“said the Roman poet Terence: 'Nothing human is alien to me.' The slogan of the old Immigration and Naturalization Service could have been the reverse: To us, no aliens are human.”
Source: Hitch-22: A Memoir
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Christopher Hitchens305
British American author and journalist 1949–2011Related quotes
“We are all human; therefore, nothing human can be alien to us.”
Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet
“I am human, I consider nothing human alien to me.”
Homo sum: humani nil a me alienum puto.
Act I, scene 1, line 25 (77).
Variant translations:
I am a human and consider nothing human alien to me.
I am human, I consider nothing human to be alien to me.
I am human, therefore nothing relating to humanity is outside of my concern.
I am a man; I consider nothing human alien to me.
I am a man, I regard nothing that is human alien to me.
I am a man, I count nothing human foreign to me.
Heauton Timorumenos (The Self-Tormentor)
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) German philosopher
Das Schicksal des jüdischen Volkes ist das Schicksal Makbeths, der aus der Natur selbst trat, sich an fremde Wesen hing, und so in ihrem Dienste alles Heilige der menschlichen Natur zertreten und ermorden, von seinen Göttern (denn es waren Objekte, er war Knecht) endlich verlassen, und an seinem Glauben selbst zerschmettert werden mußte.
in Theologische Jugendschriften (1907), S. 261
The Spirit of Christianity and its Fate (1799)
Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist
"Quotes", The Educated Imagination (1963), Talk 2: The Singing School
Context: [L]iterature not only leads us toward the regaining of identity, but it also separates this state from its opposite, the world we don't like and want to get away from... We have to look at the figures of speech a writer uses, his images and symbols, to realize that underneath all the complexity of human life that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it is still with us.... Literature is still doing the same job that mythology did earlier, but filling in its huge cloudy shapes with sharper lights and deeper shadows.
Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools
" The Buried Life http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/arnold/writings/buriedlife.html" (1852), st. 2 <br class="br">Context: Alas! is even love too weak<br>To unlock the heart, and let it speak?<br>Are even lovers powerless to reveal<br>To one another what indeed they feel?<br>I knew the mass of men conceal'd<br>Their thoughts, for fear that if reveal'd<br>They would by other men be met<br>With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;<br>I knew they lived and moved<br>Trick'd in disguises, alien to the rest<br>Of men, and alien to themselves — and yet<br>The same heart beats in every human breast!
Ronald David Laing book The Politics of Experience
Source: The Politics of Experience (1967), p. 3 of Introduction
“Modern life alienates us from Nature, even our own.”
Subhash Kak (1947) Indian computer scientist
The Wishing Tree (2015)
Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing
Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 32 (p. 249)