Quotes about human
page 56

Henry David Thoreau photo
Richard Dawkins photo
Alexander Hamilton photo
Vernor Vinge photo

“We've watched the Homo Sapiens interest group since the first appearance of the Blight. Where is this "Earth" the humans claim to be from? "Half way around the galaxy," they say, and deep in the Slow Zone. Even their proximate origin, Nyjora, is conveniently in the Slowness. We see an alternative theory: Sometime, maybe further back than the last consistent archives, there was a battle between Powers. The blueprint for this "human race" was written, complete with communication interfaces. Long after the original contestants and their stories had vanished, this race happened to get in position where it could Transcend. And that Transcending was tailor-made, too, re-establishing the Power that had set the trap to begin with.We're not sure of the details, but a scenario such as this is inevitable. What we must do is also clear. Straumli Realm is at the heart of the Blight, obviously beyond all attack. But there are other human colonies. We ask the Net to help in identifying all of them. We ourselves are not a large civilization, but we would be happy to coordinate the information gathering, and the military action that is required to prevent the Blight's spread in the Middle Beyond. For nearly seventeen weeks, we've been calling for action. Had you listened in the beginning, a concerted strike might have been sufficient to destroy the Straumli Realm. Isn't the Fall of Relay enough to wake you up? Friends, if we act together we still have a chance.Death to vermin.”

Source: A Fire Upon the Deep (1992), p. 245.

Adi Da Samraj photo
Rudy Rucker photo
Clarence Darrow photo

“The concept of communication includes all of those processes by which people influence one another… This definition is based on the premise that all actions and events have communicative aspects, as soon as they are perceived by a human being; it implies, furthermore, that such perception changes the information which an individual processes and therefor influences him.”

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) English anthropologist, social scientist, linguist, visual anthropologist, semiotician and cyberneticist

Source: Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry, 1951, p. 6 as cited in: Stewart L. Tubbs, Robert M. Carter (1978) Shared Experiences in Human Communication. p. 1

Wilhelm Lehmbruck photo

“Sculpture is the essence of things, the essence of nature, that which is perpetually human.”

Wilhelm Lehmbruck (1881–1919) German sculptor

As quoted in Expressionism (2004) by Norbert Wolf and Uta Grosenick, p. 64

Robert Harris photo
Lewis Mumford photo
Tommaso Campanella photo
Jon Cruddas photo

“About military efforts: No one wants war, neither we nor you. Our greatest efforts have been focusing on own people and forces within our boundaries, without war, to uproot the zealot Mullahs governing our country and replace them with a secular, democratic government which respects human rights and freedom.”

Amir-Abbas Fakhravar (1975) Iranian political activist

[July 2006, http://hsgac.senate.gov/_files/072006Fakhravar.pdf, "Prepared Testimony of Mr. Amir Abbas Fakhravar to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Federal Financial Management, Government Information, and International Security", PDF, U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, 2007-04-09]

“Life is each human being's workshop. If a man survives a lifetime with his creative capacities intact, he has done his part to make a better world for all men.”

Paul Rosenfels (1909–1985) American sociologist

12. Prescription for Survival
Love and Power: The Psychology of Interpersonal Creativity (1966)

Gerhard Richter photo

“Since there is no such thing as absolute rightness and truth, we always pursue the artificial, leading, human truth. We judge and make a truth that excludes other truths. Art plays a formative part in this manufacture of truth.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Notes, 1962; as cited on collected quotes on the website of Gerhard Richter: 'on Art' https://www.gerhard-richter.com/en/quotes/art-1
1960's

Thomas Hardy photo

“The Earth, say'st thou? The Human race?
By Me created? Sad its lot?
Nay: I have no remembrance of such place:
Such world I fashioned not.”

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) English novelist and poet

" God-Forgotten http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/Thomas_Hardy/16398", lines 4-8, from Poems of the Past and Present (1901)

James Martineau photo
Aldo Capitini photo
Jacob M. Appel photo

“Victory [over homophobia] may require five or maybe 20 years. Yet I have no doubt that "don't ask, don't tell" and same-sex adoption bans will be as unspeakable and inexplicable to my grandchildren as counting a slave as three-fifths of a human being.”

Jacob M. Appel (1973) American author, bioethicist, physician, lawyer and social critic

"Reparations for Gay Americans," http://freep.com/article/20090407/OPINION05/90407048 The Detroit Free Press (2009-04-07)

George W. Bush photo
Clive Staples Lewis photo

“As image and apprehension are in an organic unity, so, for a Christian, are human body and human soul.”

"Priestesses in the Church?" (1948), p. 237
God in the Dock (1970)

Daniel Levitin photo
Rollo May photo

“One does not become fully human painlessly.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Foreword to Existential-Phenomenological Alternatives for Psychology (1978) by Ronald S. Valle and Mark King

Carl von Clausewitz photo
Margaret Chase Smith photo
George Eliot photo
Bill Moyers photo

“People and places are the twin pillars on which most nonfiction is built. Every human event happens somewhere, and the reader wants to know what that somewhere was like.”

William Zinsser (1922–2015) writer, editor, journalist, literary critic, professor

Source: On Writing Well (Fifth Edition, orig. pub. 1976), Chapter 11, Writing About Places: The Travel Article, p. 80.

“Our treatment of animals is the last moral frontier, the ultimate test of our humanity, the mirror by which we can see most deeply into our own souls.”

Bernard E. Rollin (1943) American philosopher

"The Legal and Moral Bases of Animal Rights", in Ethics and Animals, edited by Harlan B. Miller and William H. Williams (Clifton, NJ: Humana Press, 1983), p. 118 https://books.google.it/books?id=JBPlBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA118.

Harry V. Jaffa photo
Dwight D. Eisenhower photo
Daniel J. Boorstin photo
Tom Robbins photo
Robert A. Heinlein photo

““The Great Egg must love human beings, he made a lot of them.”
“Same argument applies to oysters, only more so.””

Source: Beyond This Horizon (1948; originally serialized in 1942), Chapter 13, “No more privacy than a guppy in an aquarium”, p. 127

Hans Kelsen photo
Swami Vivekananda photo
Sören Kierkegaard photo
Robert A. Dahl photo
Nick Bostrom photo
Georges Bataille photo

“The human foot is commonly subjected to grotesque tortures that deform it and make it rickety. In an imbecilic way it is doomed to corns, calluses, and bunions.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927-1939

Nicholas Wade photo
Henry Moore photo
Karl Barth photo

“Nothing is more characteristic of the Hegelian system of knowledge than the fact that upon its highest pinnacle, where it becomes knowledge of knowledge, i. e. knowledge knowing of itself, it is impossible for it to have any other content but simply the history of philosophy, the account of its continuing self-exposition, in which all individual developments, coming full circle, can only be stages along the road to the absolute philosophy reached in Hegel himself. But that which knowledge is explicitly upon this topmost pinnacle as the history of philosophy, the philosophy completed in Hegel, it is implicitly all along the line: the knowledge of history and the history of knowledge, the history of truth, the history of God, as Hegel was able to say: the philosophy of History. History here has entered so thoroughly into reason, philosophy has so basically become the philosophy of history, that reason, the object of philosophy itself, has become history utterly and completely, that reason cannot understand itself other than a sits own history, and that, from the opposite point of view, it is in a position to recognize itself at once in all history in some stage of its life-process, and also in its entirety, so far as the study permits us to divine the whole. It is a matter of the production of self-movement of the thought-content in the consciousness of the thinking subject. It is not a matter of reproduction! The Hegelian way of looking is the looking of a spectator only in so far as it is in fact in principle and exclusively theory, thinking consciousness. Granting this premise, and setting aside Kierkegaard’s objection that with it the spectator might by chance have forgotten himself, that is the practical reality of his existence, then for Hegel it is also in order (only too much in order!) that the human subject, whilst looking in this manner, stands by no means apart as if it were not concerned. It is in this looking that the something seen is produced. And the thing seen actually has its reality in the fact that it is produced as the thing seen in the looking of the human subject. Man cannot participate more energetically (within the frame-work of theoretical possibility), he cannot be more forcefully transferred from the floor of the theatre on to the stage than in his theory.”

Karl Barth (1886–1968) Swiss Protestant theologian

Karl Barth Protestant Thought From Rousseau to Ritschl, 1952, 1959 p. 284-285
Protestant Thought From Rousseau to Ritschl 1952, 1956

Logan Pearsall Smith photo

“What draws us to him so closely is that he combined a disillusioned estimate of human nature sufficient to launch twenty little cynics, with a craving for love any sympathy urgent enough to turn a weaker nature into a benign sentimentalist.”

Logan Pearsall Smith (1865–1946) British American-born writer

recounting Desmond McCarthy’s description of Samuel Johnson, “English Aphorists,” p. 138
Reperusals and Recollections (1936)

David Mitchell photo
Ahmed Shah Durrani photo

“Moving a fortnight behind his vanguard, the AbdAli king himself came upon the scene. He had stormed Ballabhgarh on 3rd March and halted there for two days. On 15th March he arrived near MathurA, and wisely avoiding that reeking human shambles crossed over to the eastern bank of the Jamuna and encamped at MahAvan, six miles south-east of the city. Two miles to his west lay Gokul, the seat of the pontiff of the rich VallabhAcharya sect. The AbdAli’s policy of frightfulness had defeated his cupidity: dead men could not be held to ransom. The invader’s unsatisfied need of money was pressing him; he sought the help of ImAd’s local knowledge as to the most promising sources of booty. A detachment from his camp was sent to plunder Gokul. But here the monks were martial NAgA sannyAsis of upper India and RajputAna. Four thousand of these naked ash-smeared warriors stood outside Gokul and fought the AfghAns, till half of their own number was killed after slaying an equal force of the enemy. Then at the entreaty of the Bengal subahdAr’s envoy (Jugalkishor) and his assurance that a hermitage of faqirs could not contain any money, the AbdAli recalled the detachment. ‘All the vairAgis perished but Gokulnath [the deity of the city] was saved’, as a Marathi newsletter puts it.”

Ahmed Shah Durrani (1722–1772) founder of the Durrani Empire, considered founder of the state of Afghanistan

Rajwade, i. 63.
Jadunath Sarkar, Fall of the Mughal Empire, Volume II, Fourth Edition, New Delhi, 1991, p.70-71

Ray Comfort photo

“Imagine how wicked society would be if the fear of God and the fear of civil law were both completely removed. Imagine if a man could rape and murder, with no concerns about being punished? That’s when we would see the true heart of humanity, and that’s where we as a nation are slowly heading.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

As quoted in Mass Murder 'Normal' in World without God' http://www.wnd.com/2012/07/mass-murder-normal-in-world-without-god/, Worldnutdaily (2012-07-23)

Karl Jaspers photo
W. Somerset Maugham photo
Thomas Young (scientist) photo
Edwin Lefèvre photo
Sri Aurobindo photo

“When thou callest another a fool, as thou must, sometimes, yet do not forget that thou thyself hast been the supreme fool in humanity.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Thoughts and Aphorisms (1913), Jnana

“After all, we are human beings, and not creatures of infinite possibilities.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

"Conversations with Gordon Roper".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

Maurice Glasman, Baron Glasman photo
Johnnie Ray photo

“I've got no talent. Still sing flat as a table. I'm a sort of human spaniel. People come to see what I'm like. I make them feel, I exhaust them, I destroy them.”

Johnnie Ray (1927–1990) American singer, actor, songwriter and composer

On his audience, quoted in Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock https://books.google.com/books?id=GDqHDAAAQBAJ&pg=PT10&lpg=PT10&dq=johnnie+ray+i%27ve+got+no+talent.+Still+sing+flat+as+a+table.+I%27m+a+sort+of+human+spaniel.+People+come+to+see+what+I%27m+like.+I+make+them+feel,+I+exhaust+them,+I+destroy+them.&source=bl&ots=TA8ZYtZoiO&sig=ghfk2d2wBgArGv8PV2AlqkXAavY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjs7dWrpI7UAhUr1oMKHRwCDeMQ6AEIKjAB#v=onepage&q=johnnie%20ray%20i've%20got%20no%20talent.%20Still%20sing%20flat%20as%20a%20table.%20I'm%20a%20sort%20of%20human%20spaniel.%20People%20come%20to%20see%20what%20I'm%20like.%20I%20make%20them%20feel%2C%20I%20exhaust%20them%2C%20I%20destroy%20them.&f=false

James Marsters photo
John Trudell photo

“Every human being is a raindrop. And when enough of the raindrops become clear and coherent they then become the power of the storm.”

John Trudell (1946–2015) Native American rights activist, musician, poet

"What it Means to be a Human Being" Speech (2001)

Lee Smolin photo
Henry Adams photo
Murray Leinster photo
Thomas Hood photo

“Oh, Men, with Sisters dear!
Oh, Men, with Mothers and Wives!
It is not linen you're wearing out,
But human creatures' lives!”

Thomas Hood (1799–1845) British writer

St. 4.
1840s, The Song of the Shirt (1843)

Camille Paglia photo
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin photo
Calvin Coolidge photo
Max Frisch photo

“Everything that is human looks like a special case”

Max Frisch (1911–1991) Swiss playwright and novelist

Sketchbook 1946-1949

“Honor your humanness and all of your feelings - the messy ones, the growing pains, the ache - because we can't have the dark without the light.”

Sabrina Ward Harrison (1975) Canadian writer

Quoted in [Buchwald, Laura, 2003, http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/sharrison.html, "Authors: Sabrina Ward Harrison", The Modern Library, RandomHouse.com, 2007-09-21]

John F. Kennedy photo
Aaron Copland photo

“So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it.”

Aaron Copland (1900–1990) American composer, composition teacher, writer, and conductor

Music as an Aspect of the Human Spirit (1954).

Samuel Rogers photo
Joseph E. Stiglitz photo
Mircea Eliade photo
Emma Goldman photo
William Ellery Channing photo
William Cowper photo
Marc Chagall photo

“.. In spite of everything, there is still no more wonderful vocation than to continue to tolerate events and to work on in the name of our mission, in the name of that spirit which lives on in our teaching and in our vision of humanity and art, the spirit which can lead us Jews down the true and just path. But along the way, peoples will spill our blood, and that of others.”

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) French artist and painter

In the last lines of his lecture at the Congress of the Jewish Scientific Institute Vilnius, in 1935, as quoted in Marc Chagall - the Russian years 1906 – 1922, editor Christoph Vitali, exhibition catalogue, Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 1991, p. 58
after 1930

Alex Steffen photo

“Kids born today will see us navigate past the first greatest test of humanity, which is: can we actually be smart enough to live on a planet without destroying it?”

Alex Steffen (1968) American writer and futurist

Quoted in ABC show Earth 2100 Earth 2100, 2 June 2009, IMDb http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1471346/quotes,.

Orson Scott Card photo
Frederick Douglass photo

“They [human beings] are unwilling to gamble that God made those people who are skilled at rational argumentation uniquely virtuous. They protect themselves and others from cleverness by obscuring their preferences.”

James G. March (1928–2018) American sociologist

Jame G. March "How Decisions Happen in Organizations"; Human-Computer Interaction, 1991, Volume 6 pp. 95-117

Owen Lovejoy photo

“The principle of enslaving human beings because they are inferior, is this. If a man is a cripple, trip him up. If he is old and weak, and bowed with the weight of years, strike him, for he cannot strike back. If idiotic, take advantage of him, and if a child, deceive him. This, sir, this is the doctrine of Democrats and the doctrine of devils as well, and there is no place in the universe outside the five points of hell and |the Democratic Party where the practice and prevalence of such doctrines would not be a disgrace.”

Owen Lovejoy (1811–1864) American politician

As quoted in His Brother's Blood: Speeches and Writings, 1838–64 https://books.google.com/books?id=qMEv8DNXVbIC&pg=PA193&lpg=PA193&dq=%22The+principle+of+enslaving+human+beings+because+they+are+inferior%22&source=bl&ots=YA6W9JoaPr&sig=aO15r4OJEVD8bQUIjM34u42GjXg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiM9vuXwsrLAhWJeD4KHWvpAUcQ6AEIHjAB#v=onepage&q=%22The%20principle%20of%20enslaving%20human%20beings%20because%20they%20are%20inferior%22&f=false (2004), edited by William Frederick Moore and Jane Ann Moore, p. 193
1860s, Speech to the U.S. House of Representatives (April 1860)