Human Frailty Quotes

Perhaps they suspected that I thought less of them because I knew it. (I'm too aware of human frailty to have let that happen. If anything, I thought more of them for wanting to face up to what they had done and for trying to change.) ~ Harold S. Kushner

I'm not sure. But that bless-his/her-heart kind of melancholic humor is among my favorite things in the world. I guess it exposes a kind of humanity - or that's the hope, at least - a kind of grudging respect for human frailty. Unless it's actually kicking human frailty while it's down - I'm not sure. ~ David Rakoff

Nothing, indeed, is more revolting to English feelings than the spectacle of a human being obtruding on our notice his moral ulcers or scars, and tearing away that "decent drapery" which time or indulgence to human frailty may have drawn over them; accordingly, the greater part of our confessions (that is, spontaneous and extra-judicial confessions) proceed from demireps, adventurers, or swindlers. ~ Thomas De Quincey

Fishing is a constant reminder of the democracy of life, of humility, and of human frailty. The forces of nature discriminate for no man. ~ Herbert Hoover

By experience; by a sense of human frailty; by a perception of "the soul of goodness in things evil;" by a cheerful trust in human nature; by a strong sense of God's love; by long and disciplined realization of the atoning love of Christ; only thus can we get a free, manly, large, princely spirit of forgiveness. ~ Frederick William Robertson

Finding it so directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human frailty and sorrow. ~ Nathaniel Hawthorne

Here in the world, each human frailty Provides occasion for philosophy, And that is virtue's noblest exercise; ~ Moliere

Jason took me by the shoulders - not out of anger, or in a clinging way, but as a brother. "Promise me one thing. Whatever happens, when you get back to Olympus, when you're a god again, remember. Remember what it's like to be human."
A few weeks ago, I would have scoffed. Why would I want to remember any of this?
At best, if I were lucky enough to reclaim my divine throne, I would recall this wretched experience like a scary B-movie that had finally ended. I would walk out of the cinema into the sunlight, thinking Phew! Glad that's over.
Now, however, I had some inkling of what Jason meant. I had learned a lot about human frailty and human strength. I felt…different toward mortals, having been one of them. If nothing else, it would provide me with some excellent inspiration for new song lyrics! ~ Rick Riordan

We have seen that in this country in the last few years, particularly on Wall Street, with the rise of the old human frailty of greed. This occurs when people begin to serve only their own needs to the detriment of everyone else. ~ Lee R. Raymond

I say this because as an older man I am prone to ponder matters in the light of death in a way that you are not. I am like a traveler from Mars who looks down in astonishment at what passes here. And what I see is the same human frailty passed from generation to generation. What I see is again and again the same sad human frailty. We hate one another; we are the victims of irrational fears. And there is nothing in the stream of human history to suggest we are going to change this. But
I digress, confess that. I merely wish to point out that in the face of such a world you have only yourselves to rely on. You have only the decision you must make, each of you, alone. And will you contribute to the indifferent forces that ceaselessly conspire toward injustice? Or will you stand up against this endless tide and in the face of it be truly human? ~ David Guterson

You do not have to ladle on the impasto to make a point about human frailty or ambitions. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

Ethan filled his gaze with her, so feminine and fine, with glimmers dancing across her dress and little crystal things sparkling in her hair.
Despite her outward delicacy, there was something remarkably sturdy about her, an unyielding toughness he admired more than she would have believed. The life she'd chosen had come with the never-ending obligation to demonstrate what a woman was and was not, and what a woman could be. People would allow her no room for mistakes or ordinary human frailty. God knew she endured it all far better than Ethan would have. ~ Lisa Kleypas

For Christian faith, the death of God is not a question of his disappearance. On the contrary, it is one of the places where He is most fully present. Jesus is not Man standing in for God. He is a sign that God is incarnate in human frailty and futility. ~ James Carroll

Fill the seats of justice with good men, not so absolute in goodness as to forget what human frailty is. ~ Thomas Noon Talfourd

And because it may be too great a temptation to human frailty, apt to grasp at power, for the same persons, who have the power of making laws, to have also in their hands the power to execute them, whereby they may exempt themselves from obedience to the laws they make, and suit the law, both in its making, and execution, to their own private advantage. ~ John Locke

Your name is feared by many in Underworld. Your father has created quite the reputation for himself, so they fear you as well," Marcus said.
I smirked "As they should."
He shook his head. "That wasn't a compliment. You will come to learn that the Circle is not pure good nor the Underworld all evil. There are those who belong to the Underworld, such as Rayna, who have no use for the needless killing you associate with demons. There are also those in the Circle whose intentions are not completely honorable. There is something of human frailty in all of us. ~ M.R. Merrick

It is a blessed thing to know that no power on earth, no temptation, no human frailty can dissolve what God holds together. ~ Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Love and faith are not common companions. More commonly power and fear consort with faith ... Power is not to be crossed; one must respect and obey. Power means strength, whereas love is a human frailty the people mistrust. It is a sad fact of life that power and fear are the fountainheads of faith. ~ Saul D. Alinsky

When we love others, we naturally want to talk about them, we want to show them off, like emotional trophies. We invest them with a power to do to others what they do to us; a vain hope, as the lovers of others are rarely of much interest to us. But we listen in patience, as friends must, and as Isabel now did, refraining from comment, other than to encourage the release of the story and the attendant confession of human frailty and hope. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

The longer I live the more conscious I am of human frailty, and of the constant, overwhelming need we all have of God's grace. ~ Elizabeth Prentiss

The hardship in living out the vision comes from human frailty, and want of understanding; not from evil or malice. "Men ~ Basil Johnston

Sometimes a man cannot live up to the best idea he dared to have ~ Javier Merizalde

Embracing human frailty, fallibility, and heartbreaking aloneness is crucial for any person seeking to attain self-actualization and self-realization. ~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Never attribute to malice or other deliberate decision what can be explained by human frailty, imperfection, or ignorance. ~ Harold S. Kushner

If we look for human frailty in humans, we will always find it. When we focus on finding the frailties of those who hold priesthood keys, we run risks for ourselves. When we speak or write to others of such frailties, we put them at risk. ~ Henry B. Eyring

There had to be something new, some fresh angle. As the rain pattered down around him, Kapenda thought. What was the weirdest thing he'd seen since this all started? He'd been in the tiny town of Chew Stoke a few weeks earlier, filming the remains of a vehicle that had been washed into a culvert and whose driver had died. In Grovehill, no one had died yet but there were abandoned cars strewn along the streets and surrounding tracks, hulking shapes that the water broke around and flowed over in fractured, churning flurries.

That was old. Every television station had those shots.

He'd been there the year before when the police had excavated a mud-filled railway tunnel and uncovered the remains of two people who had been crushed in a landslide. What they needed was something like that here, something that showed how weak man's civilized veneer was when set against nature's uncaring ferocity. He needed something that contrasted human frailty and natural strength, something that Dali might have painted - a boat on a roof, or a shark swimming up the main street. He needed that bloody house to collapse.

("Into The Water") ~ Simon Kurt Unsworth

Oh, fatherhood has a very humanising effect on a bloke like me in the military. As a dad, you become absolutely aware of your own human frailty and a need to be nurturing and compassionate and fatherly ~ Peter Cosgrove

Those who hope, by retiring from the world, to earn a holiday from human frailty, in themselves and others, are usually disappointed. ~ Iris Murdoch

We'd hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves. ~ Michael Cunningham

I thought we weren't actually dead?", I asked. There was a lot of ambiguity surrounding that subject. We weren't mortal anymore. That was for sure. I could swing by my grave and prove that anytime I wanted. But, we had bodies with needs. And could get hurt or killed. And, though, I've been told we didn't age, my hair continued to grow. I still woke up hungry in the morning, and watch out, if I didn't get a cup of coffee. It was like we were straddling some invisible fence between immortality and human frailty.
"Seriously, are we dead or not? I asked again when I still received no response. I got several yes's and no's at the same time confirming my own belief. Somehow, we were neither. ~ Donna Augustine

That the world should be filled with such detail, such tiny points of human frailty, threatened to crush her and she had to look away. ~ Ian McEwan

I work with a great deal of discipline, although I usually take on more than I can handle and often have to extend due dates. I have always been appalled by bohemianism because of its laziness, disorder, and moral weakness. I understand that this way of living is a response to the fact of human frailty, but it leans too far in one direction. Being a little more buttoned up doesn't mean that you'll get so brittle that you'll break. Nor does it mean that you don't understand tragedy, loss, and, most of all, human limitation.

I am more than well aware of those things and I feel very strongly, but on the other hand I like to run ten miles and return to a spotless well-ordered room, and I like my shirts heavily starched. When I used to go on a long run on Sunday morning when I lived on the Upper West Side, I would pass thousands and thousands of people in restaurants eating . . . (I won't say this word, because I hate it so much, but it rhymes with hunch, and it's a disgusting meal that is supposed to be both breakfast and lunch). There they were - having slept for five hours while I was doing calisthenics and running - unshaven (the women too), bleary eyed, surrounded by newspapers scattered as if in a hamster cage, smoking noxious French cigarettes, and drinking Bloody Marys while they ate huge quantities of fat. They looked to me like a movie version of South American bandits. I would never want to be like that. I prefer to live like a British soldier. ~ Mark Helprin

Upon the whole, I have always considered him, both in his lifetime and since his death, as approaching as nearly to the idea of a perfectly wise and virtuous man, as perhaps the nature of human frailty will permit. ~ Adam Smith

Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, packaged and sold without benefit of accident of human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech. ~ John Steinbeck

...So speaks Man-Creating. Then, instantly, it all changes, and from Man-Creating I become simply Man-Alive--a member of society, a friend and neighbor, a son and brother of the human race. And when I look at what I have done from this point of view, suddenly I feel lower than a dog. I see all the pain and anguish I have caused to people I know, and I wonder how I could have done it, and how there could possibly be any justification for it--yes, even if what I wrote had been as great as "Lear," as eloquent as "Hamlet"...For what integrity is there that is not tainted with human frailty? If only I could tell myself that every word and phrase and incident in the book had been created at the top of my bent and with the impartial judgment of unrancorous detachment! But I know it is not true. So many words came back to me, so many whip-lash phrases, that must have been written in a spirit that had nothing to do with art or my integrity. We are such stuff that dust is made of, and where we fail--we fail! Is there, then, no such thing as a pure spirit in creation? ~ Thomas Wolfe

We'd hoped vaguely to fall in love but hadn't worried much about it, because we'd thought we had all the time in the world. Love had seemed so final and so dull
love was what ruined our parents. Love had delivered them to a life of mortgage payments and household repairs; to unglamorous jobs and the flourescent aisles of a supermarket at two in the afternoon. We'd hoped for love of a different kind, love that knew and forgave our human frailty but did not miniaturize our grander ideas of ourselves. It sounded possible. If we didn't rush or grab, if we didn't panic, a love both challenging and nurturing might appear. If the person was imaginable, then the person could exist. ~ Michael Cunningham

It is your organized religions that have made it clear through their most sacred scriptures that cruelty and killing is an acceptable response to human frailty and human differences. This goes against every human instinct, but organized religion has reorganized human thoughts. Some humans have even been turned against their own instinct for survival. And so people go around maiming and killing each other, because they've been told quite directly that this is what God does to them
and what God wants them to do to each other. ~ Neale Donald Walsch

The bow cannot always stand bent, nor can human frailty subsist without some lawful recreation. ~ Miguel De Cervantes

We also understand, therefore, that wages and private property are identical. Indeed, where the product, as the object of labor, pays for labor itself, there the wage is but a necessary consequence of labor's estrangement. Likewise, in the wage of labor, labor does not appear as an end in itself but as the servant of the wage...

An enforced increase of wages (disregarding all other difficulties, including the fact that it would only be by force, too, that such an increase, being an anomaly, could be maintained) would therefore be nothing but better payment for the slave, and would not win either for the worker or for labor their human status and dignity.

Indeed, even the equality of wages, as demanded by Proudhon, only transforms the relationship of the present-day worker to his labor into the relationship of all men to labor. Society would then be conceived as an abstract capitalist.

Wages are a direct consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the direct cause of private property. The downfall of the one must therefore involve the downfall of the other. ~ Karl Marx

Julia never asked herself why bad things happen to good people, for she already knew the answer: bad things happen t everyone. Not that this was an excuse or a justification for wronging another human being. Still, all humans had this shared experience- that of suffering. No human being left this world without shedding a tear,of feeling pain,or wading into the sea of sorrow. Why should her life be any different? Why should she expect special, favoured treatment? Even Mother Teresa suffered, and she was a saint. ~ Sylvain Reynard

You should follow your heart. Forget the rest. Ileana stood and gathered up the used plates and napkins. Thomas is human and will make mistakes, and as long as he apologizes and it's something yo can live with? It's worth loving him today. It's also worth forgiving him, too. You never know when he might be taken from you. ~ Kerri Maniscalco

The more I see the world, most dislike, and the time confirms my belief in the inconsistency of human nature and how little can one trust the appearances of goodness or intelligence ~ Jane Austen

The time will come when human drones will be ostracized from society as nobodies, as thieves of honest men's efforts, thieves of the results of honest men's labor. The coming civilization will not tolerate these thieves of society, these lazy vagabonds who do nothing but steal the products of their labor and demoralize society by their vicious example. ~ Orison Swett Marden

I am waiting for those days when the human nature will be in harmony with the nature of the nature to enjoy all the beauties and magics of life. ~ Debasish Mridha

I was a captive and a slave. I loved Dora Spenlow to distraction! She was more than human to me. She was a Fairy, a Sylph, I dont know what she was
anything that no one ever saw, and everything that everybody ever wanted. ~ David Copperfield

In ancient Greek, the word for the highest degree of human happiness is eudaimonia, which basically means "well-daemoned" - that is, nicely taken care of by some external divine creative spirit guide. ~ Elizabeth Gilbert

What's the point of God making us human if He doesn't want us to act like we're human?' 'To see if we can rise above our natures,'Megan said. ~ Susan Beth Pfeffer

There's a small worm called Loa Loa Filariasis. This parasite can survive in one environment exclusively- namely, underneath the skin and inside the eyes of human beings. Children and the elderly in tropical regions (usually the poorest) are the most widely affected. A painful, slow death is virtually certain. The worm can actually live in the host for 17 years before the host finally dies. ~ David Attenborough

No man, proclaimed Donne, is an Island, and he was wrong. If we were not islands, we would be lost, drowned in each other's tragedies. We are insulated (a word that means, literally, remember, made into an island) from the tragedy of others, by our island nature, and by the repetitive shape and form of the stories. The shape does not change: there was a human being who was born, lived, and then, by some means or another, died. There. You may fill in the details from your own experience. As unoriginal as any other tale, as unique as any other life. Lives are snowflakes - forming patterns we have seen before, as like one another as peas in a pod (and have you ever looked at peas in a pod? I mean, really looked at them? There's not a chance you'd mistake one for another, after a minute's close inspection), but still unique. ~ Neil Gaiman

One of the most terrible losses man endures in his lifetime is not even noticed by most people, much less mourned. Which is astonishing, because what we lose is in many ways one of the essential qualities that sets us apart from other creatures. I'm talking about the loss of the sense of wonder that is such an integral part of our world when we are children. However, as we grow older, that sense of wonder shrinks from cosmic to microscopic by the time we are adults. Kids say "Wow!" all the time. Opening their mouths fully, their eyes light up with genuine awe and glee. The word emanates not so much from a voice box as from an astonished soul that has once again been shown that the world is full of amazing unexpected things.
When was the last time you let fly a loud, truly heartfelt "WOW?"
NOt recently I bet. Because generally speaking wonder belongs to kids, with the rare exception of falling madly in love with another person, which invariably leads to a rebirth of wonder. As adults, we are not supposed to say or feel Wow, or wonder, or even true surprise because those things make us sound goofy, ingenuous, and childlike. How can you run the world if you are in constant awe of it?...
The human heart has a long memory though and remembers what it was like to live through days where it was constantly surprised and delighted by the world around it. ~ Jonathan Carroll

Human beings always have and always will seek havens where we are free to be productive and to keep the property we create. ~ John Pugsley

Employees Are Human Capital of An Organisation ~ Marieke Stoop

A 2016 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America suggested that health care providers may underestimate black patients' pain in part due to a belief that they simply don't actually feel as much pain - a myth that dates all the way back to the days of slavery. For centuries, the claim that black people were biologically different from whites was 'championed by scientists, physicians, and slave owners alike to justify slavery and the inhumane treatment of black men and women in medical research,' the authors wrote. Black people were thought to have 'thicker skulls, less sensitive nervous systems,' and a super-human ability to 'tolerate surgical operations with little, if any, pain at all.'

In the first phase of the study, over two hundred white medical students and residents were asked whether a series of statements about differences between black and white patients were true or false. Some of the statements were true, while others - for example, 'blacks' skin is thicker than whites' and 'blacks' nerve endings are less sensitive than whites' - were false. They found that a full half of the respondents thought that one or more the false statements - many of which were 'fantastical in nature' - were possibly, probably, or definitely true. Also, notably, many of them didn't agree with the statements that were actually true; only half of the residents knew that white patients are less likely to have heart disease t ~ Maya Dusenbery

I would feel no hesitation in saying that it is the responsibility of a decent human being to give assistance to a child who is being attacked by a rabid dog, but I would not intend this to imply that in all imaginable circumstances one must, necessarily, act in accordance with this general responsibility. ~ Noam Chomsky

Keep walking, though there's no place to get to.
Don't try to see through the distances.
That's not for human beings. Move within,
But don't move the way fear makes you move. ~ Rumi

For human beings must be served, not exploited, honored, not manipulated. ~ David Paul Kirkpatrick

On the Bigotry of Culture:
: it presented us with culture, with thought as something justified in itself, that is, which requires no justification but is valid by it's own essence, whatever its concrete employment and content maybe. Human life was to put itself at the service of culture because only thus would it become charged with value. From which it would follow that human life, our pure existence was, in itself, a mean and worthless thing. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

The idea, which constitutes the actual being of the human mind, is not simple, but compounded of a great number of ideas. ~ Baruch Spinoza

If you can kill animals, the same attitude can kill human beings. The mentality is the same which exploits nature and which creates wars. ~ Satish Kumar

We have not begun to live', Yeats writes, 'until we conceive life as a tragedy.' Newman confessed that he considered most men to be irretrievably damned, although he spent his life 'trying to make that truth less terrible to human reason'. Goethe could call his life 'the perpetual rolling of a rock that must be raised up again forever'. Martin Luther told a woman who wished him a long life: 'Madam, rather than live forty more years, I would give up my chance of paradise.' No, the Outsider does not make light work of living; at the best, it is hard going; at the worst (to borrow a phrase from Eliot) 'an intolerable shirt of flame',

It was this vision that made Axel declare: 'As for living, our servants will do that for us.' Axel was a mystic; at least, he had the makings of a mystic. For that is just what the mystic says: 'I refuse to Uve.' But he doesn't intend to die. There is another way of living that involves a sort of death: 'to die in order to Uve'. Axel would have locked himself up in his castle on the Rhine and read Hermetic philosophy. He saw men and the world as Newman saw them, as Eliot saw them in 'Burnt Norton':
... strained, time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time

But he was not willing to regard himself as hopelessly damned merely bec ~ Colin Wilson

If you fill the atmosphere with toxins, then you really cannot be surprised if the solar radiation transmission through it becomes toxic to humans. ~ Steven Magee

I want to be around these positive, expressive people who are doing something different and who also want to get the hell out of there and don't want to be around basic human bullshit. ~ Babatunde Adebimpe

And if I were to ask myself from what literature we who have been nurtured almost exclusively on the thoughts of Greeks and Romans, and of the Semitic race, the Jewish, may draw the corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human a life ... again I should point to India. ~ Max Muller

Seven key abilities human beings need to effectively manage life: the ability to motivate ourselves, to persist against frustration, to delay gratification, to regulate moods, to hope, to empathize, and to control impulse. Many ~ Gavin De Becker

All I ask is that you do as well as you can, and remember that, while to write adverbs is human, to write he said or she said is divine. ~ Stephen King

Her eyes were darkened pits of fury. She had become the spirit of vengeance itself, barely contained by human flesh. ~ S.M. Reine

Only one enemy is worse than despair: indifference. In every area of human creativity, indifference is the enemy; indifference of evil is worse than evil, because it is also sterile. ~ Elie Wiesel

Truthfully, there're only a handful of people in this world who really get joy from seeing you happy. Most won't care if you're happy, only if you're miserable like they are. They eat that shit up. ~ Crystal Woods

Fortunately, human forgetting follows a pattern. We forget exponentially. A graph of our likelihood of getting the correct answer on a quiz sweeps quickly downward over time and then levels off. ~ Gary Wolf

An indisputable law of physics, water always finds the lowest level in an incredibly efficient manner. It penetrates any crevice or path that will facilitate its downward flow, steadily meandering and descending in search of lower planes. In our physical world, water is as efficient as gravity is unforgiving.
Human beings are mostly water. The body is comprised of more than 70% water and it is always tragic when human beings, true to their chemical composition, emulate the efficiency of water during dark, difficult periods in their lives, allowing one misstep or transgression to lead to lower and lower descent. Water can be beautiful to watch as it cascades downward in its transparent and fluid simplicity, but some human beings also have a tendency to fall and sink, like water without the beauty. ~ Michael Bowe

Make up your mind, yaar, choose one thing.'
'How can I? I'm just a human being,' he replied ~ Rohinton Mistry

The globe has been circumnavigated, but no man ever yet has; you may survey a kingdom and note the result in maps, but all the savants in the world could not produce a reliable map of the poorest human personality. ~ Alexander Smith

Yes, I'm talking about a non-violent revolution of consciousness.
A consciousness that is able to understand
how we're all inextricably connected to each other on this Earth,
and to the Earth itself.
And that if we violate those fundamental principles, we do so at our own peril.
Yes, we can continue to live in this delusion and the denials of reality
because it's painful, it's frightening.
Sometimes, it's terrifying.
It's terrifying to face the truth.
So I ask each of you to search your hearts,
as to what your truth is,
for being a citizen of the Earth,
promoting justice as a foundation for peace.
It's not going to happen magically,
it's not going to happen by relying on these political structures and institutions.
I think we're going to have to wage peace in the most extraordinary ways
whether our government wants it or not.
Without a non-violent revolution of consciousness,
we will not survive as a civilization or as a planet.
We can choose to have peace if we want to pay the price.
And what more glorious goal than peace for all people?
...To build a new society, a society that understands
that we are not worth more, and they are not worth less.
And that we will be willing to pay the price and take the risks
to wage peace with all fellow and sister human beings. ~ S. Brian Willson

The ideals and objectives of yesterday was still ideals of today, but they lost some of their luster and even, as one seemed to go towards them, they lost the shining beauty which had warmed the heart and vitalized the body. Evil triumphed often enough, but what was far worse was the coarsening and distortion of what seemed so right. Was human nature so essentially bad that it would take ages of training ,through suffering and misfortune, before it could behave reasonably and raise man above the creature of lust and violence and deceit that he now was? And, meanwhile , was every effort to change radically in the present or the near future doomed to failure ~ Jawaharlal Nehru

An evolutionary morality argues that The North was right in pursuing that war because a nation is a higher form of evolution than a human body and the principle of human equality is an even higher form than a nation ~ Robert M. Pirsig

They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud." "So life became a work of art," I marveled. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Access to your husband's money might feel good. But the comparative study of human society and our primate relatives shows that such access can't buy you the power you get by being the one who earns it. And knowing this, or even having an inkling of it, just sensing the disequilibrium, the abyss that separates your version of power from your man's, could keep a thinking woman up at night. ~ Wednesday Martin

But one of the strange marks of the strength of Christianity is that, since it came, no pagan in our civilisation has been able to be really human. ~ G.K. Chesterton

I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a few moments as evolutionary time is measured, a juvenile species, a child of a species. We are only tentatively set in place, error prone, at risk of fumbling, in real danger at the moment of leaving behind only a thin layer of of our fossils, radioactive at that. ~ Lewis Thomas

When life becomes sub-human, sub-humans come alive. ~ Jerry Stahl

The authors pointed out that nearly all research in psychology is conducted on a very small subset of the human population: people from cultures that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (forming the acronym WEIRD). They then reviewed dozens of studies showing that WEIRD people are statistical outliers; they are the least typical, least representative people you could study if you want to make generalizations about human nature. Even within the West, Americans are more extreme outliers than Europeans, and within the United States, the educated upper middle class (like my Penn sample) is the most unusual of all. ~ Jonathan Haidt

Art and the triumph of the human spirit - the two combined thrill me. ~ Kristin Bauer Van Straten

If complacency is bad for business, it can also be bad for the human spirit ~ Simon Silva

Every day, I read books on philosophy and science fiction and human consciousness. ~ Tom DeLonge