Human Interest Quotes

Over the past 20 years, I have presented many science programmes on BBC1. But none is, I think, more socially important, or of more human interest, than this ongoing series of 'Child of Our Time.' ~ Robert Winston

Speaking of novels,' I said, 'you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust's rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and a colossal farce, the vocabulary of genius and its poetry, but no more, impossibly rude hostesses, please let me speak, and even ruder guests, mechanical Dostoevskian rows and Tolstoian nuances of snobbishness repeated and expanded to an unsufferable length, adorable seascapes, melting avenues, no, do not interrupt me, light and shade effects rivaling those of the greatest English poets, a flora of metaphors, described - by Cocteau, I think - as "a mirage of suspended gardens," and, I have not yet finished, an absurd, rubber-and-wire romance between a blond young blackguard (the fictitious Marcel), and an improbable jeune fille who has a pasted-on bosom, Vronski's (and Lyovin's) thick neck, and a cupid's buttocks for cheeks; but - and now let me finish sweetly - we were wrong, Sybil, we were wrong in denying our little beau ténébreux the capacity of evoking "human interest": it is there, it is there - maybe a rather eighteenth-centuryish, or even seventeenth-centuryish, brand, but it is there. Please, dip or redip, spider, into this book [offering it], you will find a pretty marker in it bought in France, I want John to keep it. Au revoir, Sybil, I must go now. I think my telephone is ringing. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

I'm really into the human interest thing. I really like regular people. ~ Chelsea Handler

Why bother with fictional characters and plots when the world was full of more marvelous stories that were true, with characters so fresh, so powerful, so new, that they stepped from into the narratives under their own power? ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

In a large congregation, while there is a wide diversification of interest, it is also true that there are only a few basic human problems. It must also be taken into consideration that people are people regardless of who they are or what their backgrounds may be. There are certain deep universal appeals to human interest and to these human nature always responds. ~ Norman Vincent Peale

A reporter did a human-interest piece on the Texas Rangers. The reporter recognized the Colt Model 1911 the Ranger was carrying and asked him 'Why do you carry a 45?' The Ranger responded, 'Because they don't make a 46.' ~ Clint Smith

Admitting the force of these contentions, nevertheless, the custom of meeting together in public assembly for the consideration of the most serious, the most exalted topics of human interest is too vitally precious to be lost. ~ Felix Adler

People write fiction in their minds all the time - every time we read a 'human interest' news story, or a true crime tale, we find ourselves fascinated because we're trying to understand why people behave the way they do, why they make the choices they do, how we become who we become. ~ Dan Chaon

I didn't want to be written about as a human-interest story. I didn't want to be a passing thing. You know, now we move on to the fat girl who had her stomach stapled. I didn't want to become a gimmick: the disabled model. ~ Aimee Mullins

But in practical affairs, particularly in politics, men are needed who combine human experience and interest in human relations with a knowledge of science and technology. ~ Max Born

Not very long ago some one invented the assertion that there were only "Four Hundred" people in New York City who were really worth noticing. But a wiser man has arisen - the census taker - and his larger estimate of human interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little stories of the "Four Million. ~ O. Henry

I am very interested in human-interest stories emerging from modern India. I get my inspiration and daily dose by reading the 'Hindustan Times.' ~ Vikas Swarup

The grandest mountain prospect that the eye can range over is appointed to annihilation. The smallest human interest that the pure heart can feel is appointed to immortality. ~ Wilkie Collins

Plainly, such an approach does not exclude other ways of trying to comprehend the world. Someone committed to it (as I am) can consistently believe (as I do) that we learn much more of human interest about how people think and feel and act by reading novels or studying history than from all of naturalistic psychology, and perhaps always will; similarly, the arts may offer appreciation of the heavens to which astrophysics cannot aspire. ~ Noam Chomsky

People love to talk but hate to listen. Listening is not merely not talking, though even that is beyond most of our powers; it means taking a vigorous, human interest in what is being told us. You can listen like a blank wall or like a splendid auditorium where every sound comes back fuller and richer. ~ Alice Duer Miller

Nothing captures human interest more than human tragedy. ~ Dan Brown

To make a current example, the world can find human interest in the death and the love affairs and the pallid addiction to cocaine of Mr. Sherlock Holmes. ~ John Albert Macy

Science is the only news. When you scan a news portal or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same cyclical dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness; even the technology is predictable if you know the science behind it. Human nature doesn't change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly ~ Stewart Brand

It interests me that there is no end of fictions, and facts made over in the forms of fictions. Because we class them under so many different rubrics, and media, and means of delivery, we don't recognize the sheer proliferation and seamlessness of them. I think at some level of scale or perspective, the police drama in which a criminal is shot, the hospital in which the doctors massage a heart back to life, the news video in which jihadists behead a hostage, and the human-interest story of a child who gets his fondest wish (a tourist trip somewhere) become the same sorts of drama. They are representations of strong experience, which, as they multiply, began to dedifferentiate in our uptake of them, despite our names and categories and distinctions...

I say I watch the news to "know". But I don't really know anything. Certainly I can't do anything. I know that there is a war in Iraq, but I knew that already. I know that there are fires and car accidents in my state and in my country, but that, too, I knew already. With each particular piece of footage, I know nothing more than I did before. I feel something, or I don't feel something. One way I am likely to feel is virtuous and "responsible" for knowing more of these things that I can do nothing about. Surely this feeling is wrong, even contemptible. I am not sure anymore what I feel.

What is it like to watch a human being's beheading? The first showing of the video is bad. The second, fifth, tenth, hundr ~ Mark Greif

5-4-10 Tuesday 8:00 A.M.
Made a large batch of chili and spaghetti to freeze yesterday. And some walnut fudge! Relieved the electricity is still on.
It's another beautiful sunny day with fluffy white clouds drifting by. The last cloud bank looked like a dog with nursing pups.
I open the window and let in some fresh air filled with the scent of apple and plum blossoms and flowering lilacs. Feels like it's close to 70 degrees. There's a boy on a skate board being pulled along by his St. Bernard, who keeps turning around to see if his young friend is still on board.
I'm thinking of a scene still vividly displayed in my memory. I was nine years old. I cut through the country club on my way home from school and followed a narrow stream, sucking on a jawbreaker from Ben Franklins, and I had some cherry and strawberry pixie straws, and banana and vanilla taffy inside my coat pocket. The temperature was in the fifties so it almost felt like spring. There were still large patches of snow on the fairways in the shadows and the ground was soggy from the melt off.
Enthralled with the multi-layers of ice, thin sheets and tiny ice sickles gleaming under the afternoon sun, dripping, streaming into the pristine water below, running over the ribbons of green grass, forming miniature rapids and gently flowing rippling waves and all the reflections of a crystal cathedral, merging with the hidden world of a child. Seemingly endless natural sculptures.
Then th ~ Andrew Neff

The human interest, and the natural interest, and the spiritual interest of this planet need to begin to take a priority over the corporate interest, the military interest, and the materialistic interests. ~ Michael Franti

The Depression was an incredibly dramatic episode - an era of stock-market crashes, breadlines, bank runs and wild currency speculation, with the storm clouds of war gathering ominously in the background ... For my money, few periods are so replete with human interest. ~ Ben Bernanke

Nothing is stupider than the common complaint that poetry lacks "human interest," unless it concerns itself with human emotions, actions, problems and viewpoints. Anything conceivable by the imagination, any speculation ((conception)) ((emergence)) of what may be beyond, above and beneath the mundane sphere, can ((or may,)) possess "human interest," by enlarging the horizons of that interest. ~ Clark Ashton Smith

The newspapers do little better. Their coverage of nonhuman animals is dominated by "human interest" events like the birth of a baby gorilla at the zoo, or by threats to endangered species; but developments in farming techniques that deprive millions of animals of freedom of movement go unreported. ~ Peter Singer

You see? This is what's wrong with the world. A young lady with bleached hair, an estuarine accent and unfeasible breasts can outsell a respected expert with decades of wisdom and experience."
"She's human interest," replied May.. "You're not. People reading her story will feel that if she can make it without talent, maybe they can. ~ Christopher Fowler

Once a reporter stood in front of a fire as it consumed a house and then he turned to see the homeowners and their little son watching it burn. The reporter, fishing for a human interest angle, said to the boy, "Son, it looks like you don't have a home anymore." The little boy promptly answered, "Oh, yes, we have a home. We just don't have a house to put it in." ~ Barbara Johnson

People are worried about the degree to which corporate interest is starting to threaten human interest. ~ Edward Norton

It was not the long, bleak sunny days of spring, nor yet was it that time was reconciling her to the town of her habitation. It was that in it she had found a human interest. ~ Elizabeth Gaskell

I'm not really good at fun-to-know, human interest stuff. We're not 'celebrities', whose life itself is a performance. Good or bad or ugly, we are our words. They're what people meet. ~ Terry Pratchett

I'd like to feel that an advertiser gets something extra when they advertise with us - a certain humanity that comes from upbeat and positive human interest letters and success stories. ~ Casey Kasem

As things are now going, the peace we will make, the peace we seem to be making, will be a peace of oil, a peace of gold, a peace of shipping, a peace, in brief ... without moral purpose or human interest. ~ Archibald MacLeish

Crime has always been a regrettably consistent element of the human experience. ~ Mark Frost

The dollar represents a one dollar debt to the Federal Reserve System. The Federal Reserve Banks create money out of thin air to buy Government Bonds from the U.S. Treasury ... and has created out of nothing a ... debt which the American people are obliged to pay with interest. ~ Wright Patman

Judaism, I would argue, does demand love for our fellow human beings, but only to an extent. 'Hate' is not always synonymous with the terribly sinful. ~ Meir Soloveichik

Happiness is the primary goal of human existence. ~ Joey Lawsin

I reject the notion that we must tell girls that the only way to be valid human beings is to turn themselves into boys. ~ Sarah Zettel

We all look different, but we all are the same. We are all just human beings trying to make a difference in a world branded by globalisation. ~ Haidji

We live in a culture that doesn't acknowledge or validate human intuition and doesn't encourage us to rely on our intuitive wisdom. ~ Shakti Gawain

Neither Romelu nor myself were happy with the game he had and his reaction. He has apologised and for me that is the end of the story. I don't look back
I look at the future. That is what interests me. Romelu trained well yesterday and looked happy. Every player wants to show himself in a World Cup but it is not going to change your life. ~ Marc Wilmots

I'm convinced that whatever contains human emotions is composed of the most fragile material, for it can shatter unpredictably and without effort. And yet it is a resilient marvel as well, able to mend instantly as though never affected. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

I think when we engage in language we are engaging in something that is specifically and primally human. ~ ZZ Packer

Liberalism is a scourge. It destroys the human spirit. It destroys prosperity. It assigns sameness to everybody. And wherever I find it, I oppose it. ~ Rush Limbaugh

You can graph human evolution, which is mostly a straight line, but we do get better and change over time, and you can graph technological evolution, which is a line that's going straight up. They are going to intersect each other at some point, and that's happening now. ~ Daniel H. Wilson

Jung was very conscious of the mysteriousness of the human personality and the difficulty of penetrating the outward appearance and discovering the real individual. ~ Christopher Bryant

Considering the timespan of human evolution and the vast potential of humankind -- as evidenced by great genius and leadership, inventions and discoveries, works of art and literature -- it is lamentable that the economic and political systems of 'advanced' cultures are still based on the unenlightened rationales that 'more is better' and 'might makes right.' In the name of 'survival of the fittest' and ensuring 'vital interests,' our economic system creates an ever-widening gap between rich and poor as it dismantles the environment upon which we all depend. Even 'lower' animals generally do not foul their own nests. ~ Alex Gerber Jr.

You should respect death and respect the dead, not out of fear, but because it's the proper human thing to do. ~ Tom Jokinen

The beast who dreams of man and has so dreamt in running dreams a hundred thousand years and more. Dreams of that malignant lesser god come pale and naked and alien to slaughter all his clan and kin and rout them from their house. A god insatiable whom no ceding could appease nor any measure of blood. ~ Cormac McCarthy

You can now modify the genes of large animals, and the largest animal we are concerned with is the human. ~ Robert Winston

My principles in respect of religious interest are two,
one is, that the Church shall not meddle with politics, and the government shall not meddle with religion. ~ Lajos Kossuth

Listen to the silence,' said Margarita to the master, the sand rustling under her bare feet. 'Listen to the silence and enjoy it. Here is the peace that you never knew in your lifetime. Look, there is your home for eternity, which is your reward. I can already see a Venetian window and a climbing vine which grows right up to the roof. It's your home, your home for ever. In the evenings people will come to see you- people who interest you, people who will never upset you. They will play to you and sing to you and you will see how beautiful the room is by candlelight. You shall go to sleep with your dirty old cap on, you shall go to sleep with a smile on your lips. ~ Mikhail Bulgakov

They're us!They've repopulated the world, and now they've achieved the same state of idiocy they were in before, ready to blow themselves up all over again. Great, isn't it? That's the human race! ~ Rene Barjavel

The only difference between men is conversion ~ Sunday Adelaja

The person who wishes to attain human perfection should study logic first, next mathematics, then physics, and, lastly, metaphysics. ~ Maimonides

I made that happen to you, Letty. I made you take the road marked FOREVER WARY OF OTHER HUMAN BEINGS, instead of the one you should have taken. ~ Charlotte Stein

For twenty years, Islamic Jihadists have been attacking American interests around the world and we did not take them seriously until September 11th, 2001. ~ Zach Wamp

Prayer is beyond any question the highest activity of the human soul. Man is at his greatest and highest when upon his knees he comes face to face with God. ~ D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones

Stories are how we think. They are how we make meaning of life. Call them schemas, scripts, mental maps, ideas, metaphors, or narratives. Stories are how we inspire and motivate human beings. Great stories help us to understand our place in the world, create our identity, discover our purpose, form our character and define and teach human values. ~ Jeroninio Almeida

Why do we capital-N Nerds love Mars so much? Because it's beautiful, it's tough, it's buried in our mythic, childhood memories. It's covered with human triumphs but also with sad stories of failure. ~ Greg Bear

I got the feeling Poseidon really didn't know what to think of me. He didn't know whether he was happy to have me as a son or not. In a strange way, I was glad that Poseidon was so distant. If he'd tried to apologize, or told me he love me, or even smiled. it would've felt fake. Like human dad, making some lame excuse for not being around. I could live with that. After all, I wasn't sure about him yet, either. ~ Rick Riordan

Because we are human we have a long childhood, and one of the jobs of that childhood is to sculpt our brains. We have years
about twelve of them
to draw outlines of the shape we want our sculpted brain to take. Some of the parts must be sculpted at critical times. One cannot, after all, carve out toes unless he knows where the foot will go. We need tools to do some of the fine work. The tools are our childhood experiences. And I'm convinced that one of those experiences must be children's books. And they must be experienced within the early years of our long childhood. ~ E.L. Konigsburg

I have come to kno one thing without ay shadow of doubt: if anything in this universe reflects the fingerprint of God, it is the human heart ~ Charles Martin

Never again will I allow our political self-interest to deter us from doing what we know to be morally right. Atrocity and terror are not political weapons. And to those who would use them, your day is over. We will never negotiate. We will no longer tolerate and we will no longer be afraid. It's your turn to be afraid. ~ Harrison Ford

Who wants the humiliation of being father to the human race? ~ Steve Toltz

It is always the individual who thinks. Society does not think any more than it eats or drinks. The evolution of human reasoning from the naive thinking of primitive man to the more subtle thinking of modern science took place within society. However, thinking itself is always an achievement of individuals. ~ Ludwig Von Mises

i tthink too many people use the word love when they don't mean it. They enjoy a relationship with someone, but the first bump or two in their path and they realize it wasn't real love - and they move on. Micah is my forever love. Could our relationship end? We're human and full of flaws, so sure it could. Would it hurt me the rest of my life? Absolutely. He is the only one for me. At the risk of sounding cliché, he's my soul mate. ~ Lindsay Delagair

A word that rose to honor at the time of the Renaissance, and that summarized in advance the whole program of modern civilization is 'humanism'. Men were indeed concerned to reduce everything to purely human proportions, to eliminate every principle of a higher order, and, one might say, symbolically to turn away from the heavens under pretext of conquering the earth; the Greeks, whose example they claimed to follow, had never gone as far in this direction, even at the time of their greatest intellectual decadence, and with them utilitarian considerations had at least never claimed the first place, as they were very soon to do with the moderns. Humanism was form of what has subsequently become contemporary secularism; and, owing to its desire to reduce everything to the measure of man as an end in himself, modern civilization has sunk stage by stage until it has reached the level of the lowest elements in man and aims at little more than satisfying the needs inherent in the material side of his nature, an aim that is in any case quite illusory since it constantly creates more artificial needs than it can satisfy. ~ Rene Guenon

How shallow is the stage on which this vast drama of human hates and joys and friendships is played! Whence do men draw this passion for eternity, flung by chance as they are upon a scarcely cooled bed of lava, threatened by the beginning by the deserts that are to be, under the constant menace of the snows? Their civilizations are but fragile gildings: a volcano can blot them out, a new sea, a sand-storm. ~ Antoine De Saint Exupery

Slumbering in every human being lies an infinity of possibilities, which one must not arouse in vain. For it is terrible when the whole man resonates with echoes and echoes, none becoming a real voice. ~ Elias Canetti