Human Value Quotes

A half century from now, our grandchildren are likely to look back at the era of mass employment in the market with the same sense of utter disbelief as we look upon slavery and serfdom in former times. The very idea that a human being's worth was measured almost exclusively by his or her productive output of goods and services and material wealth will seem primitive, even barbaric, and be regarded as a terrible loss of human value to our progeny living in a highly automated world where much of life is lived on the Collaborative Commons. ~ Jeremy Rifkin

Control of senses is an important human value. ~ Sathya Sai Baba

Failure to recognize one's own absolute significance is equivalent to a denial of human worth; this is a basic error and the origin of all unbelief. If one is so faint-hearted that he is powerless even to believe in himself, how can he believe in anything else? The basic falsehood and evil of egoism lie not in this absolute self-consciousness and self-evaluation of the subject, but in the fact that, ascribing to himself in all justice an absolute significance, he unjustly refuses to others this same significance. Recognizing himself as a centre of life (which as a matter of fact he is), he relegates others to the circumference of his own being and leaves them only an external and relative value. ~ Vladimir S. Soloviev

Western culture has allowed for the open admiration of beauty because it is a human value and a pleasure, rather than some perilous evil. ~ Olivia Pierson

When physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, contribute to the detection of concrete human woes and to the development of plans for remedying them and relieving the human estate, they become moral; they become part of the apparatus of moral inquiry or science? When the consciousness of science is fully impregnated with the consciousness of human value, the greatest dualism which now weighs humanity down, the split between the material, the mechanical and the scientific and the moral and ideal will be destroyed. ~ John Dewey

I have three commitments. Number one commitment is promotion of human value. Number two commitment is promotion of race harmony. Number three commitment is about Tibet. My retirement is the third commitment. The previous two commitments, to my death, I have committed. ~ Dalai Lama

Little is the imagination of the person who believes that the future of another may be determined by his/her past. We are so much more than our minds and our memories! We are in fact transcendent souls. If you determine what is ahead by what you can see when you look back, then you will in fact never behold what actually stands in front of you. ~ C. JoyBell C.

It is an awesome thing to comprehend the magnitude of the fact that what a human being dreams and imagines can be realized. The power of that truth needs to be directed toward our creation of a future that is worthy of true human value and the world civilization. ~ Vanna Bonta

One must believe that private dilemmas are, if deeply examined, universal, and so, if expressed, have a human value beyond the private, and one must also believe in the vehicle for expressing them, in the talent. ~ May Sarton

I seem most instinctively to believe in the human value of creative writing, whether in the form of verse or fiction, as a mode of truth-telling, self-expression and homage to the twin miracles of creation and consciousness. ~ John Updike

war, instead of finishing in 1945, would have ended in 1948 had the Government Code and Cypher School not been able to read the Enigma cyphers and produce the Ultra intelligence." During this period of delay, additional lives would have been lost in Europe, and Hitler would have been able to make greater use of his V-weapons, inflicting damage throughout southern England. The historian David Kahn summarizes the impact of breaking Enigma: "It saved lives. Not only Allied and Russian lives but, by shortening the war, German, Italian, and Japanese lives as well. Some people alive after World War II might not have been but for these solutions. That is the debt that the world owes to the codebreakers; that is the crowning human value of their triumphs. ~ Simon Singh

Loss of social standing is an ever-present threat for individuals whose social acceptance is based on behavioral traits rather than unconditional human value. ~ Melissa V. Harris-Perry

A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups. ~ Isabel Wilkerson

Years ago nobody was elected on the economic ticket. It was either the education platform, or it was health or it was other issues. It is only recently that economic values have superceded every other human value. ~ Anita Roddick

The rich and powerful are going to survive longer, but the effects are very real―and they're getting worse very quickly as more and more people get marginalized because they play no role in profit-making, which is considered the only human value. Well, the environmental problems are simply much more significant in scale than anything else in the past. And there's a fair possibility―certainly a possibility high enough so that no rational person would exclude it―that within a couple hundred years the world's water-level will have risen to the point that most of human life will have been destroyed. ~ Noam Chomsky

The stones in your driveway may have come from the slaves who spend all day breaking rocks because it's cheaper for the company to get them from India, where the labor is free. We are all connected. And we all have human value. That's what my work is about. ~ Lisa Kristine

Your pain and your hurt is no matter for anyone.Now human value is just like a bottle of Coca-Cola,people are interested in you till they are enjoying sip up to their mood after that they throw you in dustbin and search another drink ~ Mohammed Zaki Ansari

My idea of marriage, as of every other partnership, ... is that each member shall contribute to it his or her personality, unrepressed and uncoerced. Thus, and only thus, we obtain the most complex synthesis possible, which may well surpass in beauty, as it surely does in interest and human value, the separate elements of such an association. ~ Phyllis Bentley

Human beings by nature want happiness and do not want suffering. With that
feeling everyone tries to achieve happiness and tries to get rid of suffering, and everyone has the basic right to do this. In this way, all here are the same, whether rich or poor, educated or uneducated, Easterner or Westerner, believer or non-believer, and within believers whether Buddhist, Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and so on. Basically, from the viewpoint of real human value we are all the same. ~ Dalai Lama

There has to be something other than keeping busy that gives human life value, because our society so often functions as if 'productivity' and/or 'usefulness' are the measures of human value, and - particularly for artists - this is deeply problematic. We shouldn't given in. ~ Tasha Golden

At the present moment, in the prevailing situation, what is most essential is the cultivation of love. Losing love mankind has lost its humanness. Love is the Supreme human value. Truth, righteousness, peace and non-violence are other human values. Knowing these values, men are foolishly leading valueless lives. ~ Sathya Sai Baba

No one wants growth, constant expansion, physical swelling. Growth is not a human value; it's a means to the ends of sufficiency and security. Once we have enough, no one wants more, unless it is sold to us as a cheap substitute for something else, something non-material. ~ Donella Meadows

In financing growing companies, we always looked for human value that didn't appear on the balance sheet. ~ Michael Milken

Our philosophy is to rob everything as much as possible and forget about tomorrow ... But it makes a certain sense if the sole human value is making as much wealth as you can tomorrow. You don't care what happens down the road and you don't care what happens to anybody else. It makes perfect sense. If it destroys the world, well, it's not my problem. ~ Noam Chomsky

My main concern is meeting with public because my main commitment, main interest is promotion of human value, human affection, compassion and religious harmony. ~ Dalai Lama

I realize then that the disappearance of a culture does not signify the disappearance of human value, but simply of certain means of expressing this value, yet the fact remains that I have no sympathy for the current European civilization and do not understand its goals, if it has any. So I am really writing for friends who are scattered throughout the corners of the globe. ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

Self-esteem is not a value that, once achieved, is maintained automatically thereafter; like every other human value, including life itself, it can be maintained only by action. Self-esteem, the basic conviction that one is competent to live, can be maintained only so long as one is engaged in a process of growth, only so long as one is committed to the task of increasing one's efficacy. In living entities, nature does not permit stillness: when one ceases to grow, one proceeds to disintegrate
in the mental no less than in the physical. ~ Ayn Rand

The effort to eliminate the formative role of the mind, making the artifact more important than the artificer, reduces mystery to absurdity; and that affirmation of absurdity is the life-heresy of the present generation. This reductionism turns at last into the drooling blankness of 'Waiting for Godot' or 'Krapp's Last Tape,' with their representation of boredom and tedium as the inevitable climax of human existence. This in itself is a sardonic final commentary on the mechanical world picture, the power system, and the subjective non-values derived from them. For a technology that denies reality to the subjective life cannot claim any human value for even its own highest products. ~ Lewis Mumford

Dagny, there's nothing of any importance in life - except how well you do your work. Nothing. Only that. Whatever else you are, will come from that. It's the only measure of human value. All the codes of ethics they'll try to ram down your throat are just so much paper money put out by swindlers to fleece people of their virtues. The code of competence is the only system of morality that's on a gold standard. When you grow up, you'll know what I mean. ~ Ayn Rand

The state exists for man,not man for the state.The same may be said ofscience. These are old phrases,coined by people who saw in human individuality the highest human value .I would hesitate to repeat them,were it not for the ever recurring danger that they may be forgotten,especially in these days of organization and stereotypes. ~ Albert Einstein

The point is, you have an ethnic heritage and you have a human heritage. Your human heritage includes everything of human value. ~ Stanley Crouch

Legend claimed Berserkers could move with such speed that they seemed invisible to the human eye until the moment they attacked. They possessed unnatural senses: the olfactory acuity of a wolf, the auditory sensitivity of a bat, the strength of twenty men, the penetrating eyesight of an eagle. The Berserkers had once been the most fearless and feared warriors ever to walk Scotland nearly seven hundred years ago. They had been Odin's elite Viking army. Legend claimed they could assume the shape of a wolf or a bear as easily as the shape of a man. And they were marked by a common feature-unholy blue eyes that glowed like banked coals. ~ Karen Marie Moning

The names of Northern railway stations in a timetable where he would like to imagine himself stepping from the train on an autumn evening when the trees are already bare and smelling strongly in the keen air, an insipid publication for people of taste, full of names that he has not heard since childhood, may have far greater value for him than five volumes of philosophy, and lead people of taste to say that for a man of talent, he has very stupid tastes. ~ Marcel Proust

We can have wilderness without freedom; we can have wilderness without human life at all, but we cannot have freedom without wilderness, we cannot have freedom without leagues of open space beyond the cities, where boys and girls, men and women, can live at least part of their lives under no control but their own desires and abilities, free from any and all direct administration by their fellow men. ~ Edward Abbey

Human mind is the most unpredictable machine in the world. Never could one draw a reason from it.
(Dr Abin. From Broken Fourth Wall) ~ Dr. Abin

You have to understand everyone has a different path to walk and therefore your preparation may be different from other people you know. Your preparation will include making sure you have healed from past hurts and embraced your true value and potential as a woman. Your preparation is a process and it's all about becoming and being the woman God has truly designed you to be. ~ Stephan Labossiere

The human race has been telling stories since it began. ~ Doris Lessing

I ask: which of the two, civil or natural life, is more likely to become insufferable to those who live it? We see about us practically no people who do not complain about their existence; many even deprive themselves of it to the extent they are able, and the combination of divine and human laws is hardly enough to stop this disorder. ~ Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Thus the story describes a full circle ... a vicious circle as all circles are, despite their posing as apples, or planets, or human faces. ~ Vladimir Nabokov

As a part of the holy trinity, Jesus was regarded as divine, and in predominant Christian belief this divinity was not compatible with human copulation. So Mary was a virgin, with the baby Jesus implanted by divine intervention.
This was of course a marked departure from other religions in the classical
world that had not ventured such a complex statement about divine presence among mortals, and that had often been quite comfortable with the idea of sexual exploits among the gods and as sources of other gods. ~ Peter N. Stearns

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence. ~ George Eliot

The pro-death view should be of interest even to those who do not accept it. One of its valuable features is that it offers a unique challenge to those pro-lifers who reject a legal right to abortion. Whereas a legal pro-choice position does not require a pro-lifer to have an abortion - it allows a choice - a legal pro-life position does prevent a pro-choicer from having an abortion. Those who think that the law should embody the pro-life position might want to ask themselves what they would say about a lobby group that, contrary to my arguments in Chapter 4 but in accordance with pro-lifers' commitment to the restriction of procreative freedom, recommended that the law become pro-death. A legal pro-death policy would require even pro-lifers to have abortions. Faced with this idea, legal pro-lifers might have a newfound interest in the value of choice. ~ David Benatar

A historian is interested in the past because he is interested in life ... a deeply felt need to assure the continuity of human life and discover its meaning, even if the goal is never fully realized. ~ Ralph Davis

Human experience depends on everything that can influence states of the human brain, ranging from changes in our genome to changes in the global economy. ~ Sam Harris

Whence, then, did the cathedral derive its power? Clearly here: It took back the family into the confidences of religion. It taught man and woman how the human and the divine love could go hand in hand. ~ Jenkin Lloyd Jones

We've always lived in dark times. There has always been a range of human experience from the sublime to the brutal, and stories reflect it. It's no less brutal now; each age has its horrors. ~ Terri Windling

How loose he seemed to himself, under the stars! The spaces between the stars were pores, out of which human meaning evaporated. ~ Annie Dillard

Butterflies have always had wings; people have always had legs. While history is marked by the hybridity of human societies & the desire for movement, the reality of most of migration today reveals the unequal relations between rich & poor, between North and South, between whiteness and its others. ~ Harsha Walia

I think 90 percent of what/who we are is never really verbally communicated.... ~ Amy Krouse Rosenthal

People think celebrities don't have to worry about human things like sickness and death and rent. It's like you've traveled to this Land of Celebrity, this other country. ~ David Duchovny

I think it's strange - so alike and yet so different! We are capable of working together, of building the Pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China, the cathedrals of Europe and the temples of Peru. We can compose unforgettable music, work in hospitals, create new computer programs.
"But at some moment all this loses its meaning, and we feel alone, as if we were part of another world, different from the one we have helped to build."
"At times, when others need our help, we grow desperate because this prevents us from enjoying life. At other times, when nobody needs us, we feel useless.
"But that's the way we are. We are complex human beings. Why despair? ~ Anonymous

In the end, I feel that one has to have a bit of neurosis to go on being an artist. A balanced human seldom produces art. It's that imbalance which impels us. I often think that all I want to do now is to avoid suicide, accidental or otherwise. Other than that, I think living on the edge is what drives my work and me beyond a certain point. The artist lives with anxiety. When you finally reach a plateau of achievement, there comes a new anxiety - the hunger to push on still further. That angst is what makes you go forward. ~ Beverly Pepper

Dive deeply into the miracle of life and let the tips of your wings be burnt by the flame, let your feet be lacerated by the thorns, let your heart be stirred by human emotion, and let your soul be lifted beyond the earth. ~ Vilayat Inayat Khan

The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in. - Robert A. Heinlein ~ Larry Niven

It's a required part of your film history to know who Woody is. His movies are so wonderful, and not just funny but so insightful about human behavior. ~ Scarlett Johansson

We are loved. Born out of love, into love, to know love, and to be loved. Yes, we were born into a fallen, sorry world, which is at the same time more lovely than any fairy tale. It is both. And in this beautiful, heartbreaking world, God - the eternal, omniscient, amazing One - loves human beings. Including you. Especially you. ~ Stasi Eldredge

We shouldn't assume that women and girls don't know the difference between reality and fantasy. We don't fear that men who read murder mysteries and thrillers are going to have a hard time not becoming serial killers, so why should we assume that a girl won't know that she doesn't have to change from a mermaid to human in order to find love just because of a movie? ~ Lyssa Kay Adams

Marx saw exploitation in terms of the rewards of human labor, but we can see it in terms of all the values of our society. ~ Charles A. Reich

Human nature has nevertheless been changed by the ever new appearance of these teachers of the purpose of existence: It now has one additional need - the need for the ever new appearance of such teachers and teachings of a "purpose." Gradually, man has become a fantastic animal that has to fulfill one more condition of existence than any other animal: man has to believe, to know, from time to time why he exists; his race cannot flourish without a periodic trust in life - without faith in reason in life. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The further human society drifts away from nature, the less we understand interdependence. ~ Peter Senge

The greatest gift at Christmas is love. The love that bind us together us one Human Family. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

There's nothing I value more than the closeness of friends and family, a smile as I pass someone on the street. ~ Willie Stargell

Nature cannot be reprogrammed forever. Humans are not meant to run like software. You cannot hack the human condition. ~ Alex London

Is the human condition not defined by an endless struggle to control the ego's subterfuges? ~ Romeo Dallaire

How can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time. The Moralist and the Revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite under the Moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are are work and fresh dynamite is being tamped un place to blow Marx to the moon. ~ George Orwell

It takes the human voice to infuse them with the shades of deeper meaning. ~ Maya Angelou

Feminism has exceeded its proper mission of seeking political equality for women and has ended by rejecting contingency, that is, human limitation by nature or fate. ~ Camille Paglia