“Being human is overrated.”

Source: The Bane Chronicles

Source: Wonder Boys

“We cannot help but use the people below us as a resource, my love,” said her two MOHmies, as one. “That is what it means to be in power. Your choice is to relinquish power forever, or to accept that and use people for good.”...
“If we are powerful,” sang her MOHmies, “we can make things better, but we are made unclean by the fact that we have power. If we are powerless we remain clean, but we cannot make things better.”
Part 2, Chapter 13, “Of Multitudes” (p. 240).
Jack Glass (2012)

Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe (26 May 1795), quoted in R. B. McDowell (ed.), The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, Volume VIII: September 1794–April 1796 (Cambridge University Press, 1969), p. 177
1790s

The Enormous Room (1922)

2000s, The Central Idea (2006)
Context: The equality of mankind is best understood in light of a two-fold inequality. The first is the inequality of mankind and of the subhuman classes of living beings that comprise the order of nature. Dogs and horses, for example, are naturally subservient to human beings. But no human being is naturally subservient to another human being. No human being has a right to rule another without the other's consent. The second is the inequality of man and God. As God's creatures, we owe unconditional obedience to His will. By that very fact however we do not owe such obedience to anyone else. Legitimate political authority—the right of one human being to require obedience of another human being—arises only from consent. The fundamental act of consent is, as the 1780 Massachusetts Bill of Rights states, "a social compact by which the whole people covenants with each citizen and each citizen with the whole people that all shall be governed by certain laws for the common good." The "certain laws for the common good" have no other purpose but to preserve and protect the rights that each citizen possesses prior to government, rights with which he or she has been "endowed by their Creator." The rights that governments exist to secure are not the gift of government. They originate in God.

Nur durch die Bildung wird der Mensch, der es ganz ist überall menschlich und von Menschheit durchdrungen.
“Ideas,” Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), § 65

Source: Endymion (1996), Chapter 44 (p. 449)
Source: Hyperion
Context: “Humanity has evolved—as far as it has evolved,” continued the old priest, “with no thanks to its predecessors or itself. Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.”
“Empathy,” Aenea said softly.

Homage to Catalonia (1938)