Humanity Humans Quotes

Having this, we want that.
Owning some, we want more.
Standing here, we wish to be there.
If it's impossible, we struggle to make it happen.
Why are we like this? Why not be content with some, here, and now? Why is enough not enough?
Because humans are ambitious creatures not meant to be idle or fruitless. We strive to learn, to grow, to achieve, to amass; therefore, we will never be content. ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

Exactly. That's what's been happening here for the past ten thousand years: You've been doing what you damn well please with the world. And of course you mean to go right on doing what you damn well please with it, because the whole damn thing belongs to you. ~ Daniel Quinn

When Man realizes his littleness, his greatness can appear. But not before. ~ H.G.Wells

Few things, if anything, are more important than altruism. ~ Richie Norton

A demon obsessed with being human is a demon no longer ~ John Connolly

So our narcissism has bared forth an unflattering nakedness that shames our species. But this is humanity. This is our condition. ~ Zack Love

I am not convinced within myself that to its core and as a whole, humanity has, as some like to assume, progressed a great deal over the millennia. Human technology? Of course. Human beings? Hardly. ~ Criss Jami

This world isn't a battlefield. Someday you will realise how your success depends on a bunch of other people and that day you will be wiser. You will know how connected we all are.
Either we all make it or none of us does. ~ Jasleen Kaur Gumber

His eyeless skull took in the line of costumes, the waxy debris of the makeup table. His empty nostrils snuffed up the mixed smells of mothballs, grease, and sweat. There was something here, he thought, that nearly belonged to the gods. Humans had built a world inside the world, which reflected it in pretty much the same way as a drop of water reflects the landscape. And yet... and yet... Inside this little world they had taken pains to put all the things you might think they would want to escape from - hatred, fear, tyranny, and so forth. Death was intrigued. They thought they wanted to be taken out of themselves, and every art humans dreamt up took them further in. ~ Terry Pratchett

Every human being you see in the course of a day has a problem that's sucking up at least 70 percent of his or her radar. ~ Douglas Coupland

Peace, love and beauty are goals shared by every human heart. The question is whether our minds recognize them as such. ~ Raheel Farooq

You do not require a license to love someone; you don't need to pass any complicated tests. Love does not have age limitations, rules, or restrictions. Love is our birthright - it is the one thing that all humans know how to do, the one thing we all deserve. You can't force it or fake it. You can know someone for an entire lifetime, and not feel a drop of love for them. And you can know someone for a single day, and give your heart to them completely. ~ Nadia Scrieva

Well, anyhow, the practical outcome of all these damn democratic ideas, is that men of our quality -- yes, damn it! we have a quality -- excuse themselves from the hard and thankless service they owe -- not to the crowd, Dick, but to the race. (Much good it will do is to shirk like that in the long run.) We will not presume, we say, no. We shrug our shoulders and leave the geese, the hungry sheep, the born followers, call them what you will, to the leaders who haven't our scruples. The poor muts swallow those dead old religions no longer fit for human consumption, and we say 'let 'em.' They devour their silly newspapers. They let themselves be distracted from public affairs by games, by gambling, by shows and coronations and every soft of mass stupidity, while the stars in their courses plot against them. We say nothing. Nothing audible. We mustn't destroy the simple faith that is marching them to disaster. We mustn't question their decisions. That wouldn't be democratic. And then we sit here and say privately that the poor riff-raff are failing to adapt themselves to those terrible new conditions -- as if they had had half a chance of knowing how things stand with them. They are shoved about by patriotisms, by obsolete religious prejudices, by racial delusions, by incomprehensible economic forces. Amid a growth of frightful machinery... ~ H.G. Wells

Kill them dead with all your charms of kindness.
Then bloody bury them with that absolute gorgeous smile. ~ Mischa Temaul

Wild animals are less wild and more human than many humans of this world ~ Munia Khan

The Garden of Gethsemane narrative gives us a vivid view of Jesus' humanity".

~R. Alan Woods [1999] ~ R. Alan Woods

Why can't people get along without criticizing one another?" Urashima shakes
his head as he ponders this rudimentary question. "Never have the bush clover
blooming on the beach, nor the little crabs who skitter o'er the sand, nor the wild
geese resting their wings in yonder cove found fault with me. Would that human
beings too were thus! Each individual has his own way of living. Can we not learn
to respect one another's chosen way? One makes every effort to live in a dignified
and proper manner, without harming anyone else, yet people will carp and cavil
and try to tear one down. It's most vexing. ~ Osamu Dazai

I think humans will find their humanity sometime, somehow. ~ Robert Thurman

Were it not for frustration and humiliation
I suppose the human race would get ideas above its station. ~ Ogden Nash

There is this certain rawness of soul that puts the polished ones on edge. Some of us just step out and the sunlight illuminates our bones, nerves, veins, cells! And that's just it, we're just like that! Then the others are tinted, polished, honed and well-contemplated; when they see you walk in and they can see all of your bones, even the tiniest ones, illuminated and outlined by the sunlight, it makes them feel shaded-in, it makes them feel hidden, it makes them turn their faces away. The way you bleed yourself all over the lines just makes it too uncomfortable for them, I guess. ~ C. JoyBell C.

Have patience with the byzantine can of worms that is you. Cluttered and sloppy and chaotic, you may be, but you're easy on the eye and you're getting warmer. ~ Karl Wiggins

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

Human trafficking is an open wound on the body of contemporary society, a scourge upon the body of Christ ... It is a crime against humanity. ~ Pope Francis

Man is an extremely complex creature: he usually acts in an unselfish manner for selfish reasons. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I'm into humanity. I don't believe in God, but I believe in human beings. ~ Eddie Izzard

I'm really scared now, from choosing, from thinking and from taking risks and going out of the comfort zone. But what can it be done??
Time goes and goes, it eats people and it gives new people life... ~ Deyth Banger

One was watching the other day a red-tailed hawk, high in the heavens, circling effortlessly, without a beat of the wing, just for the fun of flying, just to be sustained by the air-currents. Then it was joined by another, and they were flying together for quite a while. They were marvellous creatures in that blue sky, and to hurt them in any way is a crime against heaven. Of course there is no heaven; man has invented heaven out of hope, for his life has become a hell, an endless conflict from birth to death, coming and going, making money, working endlessly. This life has become a turmoil, a travail of endless striving. One wonders if man, a human being, will ever live on this earth peacefully. Conflict has been the way of his life - within the skin and outside the skin, in the area of the psyche and in the society which that psyche has created. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

People would rather prefer blaming their crimes on a third party than taking responsibility upon themselves... It is their nature. ~ Tamuna Tsertsvadze

I don't know what or who we are. Days I feel like a human being, while other days I feel like a sound. I touch the world not as myself but as an echo of who I was. ~ Ocean Vuong

Humans like to consider everything as linear, when in reality everything is cyclic.

They are obsessed with straight lines. Straight roads, straight houses, straight pieces of steel, glass, and timber. Straight cut diamonds. Let's get straight to the point. Be straight with me. I am straight, not gay.

And this is how they see their lives. A linear journey, along the road of life. That is where expressions such as Highway to Hell come from.

But what about other expressions, such as the life cycle, the cycle of nature, and the weather cycle?

Because of this obsession with straight lines, they view history and historical events, as existing way back along an imaginary path, one they are sure they are far away from. Like watching a fading wake from a ship.

So when they look at the religious wars, for example, the Christians versus the Muslims, the rise and fall of Empires, democracies and dictatorships, they seem blind when comparing present day situations with those of the past.

The majority of humans see evolution as a race along a straight race track, a race they are winning by a long margin, yet they are afraid to ever slow down, in case other life catches them.

If they did slow down long enough, they may observe that the track is actually cyclic. ~ Robert Black

For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs - as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions. ~ Charles Darwin

The calling of the humanities is to make us truly human in the best sense of the word. ~ J. Irwin Miller

Any human being should be capable of three things to earn such title: live alone, hunt and drive anything with or without wheels. If you don't have these three things, you're either a slave or an animal. Any idea about being social or human has been cleverly associated with these two things, in order to make believe that being a social animal is the ideal to aspire for, especially if such animal is enslaved by a certain amount of ideals promoted by the system that gives him life and cuts it off as soon as he shows himself undeserving. ~ Robin Sacredfire

It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. ~ Anthony Burgess

Kyubey: You have no idea how much difficulty we go through trying to understand your human values. Presently there are six billion, eight hundred million of you, and you're increasing in number by a hundred every four minutes! What's the huge fuss over the death of each and every single creature?
Madoka: If that's how you think of us, then yes, I see you are our enemy. ~ Magica Quartet

All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers ... Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born. ~ Francois Fenelon

People are petty, spiteful creatures. What they can't use, hurt, steal, or control, they'll usually destroy. ~ Lorna Reid

Change is one of the scariest things in the world and yet it is also one of those variables of human existence that no one can avoid. ~ Aberjhani

If you put it as 'complex nervous systems' it sounds pretty deflationary. What's so special about a complex nervous system? But of course, that complex nervous system allows you to do calculus. It allows you to do astrophysics ... to write poetry ... to fall in love. Put under that description, when asked 'What's so special about humans ... ?', I'm at a loss to know how to answer that question. If you don't see why we'd be special ... because we can do poetry [and] think philosophical thoughts [and] we can think about the morality of our behavior, I'm not sure what kind of answer could possibly satisfy you at that point.
... I could pose the same kinds of questions of you ... So God says, 'You are guys are really, really special.' How does his saying it make us special? 'But you see, he gave us a soul.' How does our having a soul make us special? Whatever answer you give, you could always say ... 'What's so special about that? ~ Shelly Kagan

Humans without humanity, a war-torn world for eternity ~ Mouloud Benzadi

Man is now a new animal, a new and different animal; he can jump a hundred miles, see through brick walls, bombard atoms, analyse the stars, set about his business with the strength of a million horses. And so forth and so on. Yes. Yes. But all the same he goes on behaving like the weak little needy ape he used to be. He grabs, snarls, quarrels, fears, stampedes, and plays in his immense powder magazine until he seems likely to blow up the whole damned show. ~ H.G.Wells

The most wonderful study of mankind is man. Relieving human suffering and diffusing universal knowledge is humanitarian. ~ Daniel D. Palmer

One thing I've learnt about humans: you can't judge their strength by the size of their actions, but by the devotion of an act, no matter how small. ~ Dianna Hardy

I do not politicize Christianity nor my discipleship as Jesus did not politicize either His divinity nor his humanity. ~ R. Alan Woods

Humanity has determined it is supreme in the kingdom of animals, yet [the] beasts live a less tragic existence ... and many of their tragedies are a consequence of so-called human brilliance. ~ T.F. Hodge

Human beings are about 1,000 times dumber and meaner than they think they are. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

I think humans might be like butterflies; people die every day without many other people knowing about them, seeing their colors, hearing their stories ... and when humans are broken, they're like broken butterfly wings; suddenly there are so many beauties that are seen in different ways, so many thoughts and visions and possibilities that form, which couldn't form when the person wasn't broken! So it is not a very sad thing to be broken, after all! It's during the times of being broken, that you have all the opportunities to become things unforgettable! Just like the broken butterfly wing that I found, which has given me so many thoughts, in so many ways, has shown me so many words, and imaginations! But butterflies need to know, that it doesn't matter at all if the whole world saw their colors or not! But what matters is that they flew, they glided, they hovered, they saw, they felt, and they knew! And they loved the ones whom they flew with! And that is an existence worthwhile! ~ C. JoyBell C.

I love Humanity but I hate humans ~ Albert Einstein

To paraphrase Hannah Arendt - as portrayed in the recently released movie of the same name - the Nazi war criminal's actions stemmed from her well-known phrase "banality of evil," not as a result of mental illness but as a result of a lack of thinking. Their greatest error was delegating the process of thinking and decision-making to their higher ups. In Rudolf Höss's case, this would have been his superiors, particularly Heinrich Himmler.

To many this conclusion is troubling, for it suggests that if everyday, "normal," sane men and women are capable of evil, then the atrocities perpetrated during the Holocaust and other genocides could be repeated today and into the future.

Yet, this is exactly the lesson we must learn from the war criminals at Nuremberg. We must be ever wary of those who do not take responsibility for their actions. And we ourselves must be extra vigilant, particularly in this day of accelerated technological power, heightened state surveillance, and global corporate reach, that we do not delegate our thinking to others. ~ Thomas Harding

It's funny how humans can wrap their mind around things and fit them into their version of reality. ~ Rick Riordan

It is not true that the world is too tired and exhausted to produce anything worth praising. ~ Pliny The Younger

Planetologist call it the conundrum of unforeseen ecological consequence. I call it the whack-a-mole rule of human meddling. She clasped both hands like a child hammering. WHACK! We change something here. Oops, that makes another problem pop up there where we didn't expect it. WHACK! So, we whack that mole. Oops! We're so smart that we're a menace. ~ Robert Buettner

Humans were peculiar. They were by turns squeamish and appallingly violent. ~ Eileen Wilks

at first sight everyone seems like human. ~ Arzum Uzun

Those who teach the most about humanity, aren't always human. ~ Donald L. Hicks

Many things in life inspire philanthropy, such as your faith in humanity and your belief in the human spirit to overcome. ~ Oprah Winfrey

It is the mark of a supreme soul not know how to inflict pain on others. ~ Amit Kalantri

After desolation, grief brings back our humanity ~ Mason Cooley

When two human beings divided by hostility are both, at the same time, mystified - no, frightened - by the same apparition, there is a bond that springs up between them, and they find themselves united in the most unexpected way. United in their humanity - that is the only way I can describe it. We parted almost as friends. ~ Alice Munro

Human beings are social creatures - not occasionally or by accident but always. Sociability is one of our lives as both cause and effect. ~ Clay Shirky

Our government rests upon religion. It is from that source that we derive our reverence for truth and justice, for equality and liberality, and for the rights of mankind. Unless the people believe in these principles they cannot believe in our government. There are only two main theories of government in our world. One rests on righteousness and the other on force. One appeals to reason, and the other appeals to the sword. One is exemplified in the republic, the other is represented by despotism.

The government of a country never gets ahead of the religion of a country. There is no way by which we can substitute the authority of law for the virtue of man. Of course we endeavor to restrain the vicious, and furnish a fair degree of security and protection by legislation and police control, but the real reform which society in these days is seeking will come as a result of our religious convictions, or they will not come at all. Peace, justice, humanity, charity - these cannot be legislated into being. They are the result of divine grace. ~ Calvin Coolidge

People tend to put entertainers on pedestals. We're human beings, just like you. You may see us smiling, and whether we have money or not, we still have bills to pay, we still have our stresses. I think a lot of people want to focus on others' shortcomings to make themselves feel better. And it's a very sad thing. ~ Janet Jackson

It always has been so. The grievances of those who have got power, commands a great deal of attention; but the wrongs and the grievances of those people who have no power at all are apt to be absolutely ignored. That is the history of humanity right from the beginning. ~ Various

May we graciously accept our responsibility. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

All fashions are charming, or rather relatively charming, each one being a new striving, more or less well conceived, after beauty, an approximate statement of an ideal, the desire for which constantly teases the unsatisfied human mind. ~ Charles Baudelaire

Man is not himself only ... He is all that he sees; all that flows to him from a thousand sources ... He is the land, the lift of its mountain lines, the reach of its valleys. ~ Mary Hunter Austin

Death is not the greatest tragedy in life. The greatest tragedy is what dies inside us while we live. We need not fear death. We need fear only that we may exist without having sensed something of the possibilities that lie within human existence. ~ Norman Cousins

As I lived on in America, I got to truly know the people of this country - so many kind and wonderful people, people of so many races - who helped me in so many ways. Who became my friends. I realized that underneath our different accents, habits, foods, religions, ways of thinking, we shared a common humanity. ~ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Nothing is more important to human beings than an ecologically functioning, life sustaining biosphere on the earth. It is the only habitable place we know of in a forbidding universe. We all depend on it to live and we are compelled to share it; it is our only home ... the earth's biosphere seems almost magically suited to human beings and indeed it is, for we evolved through eons of intimate immersion within it. We cannot live long or well without a functioning biosphere, and so it is worth everything we have. ~ Joseph Guth

The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already sovered with scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulant as humanity. ~ G.K. Chesterton

God created human beings in his own likeness. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

While 45 percent of the land on earth is used to raise animals and food to feed them, it is estimated that only 5 percent is used to grow plant-based foods consumed directly by humans. This 5 percent, though, supplies 80 percent of the calories consumed by humans.15 ~ Richard Oppenlander

When looking across the horizon the world had a way of expanding, broadening beyond the tight narrow confines of the little boxes of pain humans tended to wall themselves into. ~ Cole McCade

I am absolutely convinced that no wealth in the world can help humanity forward, even in the hands of the most devoted worker in this cause. The example of great and pure characters is the only thing that can produce fine ideas and noble deeds. Money only appeals to selfishness and always tempts its owners irresistibly to abuse it. Can anyone imagine Moses, Jesus, or Gandhi armed with the money-bags of Carnegie? ~ Albert Einstein

Humans want to conquer everyone they can, and buy everything they see. I think this is because humans have forgotten how to be happy. It's not their fault - it's not easy figuring out how to be happy in these days of anything-but-moderation. ~ A.S. King

I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now that I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun. ~ Thomas Merton

Until society can be reclaimed by an undivided humanity that will use its collective wisdom, cultural achievements, technological innovations, scientific knowledge, and innate creativity for its own benefit and for that of the natural world, all ecological problems will have their roots in social problems. ~ Murray Bookchin

Most humans know their own "reason" only in the sense that Hume defined it, as "a slave to the passions"-and by "passions" he meant not moral passions or the passions of transcendent genius, but only low appetites or base desires, which society and economy ultimately shape and spur on in us. ~ Kenny Smith

For me, the glory of the human animal is cognitive activity. ~ Terence McKenna

Habit hath so vast a prevalence over the human mind that there is scarce anything too strange or too strong to be asserted of it. The story of the miser who, from long accustoming to cheat others, came at last to cheat himself, and with great delight and triumph picked his own pocket of a guinea to convey to his hoard, is not impossible or improbable. ~ Henry Fielding

Nothing ever stays the same, whether it be poems or humans. ~ Joy Harjo

The line that I am urging as today's conventional wisdom is not a denial of consciousness. It is often called, with more reason, arepudiation of mind. It is indeed a repudiation of mind as a second substance, over and above body. It can be described less harshly as an identification of mind with some of the faculties, states, and activities of the body. Mental states and events are a special subclass of the states and events of the human or animal body. ~ Willard Van Orman Quine

BTW A 24 week old embryo is not a human being. You're not a human being until you're in my phone book. ~ Bill Hicks

If you want to "get in touch with your feelings," fine, talk to yourself. We all do. But if you want to communicate with another thinking human being, get in touch with your thoughts. Put them in order, give them a purpose, use them to persuade, to instruct, to discover, to seduce. The secret way to do this is to write it down, and then cut out the confusing parts. ~ William Safire

But in most places, the new global diet has involved a narrowing down of what people eat. Our world contains around seven thousand edible crops, yet 95 per cent of what we eat comes from just thirty of those crops. As omnivores, humans are designed to eat a varied diet, so there's something strange and wrong when, as a species, we become so limited in our choice of foods ~ Bee Wilson

What is the point of a relationship if not to grant two people the very private privilege to uplift one another every day? ~ Kamand Kojouri

I had no idea what humans were capable of. I heard they were crafty, but how are they able to do such things?
You mean harness light and water? Speedy asked. Change the weather?
Yes.
It's only the beginning, Speedy said. There are more marvels waiting. Some not so marvelous.
Such as?
Be not in haste, said the tortoise.
There is nothing here but time.
If you live long enough, you will see.
Of course, though, you will see them from your cage.
Live long enough? I asked. Are there mortal dangers here?
The tortoise chuckled.
The boy doesn't always take very good care of his prisoners, Rex the lizard chimed in.
What do you mean? He doesn't feed us enough?
Sometimes he doesn't understand what we need to survive, Rex answered. Sometimes he plays too rough.
How can a creature able to bend the laws of nature be so cruel? I asked. ~ Patrick Jennings

Men have always hated the wolf."
"Why?" said the boy indignantly, suddenly looking very unhappy indeed.
"Maybe because they see something in the wolf that they hate and fear in themselves. Maybe because wolves take their sheep and goats, as if we shouldn't all share life's bounty. ~ David Clement-Davies

What is it," Maestra had asked quite rhetorically, "that separates human beings from the so-called lower animals? Well, as I see it, it's exactly one half-dozen significant things: Humor, Imagination, Eroticism - as opposed to the mindless, instinctive mating of glowworms or raccoons - Spirituality, Rebelliousness, and Aesthetics, an appreciation of beauty for its own sake.

"Now," she'd gone on to say, "since those are the features that define a human being, it follows that the extent to which someone is lacking in those qualities is the extent to which he or she is less than human. Capisce? And in those cases where the defining qualities are virtually nonexistent, well, what we have are entities that are north of the animal kingdom but south of humanity, they fall somewhere in between, they're our missing links."

In his grandmother's opinion, the missing link of scientific lore was neither extinct nor rare. "There're more of them, in fact, than there are of us, and since they actually seem to be multiplying, Darwin's theory of evolution is obviously wrong." Maestra's stand was that missing links ought to be treated as the equal of full human beings in the eyes of the law, that they should not suffer discrimination in any usual sense, but that their writings and utterances should be generally disregarded and that they should never, ever be placed in positions of authority.

"That could be problematic," Switters had said, straining, at the ag ~ Tom Robbins