Quotes about humanity
page 29

“All the history of human life has been a struggle between wisdom and stupidity.”

Source: The Amber Spyglass

“it's no use trying to pretend that mostpeople and ourselves are alike. Mostpeople have less in common with ourselves than thesquarerootofminusone. You and I are human beings; mostpeople are snobs.”

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

“Look on the bright side," said Simon, "If they need a human sacrifice, you can always offer me. I'm not sure the rest of you qualify anyway.”

Cassandra Clare book City of Ashes

Source: City of Ashes

“His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origin of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.”

J.M. Coetzee book Disgrace

Source: Disgrace (1999), p. 3-4
Context: Although he devoted hours of each day to his new discipline, he finds its first premise, as enunciated in the Communications 101 handbook, preposterous: 'Human society has created language in order that we may communicate our thoughts, feelings, and intentions to each other.' His own opinion, which he does not air, is that the origins of speech lie in song, and the origins of song in the need to fill out with sound the overlarge and rather empty human soul.

Lie, Soul

“I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art, was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character — for this plain reason, that the effect produced, by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events themselves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. It may be possible in novel-writing to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters: their existence, as recognizable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers is a narrative which interests them about men and women — for the perfectly obvious reasons that they are men and women themselves.”

Wilkie Collins book The Woman in White

Source: Collins explaining what he calls the literary principal guiding him, in the preface of the second edition of The Woman in White. Also in Reality's Dark Light: The Sensational Wilkie Collins by Maria K. Bachman & Don Richard Cox [University of Tennessee Press, 2003, ISBN 1-572-33274-3] ( p. xiv https://books.google.com/books?id=_X8AlmIp0dwC&pg=PR14)

Women, Men, Hope, Art

“Resignation is what kills people. Once they've rejected resignation, humans gain the privilege of making humanity their footpath.”

Kohta Hirano (1973) Japanese manga artist

People

“I felt that I wanted the world to be in uniform and at a sort of moral attention forever; I wanted no more riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

Source: The Great Gatsby

World, Heart

“Human beings suffer agonies, and their sad fates become legends; poets write verses about them and playwrights compose dramas, and the remembrance of past grief becomes a source of present pleasure - such is the strange alchemy of the spirit.”

Upton Sinclair book Dragon's Teeth

Source: Dragon's Teeth

Fate, Pleasure, Sadness, Suffering

“Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.”

Immanuel Kant book Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose

Idea for a General History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose (1784), Proposition 6.
Variant translations: Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be built.
From such crooked wood as that which man is made of, nothing straight can be fashioned.
Never a straight thing was made from the crooked timber of man.
Source: Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose

“We are all human; therefore, nothing human can be alien to us.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

“I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.”

James A. Michener (1907–1997) American author

Love

“Can a person steal happiness? Or is just another internal, infernal human trick?”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

Happiness, Personality

“Readers understand that the books celebrate female power. In the romance novel, the woman always wins. With courage, intelligence and gentleness she brings the most dangerous creature on the earth, the human male, to his knees.”

Jayne Ann Krentz (1948) American novelist

Books, Intelligence, Courage, Understanding

“I was attracted to science fiction because it was so wide open. I was able to do anything and there were no walls to hem you in and there was no human condition that you were stopped from examining.”

Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) American science fiction writer

Science

“If you’re in the luckiest one per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

Thinking

“I think it's a shame that something as creative and vital to the nature of the human species as story-telling is largely controlled by the soulless cretins known as publishers.”

Piers Anthony (1934) English-American writer in the science fiction and fantasy genres

Nature, Thinking

“When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.”

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

Death

“As soon as man began considering himself the source of the highest meaning in the world and the measure of everything, the world began to lose its human dimension, and man began to lose control of it.”

Václav Havel book Disturbing the Peace

Source: Disturbing the Peace (1986), Ch. 1 : Growing Up "Outside", p. 11

World

“Marvin was humming ironically because he hated humans so much.”

Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy pentalogy

Source: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Hate

“Human: That's stupid. Isn't there grass on both sides?”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Stupidity, Grass

“It is the imagination that argues for the Divine Spark within human beings. It is literally a decent of the World's Soul into all of us.”

Terence McKenna (1946–2000) American ethnobotanist

World, Soul, Imagination

“The serial number of a human specimen is the face, that accidental and unrepeatable combination of features. It reflects neither character nor soul, nor what we call the self. The face is only the serial number of a specimen”

Milan Kundera book Immortality

Source: Immortality

Soul

“Atheism is a way of humility. It's to think oneself to be an animal, as we are actually and to allow oneself to become human.”

André Comte-Sponville (1952) French philosopher

Source: Presentations de La Philosophie

Way, Thinking, Animals

“One can't love humanity. One can only love people.”

Graham Greene book The Ministry of Fear

Source: The Ministry of Fear

Love, People

“Human will is the strongest will ever created. There are those who are born to succeed and those who are determined to succeed. The former fall into it, and the latter pursue it at all costs. They won’t be denied. Nothing daunts them.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Invincible

“The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more.”

Isaac Asimov book Foundation and Empire

Source: Foundation and Empire

Law, Error, History

“God has mercifully ordered that the human brain works slowly; first the blow, hours afterwards the bruise.”

Walter de la Mare (1873–1956) English poet and fiction writer

Source: The Return

God

“Too bad Jason wasn’t a metal automaton. At least then Leo would have some idea of how to help his best friend. But with humans … Leo felt helpless. They broke way too easily.”

Rick Riordan book The Blood of Olympus

Source: The Blood of Olympus

Way, Idea, Help

“Oh come on Pam, they're funny. They're like humans but miniature… tea cup humans!”

Charlaine Harris (1951) American writer

Tea

“Strong women- precious jewels all- their humanness is evident in their accessibility. We are able to enter into the spirit of these women and rejoice in their warmth and courage.”

Maya Angelou (1928–2014) American author and poet

Women, Courage, Strong

“The human race tends to remember the abuses to which it has been subjected rather than the endearments. What's left of kisses? Wounds, however, leave scars.”

Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956) German poet, playwright, theatre director

Kiss

“Most of humanity, he said, have eyes that are so caked shut with the dust of deception they will never see the truth, no matter who tries to help them.”

Elizabeth Gilbert book Eat, Pray, Love

Source: Eat, Pray, Love

Truth, Help

“… the human spirit knows, deep down that all lives intersect.”

Mitch Albom (1958) American author

Source: The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Meniti Bianglala

“Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.”

James Gleick book The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

Source: The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood

History, Nature

“Everyone has things they're afraid of. It's part of being human.”

Cassandra Clare book Lady Midnight

Source: Lady Midnight

Parting

“Typography is the craft of endowing human language with a durable visual form.”

Robert Bringhurst The Elements of Typographic Style

Source: The Elements of Typographic Style

“What kind of human person has a favorite eraser?”

William Goldman Marathon Man

Source: Marathon Man

Personality

“Humm humm haaa. Rahmumm humm haaaa," intoned Opal, finishing her chant. "Peace be inside me, tolerance all around me, forgiveness in my path. Now, Mervall, show me where the filthy human is so that I may feed him his organs.”

Eoin Colfer (1965) Irish author of children's books

Source: The Time Paradox

Peace, Forgiveness

“Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.”

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) American fiction writer and essayist

Source: A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

People

“A desire not to butt into other people's business is at least eighty percent of all human 'wisdom'… and the other twenty percent isn't very important.”

Robert A. Heinlein book Stranger in a Strange Land

Source: Stranger in a Strange Land

Wisdom, People, Business

“It’s not the pain that’s inflicted on us by others that destroys us. It’s the pain we let inside our hearts that does that. Don’t let the human’s anger become yours. It can drive you mad if you do. (M'Adoc)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Upon the Midnight Clear

Pain, Heart, Madness, Anger

“We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity; more than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.”

Charlie Chaplin (1889–1977) British comic actor and filmmaker

Life, Feeling, Thinking

“And now, farewell to kindness, humanity and gratitude… I have substituted myself for Providence in rewarding the good; may the God of vengeance now yield me His place to punish the wicked.”

Alexandre Dumas book The Count of Monte Cristo

Chapter 30 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Count_of_Monte_Cristo/Chapter_30 Source: The Count of Monte Cristo (1845–1846)

God, Gratitude

“Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Source: Lullaby

God

“Questioning the ostensibly unquestionable premises of our way of life is arguably the most urgent of services we owe our fellow humans and ourselves.”

Zygmunt Bauman book Globalizace: důsledky pro člověka

Source: Globalization: The Human Consequences

Life, Way, Question

“Oh, the humanity….
It was a wonder Rhage hadn't blinded himself with all that pop culture.”

Jessica Bird book Lover Eternal

Source: Lover Eternal

“I know why familles were created, with all their imperfections. They humanize you. They are made to make you forget yourself occasionally, so that the beautiful balance of life is not destroyed.”

Anaïs Nin (1903–1977) writer of novels, short stories, and erotica

Life, Beauty, Forgetting

“Not all monsters were three-ton reptiles with poisonous breath. Many wore human faces.”

Rick Riordan book The Hidden Oracle

Source: The Hidden Oracle

“For the ones who are called saints by human opinion on earth may very well be devils, and their light may very well be darkness”

Thomas Merton (1915–1968) Priest and author

Light

“It's the most charming thing about humans. You are all so sure that the lesser animals are bleeding with envy because they didn't have the good fortune to be born Homo sapiens.”

Orson Scott Card book Speaker for the Dead

Source: Speaker for the Dead

Animals, Envy

“Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn't forbidden.”

Robert A. Heinlein book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress

Source: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

“Human behavior is messy and unpredictable and unconcerned with convenient symmetries.”

Khaled Hosseini book And the Mountains Echoed

Source: And the Mountains Echoed

Behavior

“Acceptance is not love. You love a person because he or she has lovable traits, but you accept everybody just because they're alive and human.”

Albert Ellis (1913–2007) American psychologist

Love, Personality

“Yes, the brutalities of progress are called revolutions. When they are over, this is recognised: that the human race has been harshly treated, but that it has advanced.”

Victor Hugo book Les Misérables

Source: Les Misérables

“Truth is a risky proposition. It's the nature of mediocre human beings to believe that lies are necessary, that they serve a purpose, that truth is subversive, that candor is dangerous, that the very scaffold of communal life is supported by lies.”

Anne Rice The Wolf Gift

Source: The Wolf Gift

Life, Truth, Communication, Support

“If anything is sacred, the human body is sacred.”

Walt Whitman (1819–1892) American poet, essayist and journalist

“If somebody had said last week that I'd be in… involved… with a human, I'd have knocked his head off. I mean, after howls of derisive laughter. But.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Night World, No. 1

Laughter

“No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.”

John Steinbeck book The Winter of Our Discontent

Source: The Winter of Our Discontent (1961), Part One, Chapter III

“If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms.”

Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexican writer laureated with the 1990 Nobel Prize for Literature

André Breton or the Quest of the Beginning
Source: Alternating Current (1967)
Context: If we are a metaphor of the universe, the human couple is the metaphor par excellence, the point of intersection of all forces and the seed of all forms. The couple is time recaptured, the return to the time before time.

Universe

“Michael had once read to her how God had cast a man and woman out of paradise. Yet, for all their human faults and failures. God had shown them the way back in.”

Francine Rivers (1947) American writer

Source: Redeeming Love

God, Way, Failure, Reading

“To Thetis,
Long overdue, I know, but every often the things we most desire come only after much patience and struggle. That is a human truth, I think. Even Peleus knew that.
-Seth”

Richelle Mead (1976) American writer

Source: Succubus Blues

Truth, Thinking, Patience

“Wealth comes from industry and from the hard experience of human toil. To dissipate it in waste and extravagance is disloyalty to humanity.”

Calvin Coolidge book The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge

Source: The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge

Wealth

“If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse gift will find a fitting place.”

Margaret Mead (1901–1978) American anthropologist

Source: 1930s, Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), p. 322
Context: Historically our own culture has relied for the creation of rich and contrasting values upon many artificial distinctions, the most striking of which is sex. It will not be by the mere abolition of these distinctions that society will develop patterns in which individual gifts are given place instead of being forced into an ill-fitting mould. If we are to achieve a richer culture, rich in contrasting values, we must recognize the whole gamut of human potentialities, and so weave a less arbitrary social fabric, one in which each diverse human gift will find a fitting place.

“These lights, this brightness, these clusters of human hope, of wild desire—I shall take these lights in my fingers. I shall make them bright, and whether they shine or not, it is in these fingers that they shall succeed or fail.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald book The Love of the Last Tycoon

Source: The Love of the Last Tycoon

Hope, Light

“If, when you talk to people, they keep backing away from you, it's because you're TOO CLOSE, alright? SO DON'T KEEP ADVANCING ON THEM LIKE A HUMAN GLACIER.”

Dave Barry (1947) American writer

People

“Humans are pattern-seeking story-telling animals, and we are quite adept at telling stories about patterns, whether they exist or not.”

Michael Shermer (1954) American science writer

Animals

“As soon as questions of will or decision or reason or choice of action arise human science is at a loss.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

Question, Decision, Science, Loss

“Either things happen for a reason, or they happen for no reason at all. Either one's life is a thread in a glorious tapestry or humanity is just a hopelessly tangled knot.”

Neal Shusterman (1962) American novelist

Source: UnWholly

Life

“The human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. He who does anything because it is the custom, makes no choice.”

John Stuart Mill book On Liberty

Source: On Liberty

Feeling, Exercises

“The assumption of time is one of humanity's greatest follies. We tell ourselves that there's always tomorrow, when we can no more predict tomorrow than we can the weather. Procrastination is the thief of dreams.”

Richard Paul Evans (1962) American writer

Source: The Walk

Dreams, Time, Weather

“I've since discovered that many human beings need no supernatural mentoring to commit acts of savagery; some people are devils in their own right, their telltale horns having grown inward to facilitate their disguise.”

Dean Koontz Odd Thomas

Source: Odd Thomas

People

“Human understanding is fallible, and we see through a glass, darkly. Any religion is a shadow of God. But the shadows of God are not God.”

Margaret Atwood book The Year of the Flood

Source: The Year of the Flood

God, Religion, Understanding

“Percy: "Hey, why do pegasi gallop as they fly, anyway?"

Blackjack: "Why do humans swing their arms as they walk? I dunno, boss. It just feels right.”

Rick Riordan book The Last Olympian

Variant: Why do you need to gallop while you fly?"
"Why do humans have to sway their arms while they walk? I dunno boss, but it just feels right.
Source: The Last Olympian

Feeling, Flying

“People of limited intelligence are fond of talking about "these days," imagining that they have discovered and appraised the peculiarities of "these days" and that human nature changes with the times.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

People, Imagination, Intelligence, Nature

“The difference between animals and humans is that animals change themselves for the environment, but humans change the environment for themselves.”

Ayn Rand (1905–1982) Russian-American novelist and philosopher

Change, Animals

“Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet.”

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

Life, Health, Chance

“People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.”

James Baldwin book No Name in the Street

No Name in the Street (1972)

People, Water

“About the nature of human beings. I discovered that confronted by temptation, we will always fall. Given the right circumstances, every human being on this earth would be willing to commit evil.”

Paulo Coelho book The Devil and Miss Prym

Source: The Devil and Miss Prym

Nature, Evil

“We humans have two great problems: the first is knowing when to begin; the second is knowing when to stop.”

Paulo Coelho (1947) Brazilian lyricist and novelist

Problem

“I find it impossible to experience either pride or shame over accidents of genetics in which I had no active part. I'm not necessarily proud to be female. I am not even proud to be human—I only love to be so.”

Zadie Smith (1975) British writer

Love, Parting

“Skepticism has become a virtue. Cynicism and demand for proof has become enlightened thought. Is it any wonder that humans now feel more depressed and defeated than they have at any point in human history?”

Dan Brown book Angels & Demons

Source: Angels & Demons

Feeling, History

“Sometimes I can't figure designers out. It's as if they flunked human anatomy.”

Erma Bombeck (1927–1996) When I stand before God at the end of my life, I would hope that I would not have a single bit of talent le…

“The more I thought about human nature, the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin/mistakes causes us to use our minds to rationalize our action.”

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

Nature

“You see, to me, for just a moment, despite all of the colors that touch and grapple with what I see in this world, I will often catch an eclipse when a human dies.
I've seen millions of them.
I've seen more eclipses than I care to remember”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

World, Color

“I understand too well the dreadful act
I'm going to commit, but my judgement
can't check my anger, and that incites
the greatest evils human beings do.”

Euripidés Medea

Source: Medea

Understanding, Evil, Anger

“For the first time I could remember, I felt weak, woozy and stupid— like a human-being. Like a very small and helpless human-being.”

Jeff Lindsay book Darkly Dreaming Dexter

Source: Darkly Dreaming Dexter

Stupidity, Time

“The human being is a most curious creature. He thinks he has got one
soul, and he has got dozens.”

D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter

Soul, Thinking

“If I bet on humanity, I'd never cash a ticket.”

Charles Bukowski (1920–1994) American writer

“I am haunted by humans.”

Markus Zusak book The Book Thief

Source: The Book Thief

“I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.”

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

Variants: I fear the day when the technology overlaps with our humanity. The world will only have a generation of idiots. I fear the day when technology overlaps our humanity. It will be then that the world will have permanent ensuing generations of idiots. 1995 film Powder includes a similar quotation attributed to Einstein: It’s become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity. Although it is a popular quote on the internet, there is no substantial evidence that Einstein actually said that. It does not appear in "The Ultimate Quotable Einstein" from Princeton University Press nor in any reliable source. " Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/03/19/tech-surpass/" concluded that it probably emerged as a meme on the internet as late as 2012. Misattributed

World, Fear

“But life isn’t about learning to forgive those who have hurt you or forgetting your past. It’s about learning to forgive yourself for being human and making mistakes.”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Time Untime

Life, Forgiveness, Learning, Past

“A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.”

Milan Kundera book The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Source: The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Question