Quotes about humanity
page 24

“But the bottom line is that, as humans, we are by nature selfish creatures. The only way we care about anything, really, is by making it about us.”

Sarah Dessen book The Moon and More

Source: The Moon and More

Way, Nature, Selfishness

“You are healed." Allegra nodded. "You are no longer a Silver Blood." She paused. "But you are no longer a vampire either."
Bliss started. No longer a vampire-but what did that mean? Did it mean she was just human?”

Melissa de la Cruz book The Van Alen Legacy

Source: The Van Alen Legacy

“I love Humanity but I hate humans”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

A comment of Einstein's recalled by John Wheeler in Albert Einstein: His influence on physics, philosophy and politics edited by Peter C. Aichelburg, Roman Ulrich Sexl, and Peter Gabriel Bergmann (1979), p. 202
Attributed in posthumous publications
Variant: I love to travel, but I hate to arrive.

Love, Hate

“Out of the cacophony of random suffering and chaos that can mark human life, the life artist sees or creates a symphony of meaning and order. A life of wholeness does not depend on what we experience. Wholeness depends on how we experience our lives.”

Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner

Life, Suffering, Dependency

“The potential beauty of human life is constantly made ugly by man's ever-recurring song of retaliation.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

Life, Beauty

“People talk too much. Humans aren't descended from monkeys. They come from parrots.”

Carlos Ruiz Zafón book The Shadow of the Wind

Source: The Shadow of the Wind

People

“Results aside, the ability to have complete faith in another human being is one of the finest qualities a person can possess.”

Haruki Murakami book The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Source: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Faith, Personality

“Every civilization sees itself as the center of the world and writes its history as the central drama of human history.”

Samuel P. Huntington (1927–2008) American political scientist

Source: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order

World, History

“Human beings are strange creatures. As people come across one another they produce various outcomes. Good things, sometimes. And other times, bad.”

Natsuki Takaya (1973) Manga artist

Source: Fruits Basket, Vol. 16

People, Time

“I've seen the meanness of humans till I dont know why God aint put out the sun and gone away.”

Cormac McCarthy book Outer Dark

Source: Outer Dark (1968)

God, Sun

“I so seldom had to dispose of a human body myself, I was at a loss. Fairies turned into dust, and vampires flaked away. Demons had to be burned. Humans were very troublesome.”

Charlaine Harris Deadlocked

Source: Deadlocked

Loss

“Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

Idea, Affliction

“There is no human problem which could not be solved if people would simply do as I advise.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

People, Problem

“No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity.”

Edith Wharton book The House of Mirth

Source: "The House of Mirth" http://books.google.com/books?id=plFdLlYHwZ8C&pg=PA69&lpg=PA69&dq=No+insect+hangs+its+nest+on+threads+as+frail+as+those+which+will+sustain+the+weight+of+human+vanity.&source=bl&ots=j0EPPhjIZW&sig=MQMjyNy5yKK97Ok4bGqRWfC3obE&hl=en&ei=T5F0TMqyMIuisAOczpyMBg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=No%20insect%20hangs%20its%20nest%20on%20threads%20as%20frail%20as%20those%20which%20will%20sustain%20the%20weight%20of%20human%20vanity.&f=false (1905), ch. X, pg. 69

“Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Starship Troopers

Source: Starship Troopers

Nature

“There was nothing particularly wrong with them; they were just the ordinary garden variety of human garbage.”

Robert Penn Warren book All the King's Men

Source: All the King's Men

“Any situation in which some men prevent others from engaging in the process of inquiry is one of violence;… to alienate humans from their own decision making is to change them into objects.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Men, Decision, Change

“Sooner or later…one has to take sides – if one is to remain human.”

Graham Greene book The Quiet American

Pt. IV, ch. 2, pg 230
Source: The Quiet American (1955)

“They wanted genuine intimacy, but they could not get even normally near to anyone, because they scorned to take the first steps, they scorned the triviality which forms common human intercourse.”

D.H. Lawrence book Sons and Lovers

Source: Sons and Lovers

“Maybe that is what beauty was, for humans. Accidents, imperfections, placed inside a pretty pattern. Asymmetry. The defiance of mathematics.”

Matt Haig (1975) British writer

Source: The Humans

Beauty, Mathematics

“Intuition is the art, peculiar to the human mind, of working out the correct answer from data that is, in itself, incomplete or even, perhaps, misleading.”

Isaac Asimov book Forward the Foundation

Source: Forward the Foundation

Art

“No culture in human history ever suffered because its people became too reasonable or too desirous of having evidence in defense of their core beliefs.”

Sam Harris Letter to a Christian Nation

Sam Harris in * 2006
September
The Temple Of Reason
Bethany
Saltman
The Sun
0744-9666
http://thesunmagazine.org/issues/369/the_temple_of_reason?page=3
2014-05-04
2000s
Source: Letter to a Christian Nation

People, History, Suffering

“She's a sort of human vampire-bat”

P.G. Wodehouse (1881–1975) English author

“Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1977) Nigerian writer

Source: https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/15-quotes-from-chimamanda-adichie-that-have-change/

People

“Elephants can remember, but we are human beings and mercifully human beings can forget.”

Agatha Christie Elephants Can Remember

Source: Elephants Can Remember

Forgetting

“There was a sound like a human yawn, and then the skull turned slightly toward me and asked, "What's up, boss?"

"Evil's afoot."

"Well, sure," Bob said, "because it refuses to learn the metric system. Otherwise it'd be up to a meter by now.”

Jim Butcher book White Night

Source: White Night

Learning, Evil

“Disagreement is not necessarily a reason to head for Splitsville. In fact, a relationship without disagreement is probably too brittle to last. Some of the best human bonds are forged in the fire of disagreement.”

Jerry Spinelli (1941) American children's writer

Source: Today I Will: A Year of Quotes, Notes, and Promises to Myself

“I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are yours. Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret of what it means to be human.”

Frederick Buechner (1926) Poet, novelist, short story writer, theologian

Secret

“No human being can be more human than another human being. I liberate you from my ignorance.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

“Caring passionately about something isn't against nature, and it isn't against human nature. It's what we're here to do.”

Annie Dillard (1945) American writer

Nature, Passion

“We humans are conflicted beings. Our beliefs don't always harmonize with our instincts, and our behavior doesn't always reflect our beliefs…. We wage war between the person we are and the person we hope to become.”

Brandon Mull (1974) American fiction writer

War, Hope, Behavior, Personality

“I want my children to understand the world, but not just because the world is fascinating and the human mind is curious. I want them to understand it so that they will be positioned to make it a better place.”

Howard Gardner (1943) American developmental psychologist

Howard Gardner (1983), "Multiple approaches to understanding," in: Charles M. Reigeluth (ed.) Instructional-design Theories and Models: A new paradigm of ..., Volume 2. p. 69-90

Children, World, Understanding

“Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.”

Harper Lee book To Kill a Mockingbird

Source: To Kill a Mockingbird

Women, Men, Truth, Lie

“Result of self-consciousness: audience and actor are the same. I live my life as a spectacle for myself, for my own edification. I live my life but I don't live in it. The hoarding instinct in human relations.”

Susan Sontag (1933–2004) American writer and filmmaker, professor, and activist

Source: Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

Life

“True beauty is about who you are as a human being, your principles, your moral compass.”

Ellen DeGeneres (1958) American stand-up comedian, television host, and actress

Source: Seriously... I'm Kidding

Beauty, Beauty

“For truly we are all angels temporarily hiding as humans.”

Brian L. Weiss

Angels

“The basis of all human fears, he thought. A closed door, slightly ajar.”

Stephen King book 'Salem's Lot

Source: 'Salem's Lot

Fear

“I am a flawed human being - a far more flawed human being than you
realize.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

“Till we can become divine, we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for change we sink to something lower.”

Anthony Trollope book Barchester Towers

Source: Barchester Towers

Change

“At first she was overjoyed that he would be with her, but then she recalled that human people could not live under the water, and he could only visit her father's palace as a dead man.”

Hans Christian Andersen book The Little Mermaid

Source: The Little Mermaid

People, Water, Dead

“And what greater might do we possess as human beings than our capacity to question and to learn?”

Ann Druyan (1949) American author and producer

Question, Learning

“Each creature had something it excelled at, he supposed. Humans could manage knots easily, and cats could do everything else.”

Jim Butcher book The Aeronaut's Windlass

Source: The Aeronaut's Windlass

Cats

“Sometimes humans hit on a moment of profundity more complete than their dim minds could comprehend, and they took that nugget of truth and dumped it in the refuse for the bards and the poets to find, and mangle into yodeling paeans of love.”

Kelley Armstrong book Haunted

Source: Haunted

Love, Truth

“There are people who cannot risk loneliness with the experience. They always have to be in a flock and have human contact.”

Marie-Louise von Franz (1915–1998) Swiss psychologist and scholar

Source: Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology

People, Loneliness

“In all human sorrow nothing gives comfort but love and faith, and that in the sight of Christ's compassion for us no sorrow is trifling.”

Leo Tolstoy book Anna Karenina

Source: Anna Karenina

Love, Faith, Christ

“Oh my God!" said one of the Ambers. "Is this not the worst trip ever? Did you see the snow?"
She was a sharp one, this Amber. What would she notice next? The train? The moon? The hilarious vagaries of human existence? Her own head?”

Maureen Johnson book Let It Snow

Source: Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances

God, Training

“Holly: Stay back human. You don't know what you're dealing with.”

Eoin Colfer Artemis Fowl

Source: Artemis Fowl (2001)

“Gods have great power, but only humans have creativity, the power to change history.”

Rick Riordan book The Red Pyramid

Source: The Red Pyramid

God, History, Change

“What are you, a baby? Jeez, if you’re going to kill humans, the least you could do is learn to die with some dignity. (Wulf)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Kiss of the Night

Learning, Baby

“In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.”

Dan Simmons book Hyperion

Source: Hyperion

Food, Dead

“Christmas it seems to me is a necessary festival; we require a season when we can regret all the flaws in our human relationships: it is the feast of failure, sad but consoling.”

Graham Greene (1904–1991) English writer, playwright and literary critic

Source: Travels With My Aunt

Sadness, Failure, Christmas, Season

“Just because a person is beautiful doesn't mean there's no soul beneath. Doesn't mean that person hasn't suffered like everyone else, doesn't mean they don't hope to still be a good human being in an awful world.”

David Levithan (1972) American author and editor

Source: Naomi and Ely's No Kiss List

World, Beauty, Hope, Soul

“We humans have always sought to increase our personal energy in the only manner we have known, by seeking to psychologically steal it from the others--an unconscious competition that underlies all human conflict in the world.”

James Redfield book The Celestine Prophecy

Source: The Celestine Prophecy

World, Personality

“I'm quite sure more people fake an awful lot of everyday human contact. I just fake all of it." --Dexter”

Jeff Lindsay book Darkly Dreaming Dexter

Source: Darkly Dreaming Dexter

People

“The smallest indivisible human unit is two people, not one; one is a fiction. From such nets of souls societies, the social world, human life springs.”

Tony Kushner (1956) American playwright and screenwriter

Life, People, World, Soul

“The doctor of the future will give no medicine, but will interest his (sic)patient in the care of the human frame, in diet and in the cause and prevention of disease”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Disease, Future

“It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces and they stagger on, coughing and searching, and finding.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

“You’re not a human being until you value something more than the life of your body. And the greater the thing you live and die for the greater you are.”

Orson Scott Card The Worthing Chronicle

Source: The Worthing Chronicle

Life

“True character is revealed in the choices a human being makes under pressure - the greater the pressure, the deeper the revelation, the truer the choice to the character's essential nature.”

Robert McKee (1941) American academic specialised in seminars for screenwriters

Source: Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting

Nature

“It was common enough, to see so much death and want a child. Common, therefore human, and he wanted it all the more. When the wounded were screaming, you dreamed of sharing a little house somewhere, of an ordinary life, a family line, connection.”

Ian McEwan book Atonement

Source: Atonement

Life, Death, Family, Dreams

“A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it.”

Barbara Kingsolver The Bean Trees

Source: The Bean Trees

Personality

“We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.”

Malcolm Gladwell book Blink

Source: Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Problem

“Everybody has a vocation to some form of life-work. However, behind that call (and deeper than any call), everybody has a vocation to be a person to be fully and deeply human in Christ Jesus.”

Brennan Manning (1934–2013) writer, American Roman Catholic priest and United States Marine

Source: The Wisdom of Tenderness: What Happens When God's Fierce Mercy Transforms Our Lives

Life, Christ, Personality

“To err is human. To loaf is Parisian.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Les feuilles d'automne (1831)
Variant: To divinise is human, to humanise is divine.
Source: Les Misérables

“Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.”

Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) Novelist, screenwriter

Intelligence

“Only in our darkest hour do we find the light. Humans are destructive by nature. The world is lacking balance. Terrors are beginning to triumph over the simple joys. Stand back and watch, because you're going to be here when we fall.”

Amelia Atwater-Rhodes (1984) Novelist

World, Nature, Light, Joy

“Tell me how you crumble when you hit the wall, the place you cannot go beyond by the strength of your own will. What carries you to the other side of that wall, to the fragile beauty of your own humanness?”

Oriah Mountain Dreamer (1954) Canadian author

Beauty

“Humans aren’t a protected class. (Acheron)
Really? (Jaden)
Yeah. Savitar shares your ‘all humans are vermin’ mind set. (Savitar)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Acheron

“I always had a repulsive need to be something more than human.”

David Bowie (1947–2016) British musician, actor, record producer and arranger

“I realize, for the first time, how very lonely I've been in the arena. How comforting the presence of another human being can be.”

Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games

Source: The Hunger Games

Time

“Every man has within himself the entire human condition”

Michel De Montaigne book Essays

Book III, Ch. 2
Essais (1595), Book III
Variant: Every man bears the whole stamp of the human condition.

“One of my favorite things about hanging out with the monsters is the healing. Straight humans seemed to get killed on me a lot. Monsters survived. Let's hear it for the monsters.”

Laurell K. Hamilton book Cerulean Sins

Source: Cerulean Sins

“There are times, young fellah, when every one of us must make a stand for human right and justice, or you never feel clean again.”

Arthur Conan Doyle book The Lost World

Source: The Lost World

Justice, Feeling, Time

“All human behavior has a reason. All behavior is solving a problem.”

Michael Crichton (1942–2008) American author, screenwriter, film producer

Source: Disclosure

Behavior, Problem

“Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith. Faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

Faith, Universe

“Life is long, and sometimes cruel. Sometimes victims are needed. Someone has to take on that role. And human bodies are fragile, easily damaged. Cut them, and they bleed.”

Haruki Murakami book Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Source: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Life

“the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons”

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) Jewish-American political theorist

Evil, Personality

“Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.”

Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) Novelist, short story writer

Source: Education of a Wandering Man

Way, History, Question

“I can't eat and I can't sleep. I'm not doing well in terms of being a functional human, you know?”

Ned Vizzini book It's Kind of a Funny Story

Variant: I'm not doing well in terms of being a functional human.
Source: It's Kind of a Funny Story

Sleep, Sad

“Denial, perhaps, is a necessary human mechanism to cope with the heartaches of life.”

Richard Paul Evans book The Christmas Box

Source: The Christmas Box

Life

“Then I have some bad news for you, because humans are going to destroy each other as soon as it becomes easy enough to, which will be very soon.”

Jonathan Safran Foer book Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Source: Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

“The first duty of a human being is to assume the right relationship to society -- more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) American feminist, writer, commercial artist, lecturer and social reformer

“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 339

“Stories took twists and turns down fairy-tale paths or down very human everyday ones. You think you’re at the end of the book, and it’s only the end of a chapter.”

Deb Caletti (1963) American writer

Source: The Story of Us

Books, Thinking

“You're my brother."

"Those words don't mean anything where we're concerned. We aren't human. Their rules don't apply to us. Stupid laws about what DNA can be mixed with what. Hypocritical, really, considering. We're already experiments.”

Cassandra Clare The City of Lost Souls

Source: City of Lost Souls

Stupidity, Law

“Happiest day of my life when my dad made him human. (Devyn)
Happy for you, bonebag…It cost me my girlfriend. (Vik)
It was a lamp, Vik, not a girlfriend. (Devyn)
I really loved that lamp. She lit up my entire world. (Vik)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Born of Ice

Love, Life, Happiness, World

“Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

42 min 33 sec
Variant: A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Source: Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), The Persistence of Memory [Episode 11]
Context: What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

Books, Time

“What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself.”

Jeffrey Eugenides book The Virgin Suicides

Source: The Virgin Suicides

Life, Death, Nature, Thinking

“The absolute yearning of one human body for another particular body and its indifference to substitutes is one of life's major mysteries.”

Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) British writer and philosopher

Life, Indifference

“A person is a person through other persons; you can't be human in isolation; you are human only in relationships.”

Desmond Tutu (1931) South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Prize winner

Personality

“The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance”

Lewis Thomas (1913–1993) American physician, poet and educator

Science

“Miracles are to come.
With you I leave a remembrance
of miracles: they are by
somebody who can love
and who shall be continually reborn,
a human being.”

E.E. Cummings (1894–1962) American poet

Love

“There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man - with human flesh.”

Frank Herbert book Dune

Source: Dune

“There is still the outside world to contend with. A world of backfiring cars, and their human equivalents.”

David Sedaris (1956) American author

World, Cars

“The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being.”

Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973) American writer

"To You on Your First Birthday"
To My Daughters, With Love (1967)
Context: The person who tries to live alone will not succeed as a human being. His heart withers if it does not answer another heart. His mind shrinks away if he hears only the echoes of his own thoughts and finds no other inspiration.

Personality

“It is human nature to think wisely and to act in an absurd fashion.”

Anatole France (1844–1924) French writer

Il est dans la nature humaine de penser sagement et d'agir d'une façon absurde. <br class="br"> Le livre de mon ami http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Le_Livre_de_Pierre_-_Premi%C3%A8res_conqu%C3%AAtes#II._La_Dame_en_blanc (1885): Le livre de Pierre, part I, ch. II: La dame en blanc

Fashion, Nature, Thinking