing one another to pieces from the emulation of spending money, and the men of business from envy in getting it.

~ Henry Fielding

Nobody scarce doth any good, yet they all agree in praising those who do. Indeed, it is strange that all men should consent in commending goodness, and no man endeavour to deserve that commendation; whilst, on the contrary, all rail at wickedness, and all are as eager to be what they abuse.

~ Henry Fielding

I don't give a damn if there's any hope for them or not. But I know that I am not about to be bugged by any more white jokers who still can't figure out whether I'm human or not. If they don't know, baby, sad on them, and I hope they drop dead slowly, in great pain.

~ James Baldwin

With humanity, life has ended up with a living creature that never quite finds itself in the right place, a living creature destined to wander and endlessly make mistakes.

~ Michel Foucault

No matter the languages we speak or the colour of our skin, we share ancestors who planted rice on the banks of the Yangtze, who first domesticated horses on the steppes of the Ukraine, who hunted giant sloths in the forests of North and South America, and who laboured to build the Great Pyramid of Khufu.

~ Adam Rutherford

Frailty, thy name is human!

~ Marty Rubin

The voice of the intellect is soft one, but it does not rest until it has gained a hearing. Ultimately, after endless rebuffs, it succeeds. This is one of the few points in which one may be optimistic about the future of mankind.

~ Sigmund Freud

I believe that at the very root of our humanity is a passion to create value with heart, to work alongside others who care, and to make a difference.

~ Nilofer Merchant

The mark of humanity is how it treats the world and those who share it with us...

~ Aliya Whiteley

How many times had Paladin looked into this human face, its features animated by neurological impulse alone? He did not know. Even if he were to sort through his video memories and count them up one by one, he still didn't think he would have the right answer. But after today's mission, human faces would always look different to him. They would remind him of what it felt like to suffer, and to be relieved of suffering.

~ Annalee Newitz

It is certain that we cannot escape anguish, for we are anguish.

~ Jean-Paul Sartre

An entire planet pretending to be uncomfortable with the humanitarian crisis while engrossed in distractions on their mobile screens. Humanity ignoring their inevitable existential crisis.

~ Gayendra Abeywardane

Humanity was an ugly word when such cruelty was inflicted on one another.

~ Gayendra Abeywardane

Never laugh at the fate of others, you are the next

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Without strength, can we work to create wealth?

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I feel like we should stop calling feminists 'feminists' and just start calling people who aren't feminist 'sexist' – and then everyone else is just human.

~ Maisie Williams

Life is all we have, the grace of service to mankind.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Without the earth, where can humankind live?

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Humanity's savageness is what makes it civilized. Technology, trade, computers, space travel. All are products of competition and conflict.

~ Adam Burch