“What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human […] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.”

As quoted in "Saroyan's Literary Quarantine" by Peter H. King, in The Los Angeles Times (26 March 1997).

Context: The only people I really hate are servants. They are not really human beings at all. As attributed without citation in At Home by Bill Bryson, Chapter V, "The Scullery and the Larder" p. 111

Variant: The only good human being is a dead one.
Source: Animal Farm

This I Believe (1951)
Context: I believe in human beings, but my faith is without sentimentality. I know that in environments of uncertainty, fear, and hunger, the human being is dwarfed and shaped without his being aware of it, just as the plant struggling under a stone does not know its own condition. Only when the stone is removed can it spring up freely into the light. But the power to spring up is inherent, and only death puts an end to it. I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.

"The Ethics of Human Beings Toward Non-human Beings", p. 279
The Universal Kinship (1906), The Ethical Kinship

1770s, African Slavery in America (March 1775)

Source: Watership Down

Addressing reporters at post-game press conference on Roberto Clemente Day, as quoted in &quot;Roberto Clemente&#x27;s a Man of 2 Lives ... and 2 Loves&quot; https://news.google.com/newspapers?id=zbYcAAAAIBAJ&amp;sjid=NWYEAAAAIBAJ&amp;pg=2327%2C2876682 by the Associated Press, in The Sarasota Herald-Tribune (July 26, 1970) <br class="br">Other, &lt;big&gt;&lt;big&gt;1970s&lt;/big&gt;&lt;/big&gt;, &lt;big&gt;1970&lt;/big&gt;

During a 1921 meeting with American businessman Armand Hammer, as quoted in Hammer: Witness to History by Hammer and Neil Lyndon (1988), p. 160