Quotes about humanity
page 67

“When I look at the man at the head of the French monarchy, surrounded as he is with all the pomp of power, and all the pride of victory, distributing kingdoms to his family, and principalities to his followers; seeming, as he sits upon his throne, to have reached the summit of human ambition, the pinnacle of earthly happiness; and when I follow him into his closet, or to his bed, and contemplate the anguish with which his solitude must be tortured, by recollections of the blood he has spilt, and the oppressions he has committed.”

Samuel Romilly (1757–1818) British politician

Slave Trade Bill speech (1807)

Happiness, Family, Solitude, Victory

“I'm trying to change the world or at least to make the horrors of the global capitalism visible. I don't care much about art. I used to be a total artist but now I'm more a human being.”

Riiko Sakkinen (1976) Finnish visual artist

"More a Human Being than an Artist" (6 February 2013) http://www.riikosakkinen.com/blog/?show=archive&m=02-2013

World, Art, Change

“Gentile maintained, with Marx, that the ‘essence’ of man is not individual—but social. The human person is a function of a complex pattern of interactions with both nature and other persons in a law-and-rule-government environment. The human being is essentially a social creature (a Gemeinwesen)—and outside society, loses humanity.”

A. James Gregor (1929–2019) American political scientist

Source: The Phoenix: Fascism in Our Time, (1999), p. 95

Law, Nature, Personality

“Isn’t Hollywood a dump — in the human sense of the word. A hideous town, pointed up by the insulting gardens of its rich, full of the human spirit at a new low of debasement.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Letter to Alice Richardson (29 July 1940)
Quoted, Letters

Sense

“Being in humaneness is good. If we select other goodness and thus are far apart from humaneness, how can we be the wise?”

Confucius (-551–-479 BC) Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher

The opening phrase of this chapter after which the chapter is named in Chinese.
Source: The Analects, Chapter IV

“Many people today hold to a Gnostic view of things without realizing the fact. Believing that human beings can be fully understood in the terms of scientific materialism, they reject any idea of free will. But they cannot give up hope of being masters of their destiny. So they have come to believe that science will somehow enable the human mind to escape the limitations that shape its natural condition. Throughout much of the world, and particularly in western countries, the Gnostic faith that knowledge can give humans a freedom no other creature can possess has become the predominant religion.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

The Faith of Puppets: The Freedom of the Marionette (p. 9)
The Soul of the Marionette: A Short Enquiry into Human Freedom (2015)

People, World, Faith, Religion

“People in many Western countries with troops in Afghanistan may be alarmed to note that, after all the blood and treasure expended there to help that country build a democracy, it continues to vote with Iran in opposing the Western-led effort to denounce the Islamic Republic for – in the words of one of the resolution’s sponsors – a ‘continued deterioration’ in Iran’s human rights record.”

Hillel Neuer Canadian activist

UN Watch quotes for human rights votes today on Iran, Burma, North Korea https://www.unwatch.org/un-watch-quotes-human-rights-votes-today-iran-burma-north-korea/, Jewish Press, November 21, 2011

People, Democracy, Effort, Help

“From the haunts of daily life
Where is waged the daily strife
With common wants and common cares
Which sows the human heart with tares.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

St. 69
(1819)

Life, Heart

“Of all the conditions of his youth which afterwards puzzled the grown-up man, this disappearance of religion puzzled him most. The boy went to church twice every Sunday; he was taught to read his Bible, and he learned religious poetry by heart; he believed in a mild deism; he prayed; he went through all the forms; but neither to him nor to his brothers or sisters was religion real. Even the mild discipline of the Unitarian Church was so irksome that they all threw it off at the first possible moment, and never afterwards entered a church. The religious instinct had vanished, and could not be revived, although one made in later life many efforts to recover it.

That the most powerful emotion of man, next to the sexual, should disappear, might be a personal defect of his own; but that the most intelligent society, led by the most intelligent clergy, in the most moral conditions he ever knew, should have solved all the problems of the universe so thoroughly as to have quite ceased making itself anxious about past or future, and should have persuaded itself that all the problems which had convulsed human thought from earliest recorded time, were not worth discussing, seemed to him the most curious social phenomenon he had to account for in a long life.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Life, Youth, Religion, Intelligence

“With the possible exception of sex, there is no more basic human activity than eating, rendering it an appropriate candidate for Jewish rituals designed to maintain our focus on Godliness. The table is seen as an altar, and the concern with Kashrut extends to removing knives, instruments of war, from the table during the Birkat HaMazon (blessing after the meal). Tsaar baalei khayim, the concern for the pain of all living things and the reverence for life, is another essential aspect of kashrut. Vegetarianism is clearly the Torah's ideal; the Garden of Eden is a vegetarian society.”

Bonnie Koppell American rabbi

Source: Vegetarianism, p. 37

Life, Pain, War, Sex

“Simply stated, this is one of the thumbnail passages that explain Seth's concept of God: "He is not human in your terms, though he passed through human stages; and here the Buddhist myth comes closest to approximating reality. He is not one individual, but an energy gestalt. If you remember what I said about the way in which the universe expands, that it has nothing to do with space, then you may perhaps dimly perceive the existence of a psychic pyramid of interrelated, ever-expanding consciousness that creates, simultaneously and instantaneously, universes and individuals that are given -- through the gifts of personal perspective -- duration, psychic comprehension, intelligence, and eternal validity.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: The Seth Material (1970), p. 261

God, Way, Intelligence, Reality

“We have reached a level of insanity and delusion, to take a situation from the battlefield, when soldiers are under stress and explosive devices are being thrown at them and attempts are being made to infiltrate, and to take their human response and judge them from the armchairs in Tel Aviv?”

Gilad Erdan (1970) Israeli politician

In response over a video of a shooting by IDF soldiers on prostestors during the 2018 Gaza border protests. (April 10 2018) https://theintercept.com/2018/04/10/gaza-protests-palestine-israel-sniper-video/

“What unseen pen etched eternal things
on the hearts of human kind
but never let them in our minds?”

Aaron Weiss

My Exit, Unfair.
Catch For Us The Foxes (2004)

Heart

“You're going to have a deportation force, and you're going to do it humanely and you're going to bring the country -- and, frankly, the people, because you have some excellent, wonderful people, some fantastic people hat have been here for a long period of time. Don't forget, Mika, that you have millions of people that are waiting in line to come into this country and they're waiting to come in legally. And I always say the wall, we're going to build the wall. It's going to be a real deal. It's going to be a real wall. There was a picture in one of the magazines where they had a wall this tall and they were taking drugs over the wall. They built a ramp over the wall and the truck was going up and down. They were using it like a highway; the wall is like a highway. It's not going to happen. It's going to be a Trump wall. It's going to be a real wall. And it's going to stop people and it's going to be good. But your friend Thomas Friedman called me and said, hah, there should be a big door. I said going to be a big door. I love the expression. There's going to be a big beautiful nice door. People are going to come in and they're going to come in legally. But we have no choice. Otherwise, we don't have a country. We don't even know how many people. We don't know if it's 8 million or if it's 20 million. We have no idea how many people are in our country. And then you see what happened with Kate in San Francisco. You see what happens with all of the things going on, all of the tremendous crime going on. It costs us $200 billion a year for illegal immigration right now. $200 billion a year, maybe $250, maybe $300. They don't even know. We're going to stop it. We're going to run it properly and we're going to stop it.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

On his immigration plan (2015 November 11)
2010s, 2015

Love, People, Beauty, Idea

“I started eating vegan purely for health/athletic reasons originally. But as the years have gone by, I care very much about trying to cause as little harm to other creatures as possible. I really love animals and respect them very much, and I don’t want to see them hurt or forced into unnatural lives. I’m not so much out to change the world, as to change myself, but I would love to see all the people taking care of all living creatures, humans included. Wouldn’t that be something? With being vegan and avoiding animal products of any kind, my policy has always been to just do the best I can. No one’s perfect, but we can’t let that stop us from trying to be better, right?”

Steph Davis (1973) American rock climber

"Talking About Sports Nutrition" http://stephdavis.co/blog/talking-about-sports-nutrition/, on her blog (April 10, 2008).

Love, People, Health, World

“Big Dams are to a nation's 'development' what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal. They're both weapons of mass destruction. They're both weapons governments use to control their own people. Both twentieth-century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They're both malignant indications of a civilization turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link -- the understanding-- between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life, and the earth to human existence.”

Arundhati Roy (1961) Indian novelist, essayist

The Greater Common Good May, 1999 http://www.narmada.org/gcg/gcg.html. Articles

Life, People, Food, Intelligence

“To me, adventure is a concept that applies only to those men and women of earlier historical times, like the mediaeval knights who travelled into the unknown. The concept has degenerated constantly since then… I absolutely loathe adventurers, and I particularly hate this old pseudo-adventurism where the mountain climb becomes about confronting the extremes of humanity.”

Werner Herzog (1942) German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and opera director

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

Women, Men, Hate, Travel

“Everything has altered its dimensions, except the world we live in. The more we know of that, the smaller it seems. Time and distance have been abridged, remote countries have become accessible, and the antipodes are upon visiting terms. There is a reunion of the human race; and the family resemblance now that we begin to think alike, dress alike, and live alike, is very striking. The South Sea Islanders, and the inhabitants of China, import their fashions from Paris, and their fabrics from Manchester, while Rome and London supply missionaries to the ‘ends of the earth,’ to bring its inhabitants into ‘one fold, under one Shepherd.’ Who shall write a book of travels now? Livingstone has exhausted the subject. What field is there left for a future Munchausen? The far West and the far East have shaken hands and pirouetted together, and it is a matter of indifference whether you go to the moors in Scotland to shoot grouse, to South America to ride and alligator, or to Indian jungles to shoot tigers-there are the same facilities for reaching all, and steam will take you to either with the equal ease and rapidity. We have already talked with New York; and as soon as our speaking-trumpet is mended shall converse again. ‘To waft a sigh from Indus to the pole,’ is no longer a poetic phrase, but a plain matter of fact of daily occurrence. Men breakfast at home, and go fifty miles to their counting-houses, and when their work is done, return to dinner. They don’t go from London to the seaside, by way of change, once a year; but they live on the coast, and go to the city daily. The grand tour of our forefathers consisted in visiting the principle cities of Europe. It was a great effort, occupied a vast deal of time, cost a large sum of money, and was oftener attended with danger than advantage. It comprised what was then called, the world: whoever had performed it was said to have ‘seen the world,’ and all that it contained. The Grand Tour now means a voyage round the globe, and he who has not made it has seen nothing.”

Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796–1865) Canadian-British politician, judge, and author

The Season-Ticket, An Evening at Cork 1860 p. 1-2.

Men, Money, Books, World

“Even if drugs are fully as destructive as they are usually claimed to be, it is morally wrong — and demonstrably more destructive — for government to deprive people of their unalienable, individual, civil, Constitutional, and human right to make an utter mess of their own lives. Since human beings are inclined to learn more from the mistakes they make, rather than from their triumphs, the right to fail, for individuals and groups alike, may be even more important than the right to succeed, and it must be fiercely protected at almost any cost.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"Some Random Thoughts About the War On Drugs" http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2010/tle574-20100613-02.html 13 June 2010.

People, Learning

“The supposedly sacred fables in the Bible describe God as creating evil intentionally, of consorting with evil, being compelled by evil, and of gambling with the devil -with human suffering as the desired outcome. In fact, God is depicted as being almost entirely evil himself, throughout the entire cluster of repugnant horror stories.”

Aron Ra (1962) Aron Ra is an atheist activist and the host of the Ra-Men Podcast

Patheos, A Letter to a Certain Christian http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2013/10/12/a-letter-to-a-certain-christian/ (October 12, 2013)

God, Suffering, Evil

“What shall be said, then, of those who insist upon ignoring the question of slavery as not involved in this deadly feud, and maintain that the only issue is, the support of the government and the preservation of the Union? Surely, they are "fools and blind"; for it is slaveholders alone who have conspired to seize the one, and overturn the other. As long as the enslavement of a single human being is sanctioned in the land, the curse of God will rest upon it.”

William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879) American journalist

The War — Its Cause and Cure http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/index.asp?documentprint=577 (3 May 1861)

God, Fools, Question, Support

“Let our law-givers then make haste before it is too late to set apart this surpassingly glorious region for the recreation and well-being of humanity, and all the world will rise up and call them blessed.”

John Muir (1838–1914) Scottish-born American naturalist and author

" A Rival of the Yosemite: The Cañon of the South Fork of King's River, California http://books.google.com/books?id=fWoiAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA77" The Century Magazine, volume XLIII, number 1 (November 1891) pages 77-97 (at page 97) 1890s

World, Law

“So I made a mistake. That happens. It proves I'm human, which you know, for some people, is a revelation…. I was also told that the greeting ceremony had been moved away from the tarmac but that there was this eight-year-old girl and I said, 'Well, I, I can't, I can't rush by her, I've got to at least greet her.' So I greeted her, I took her stuff and I left. Now that's my memory of it.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

March 25, 2008, regarding her recent remarks on Bosnia. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/25/politics/main3967223.shtml?source=mostpop_story Presidential campaign (January 20, 2007 – 2008)

People, Girl, Memory

“Memetics appears to have a lot of implications that we humans are machines, which people have never liked. Of course we're machines, we're biological machines. But people don't like that. Free will and consciousness is an illusion, and the self is a complex of memes. People don't like that. My view is that if these things are true it doesn't matter if we like them or not.”

Susan Blackmore (1951) British writer and academic

"Humans Are Just Machines for Propagating Memes", Wired.com, 2/29/2008

People, Appearance

“Everard was not so sure; he had seen enough human misery in all the ages. You got case-hardened after a while, but down underneath, when a peasant stared at you with sick brutalized eyes, or a soldier screamed with a pike through him, or a city went up in radioactive flame, something wept. He could understand the fanatics who had tried to change events. It was only that their work was so unlikely to make anything better…”

Poul Anderson (1926–2001) American science fiction and fantasy writer

Delenda Est (p. 177)
Time Patrol

Age, Understanding, Change

“History knew a midnight, which we may estimate at about the year 1000 A. D., when the human race lost the arts and sciences even to the memory. The last twilight of paganism was gone, and yet the new day had not begun. Whatever was left of culture in the world was found only in the Saracens, and a Pope eager to learn studied in disguise in their unversities, and so became the wonder of the West. At last Christendom, tired of praying to the dead bones of the martyrs, flocked to the tomb of the Saviour Himself, only to find for a second time that the grave was empty and that Christ was risen from the dead. Then mankind too rose from the dead. It returned to the activities and the business of life; there was a feverish revival in the arts and in the crafts. The cities flourished, a new citizenry was founded. Cimabue rediscovered the extinct art of painting; Dante, that of poetry. Then it was, also, that great courageous spirits like Abelard and Saint Thomas Aquinas dared to introduce into Catholicism the concepts of Aristotelian logic, and thus founded scholastic philosophy. But when the Church took the sciences under her wing, she demanded that the forms in which they moved be subjected to the same unconditioned faith in authority as were her own laws. And so it happened that scholasticism, far from freeing the human spirit, enchained it for many centuries to come, until the very possibility of free scientific research came to be doubted. At last, however, here too daylight broke, and mankind, reassured, determined to take advantage of its gifts and to create a knowledge of nature based on independent thought. The dawn of the day in history is know as the Renaissance or the Revival of Learning.”

Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi (1804–1851) German mathematician

"Über Descartes Leben und seine Methode die Vernunft Richtig zu Leiten und die Wahrheit in den Wissenschaften zu Suchen," "About Descartes' Life and Method of Reason.." (Jan 3, 1846) C. G. J. Jacobi's Gesammelte werke Vol. 7 https://books.google.com/books?id=_09tAAAAMAAJ&pg=PA309 p.309, as quoted by Tobias Dantzig, Number: The Language of Science (1930).

Life, World, Faith, Law

“The richness of human life is that we have many lives, we live the events that do not happen (and some that cannot) as vividly as those that do, and if thereby we die a thousand deaths, that is the price we pay…”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

"The Reach of Imagination" (1967)

Life, Death

“I was brought up to believe that human beings are good, which is why it shocks me to the core when I see human beings behaving badly.”

Benazir Bhutto (1953–2007) 11th Prime Minister of Pakistan

Destiny’s daughter (2007)

“I may say Christianity itself divided into its thousands also, who are disputing, anathematizing and where the laws permit burning and torturing one another for abstractions which no one of them understand, and which are indeed beyond the comprehension of the human mind”

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

. Letter to George Logan (12 November 1816). Published in The Works of Thomas Jefferson in Twelve Volumes http://oll.libertyfund.org/ToC/0054.php, Federal Edition, Paul Leicester Ford, ed., New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904, Vol. 12 http://oll.libertyfund.org/Texts/Jefferson0136/Works/0054-12_Bk.pdf, pp. 43 1810s

Law, Understanding

“It's not an endlessly expanding list of rights — the 'right' to education, the 'right' to health care, the 'right' to food and housing. That's not freedom, that's dependency. Those aren't rights, those are the rations of slavery — hay and a barn for human cattle.”

Alexis De Tocqueville (1805–1859) French political thinker and historian

Source: Misattributed, P. J. O'Rourke, Age and Guile Beat Youth, Innocence, and a Bad Haircut‎ (1996), p. 227.

Health, Education, Food, Freedom

“Every addition to true knowledge is an addition to human power.”

Horace Mann (1796–1859) American politician

Lecture 1
Lectures on Education (1855)

Knowledge

“…As time passed I began to play a game with water's secret powers; I surrendered my so-called free consciousness and allowed the water to take possession of it for a while. Little by little this game turned into a profoundly earnest endeavour, because I realised that one could detach one's own consciousness from the body and attach it to that of the water. When my own consciousness was eventually returned to me, then the water's most deeply concealed psyche often revealed the most extraordinary things to me. As a result of this investigation, a researcher was born who could dispatch his consciousness on a voyage of discovery, as it were. In this way I was able to experience things that had escaped other people's notice, because they were unaware that a human being is able to send forth his free consciousness into those places the eyes cannot see. By practising this blindfolded vision, I eventually developed a bond with mysterious Nature, whose essential being I then slowly learnt to perceive and understand…”

Viktor Schauberger (1885–1958) austrian philosopher and inventor

Callum Coats: Living Energies - Viktor Schauberger's brilliant work with Natural Energies Explained (2002)

People, Secret, Way, Game

“Tried myself in the school of affliction, by the loss of every form of connection which can rive the human heart, I know well, and feel what you have lost, what you have suffered, are suffering, and have yet to endure. The same trials have taught me that for ills so immeasurable, time and silence are the only medicines. I will not, therefore, by useless condolences, open afresh the sluices of your grief, nor, although mingling sincerely my tears with yours, will I say a word more where words are vain.”

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

Letter to John Adams http://www.masshist.org/database/transcription.cfm?transcriptDir=masshist&transcript=L5058.xml&queryID=1797 (13 November 1818) regarding the death of Abigail Adams 1810s

School, Feeling, Tear, Silence

“The present industrial era brought with it a new governing class, as every considerable change in human environment must bring with it a governing class to give it expression. Perhaps, for lack of a recognized name, I may describe this class as the industrial capitalistic class, composed in the main of administrators and bankers. I conjecture that this class attained its acme of popularity and power, at least in America, toward the close of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Almost at the opening of the present century a progressively rigorous opposition found for its mouthpiece the President of the Union himself. If Mr. Roosevelt became, what his adversaries are pleased to call, an agitator, his agitation had a cause which is as deserving of study as is the path of a cyclone.”

Brooks Adams (1848–1927) American political writer

Source: The Theory of Social Revolutions,, pp. 2-3, as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 9-10

Study, Change

“Genius, like humanity, rusts for want of use.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"On Application to Study"
The Plain Speaker (1826)

“To defend painting: One has to believe in what one is doing, one has to commit oneself inwardly, in order to do painting. Once obsessed, one ultimately carries it to the point of believing that one might change human beings through painting. But if one lacks this passionate commitment, there is nothing left to do. Then it is best to leave it alone. For basically painting is pure idiocy.”

Gerhard Richter (1932) German visual artist, born 1932

Source: undated quotes, The Daily Practice of Painting, Writings (1962-1993), p. 78

Passion, Change, Painting

“In the age of the concentration camp, when from 1935 to 1947 or so, she wrote her very best novels, no writer did more to illumine the springs of human cruelty, suffering and bravery.”

Ivy Compton-Burnett (1884–1969) English writer

Angus Wilson, quoted in Malcolm Bradbury The Modern British Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001) p. 250.
Criticism

Age, Spring, Suffering

“Our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time; our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a series of events — a story — and when we can’t figure out what our particular story is, we feel lost somehow.”

Douglas Coupland book Player One

Player One (2010)

Life, Feeling, Time

“… without New Testament Greek there would be no Christian Theology, or possibly no Christianity. The Athanasian Creed, the dogma of Christ the Homiousios, of the same essence as the Father, the dogma of Christ, fully God and Fully Human, The dogma of the Holy Trinity, 'that Christ is the incarnation of the indivisible source of the Divine Godhead through the power of the Holy Spirit " could only have been formulated by the Church Fathers within the linguistic structures and concepts provided by early century Greek language and thought., e. g concepts such as the God/man, a concept that which does not exist in the Hebrew and is totally foreign to Hebrew culture. Hence Shelley's assertion that the Greeks /the Hellenes "gave us our religion."”

Angelique Rockas South African actress and founder of Internationalist Theatre, London

On Orthodoxia
Interview on Helenism .net (September 2011)

God, Religion, Christ

“Surrealism, is interested in a dream world that will penetrate the human psyche.”

Barnett Newman (1905–1970) American artist

Source: 1940 - 1950, The Plasmic Image 1. 1943-1945, p. 140

World, Dreams

“Thus money is almost always something hovering between a commodity and a debt-token. This is probably why coins—pieces of silver or gold that are already valuable commodities in themselves, but that, being stamped with the emblem of local authority, became even more valuable—still sit in our heads as the quintessential form of money. They most perfectly straddle the divide that defines what money is in the first place. What's more, the relation between the two was a matter of constant political conversation. In other words, the battle between state and market, between governments and merchants is not inherent to the human condition.”

David Graeber (1961) American anthropologist and anarchist

Source: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), Chapter Four, "Cruelty and Redemption", p. 75

Money

“Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Education, Nature, Knowledge

“Glories
Of human greatness are but pleasing dreams,
And shadows soon decaying.”

John Ford (dramatist) The Broken Heart

Act III, sc. v.
The Broken Heart (c. 1625-33)

Dreams

“Expecting to be able to get rid of the competitive drive, first of all, flies in the face of human nature — and little girls certainly have this drive, as much as little boys do, or at least the little girls I have observed in my immediate family have it.”

Lynne Cheney (1941) Second Lady of the United States 2001–2009, writer and pundit

"The Truth & Lynne Cheney" http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0IUK/is_2001_Spring/ai_75453032/pg_1, interview, Women's Quarterly (Spring 2001).

Family, Girl, Boy, Nature

“Find something you really love and make it your career. Don't let anyone discourage you or tell you it's not practical. I have loved the Middle East since I was a little girl. I read my first book about ancient Egypt when I was 10, and I've been hooked ever since... I have been blessed to have had great, strong women mentors, beginning with my mother. I have also met incredibly impressive women in the Arab world. They are demonstrating enormous courage as they work to expand women's rights and human freedom in their countries. I am inspired to work harder every time I spend time with them.”

Elizabeth Cheney (1966) American lawyer

Barbara Kantrowitz and Holly Peterson, "What I Learned: Whether they're running universities, political campaigns or major corporations, these 11 remarkable women have found their own ways of overcoming obstacles," Newsweek, October 15, 2007.

Love, Women, Books, World

“You have sacrificed nearly ten thousand American lives– the flower of our youth. You have devastated provinces. You have slain uncounted thousands of the people you desire to benefit. You have established reconcentration camps. Your generals are coming home from their harvest bringing sheaves with them, in the shape of other thousands of sick and wounded and insane to drag out miserable lives, wrecked in body and mind. You make the American flag in the eyes of a numerous people the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches, and of the burning of human dwellings, and of the horror of the water torture.”

George Frisbie Hoar (1826–1904) American politician

Subjugation of the Philippines Iniquitous (1902)

People, Youth, Home, Flowers

“Remember always that the cause of the United States is the cause of human nature.”

William H. Seward (1801–1872) American lawyer and politician

Letter to Charles F. Adams (1863), as quoted in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, Volume 2 https://books.google.com/books?id=xe9TAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA150&lpg=PA150&dq=%22the+cause+of+the+United+States+is+the+cause+of+human%22&source=bl&ots=WHM-9fK5zZ&sig=3aspBI67n5cNTU2ARF6OaNTyCDQ&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMIt7WJl9msxwIViDI-Ch3mpgBq#v=onepage&q=%22the%20cause%20of%20the%20United%20States%20is%20the%20cause%20of%20human%22&f=false, p. 150.

Nature

“You ought to try to make significant contributions to humanity rather than just get along through life comfortably… the life of trying to achieve excellence in some area is in itself a worthy goal… A life without a struggle on your part to make yourself excellent is hardly a life worth living. …a life without such a goal… is merely existing…”

Richard Hamming (1915–1998) American mathematician and information theorist

The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn (1991)

Life, Parting

“As we are clearly aware that the Savior teaches His people nothing in a merely human way, but everything by a divine and mystical wisdom, we must not understand His words literally [σαρκίνως] but with due inquiry and intelligence we must search out and master their hidden meaning.”

Clement of Alexandria (150–215) Christian theologian

Source: The Rich Man's Salvation, p. 281.

Wisdom, People, Way, Search

“That was how divorced from the human scale modern warfare had become. You could smash and destroy from unthinkable distances, obliterate planets from beyond their own system and provoke stars into novae from light-years off…and still have no good idea why you were really fighting.”

Iain Banks Culture series

Source: Culture series, Consider Phlebas (1987), Chapter 2 “The Hand of God 137” (p. 32).

Star, Idea, Light, Fight

“At a time when cancer was a rare disease, people lived shorter for other reasons. When there were no antibiotics, they often died for ordinary infections. I therefore think that the "cancer epidemic" does not result from changes in genetic predisposition or carcinogenic factors, but from the fact that in recent decades these imperfections of human nature have been revealed that were previously masked by other diseases.”

Marek Sanak (1958) Polish scientist

Mazurek, Maria (13 May 2016): Komórki rakowe to anarchizujące potwory https://gazetakrakowska.pl/komorki-rakowe-to-anarchizujace-potwory/ar/9985395. Gazeta Krakowska (in Polish), pp. 18–19.

People, Disease, Nature, Thinking

“I could never stand more than three months of dreaming at a time without feeling an irresistible desire to plunge into society. To plunge into society meant to visit my superior, Anton Antonich Syetochkin. He was the the only permanent acquaintance I have had in my life, and I even wonder at the fact myself now. But I even went to see him only when that phase came over me, and when my dreams had reached such a point of bliss that it became essential to embrace my fellows and all mankind immediately. And for that purpose I needed at least one human being at hand who actually existed. I had to call on Anton Antonich, however, on Tuesday — his at-home day; so I always had to adjust my passionate desire to embrace humanity so that it might fall on a Tuesday.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky book Notes from Underground

Part 2, Chapter 2 (page 56)
Notes from Underground (1864)

Life, Dreams, Feeling, Home

“In every human soul there is a socialist and an individualist, an authoritarian and a fanatic for liberty, as in each there is a Catholic and a Protestant. The same is true of the mass movements in which men marshal themselves for common action.”

R. H. Tawney (1880–1962) English philosopher

Part IV, Ch. 2
Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)

Men, Soul

“I was talking earlier — about anarchy and fascism being the two poles of politics. On one hand you’ve got fascism, with the bound bundle of twigs, the idea that in unity and uniformity there is strength; on the other you have anarchy, which is completely determined by the individual, and where the individual determines his or her own life. Now if you move that into the spiritual domain, then in religion, I find very much the spiritual equivalent of fascism. The word “religion” comes from the root word ligare, which is the same root word as ligature, and ligament, and basically means “bound together in one belief.” It’s basically the same as the idea behind fascism; there’s not even necessarily a spiritual component it. Everything from the Republican Party to the Girl Guides could be seen as a religion, in that they are bound together in one belief. So to me, like I said, religion becomes very much the spiritual equivalent of fascism. And by the same token, magic becomes the spiritual equivalent of anarchy, in that it is purely about self-determination, with the magician simply a human being writ large, and in more dramatic terms, standing at the center of his or her own universe. Which I think is a kind of a spiritual statement of the basic anarchist position. I find an awful lot in common between anarchist politics and the pursuit of magic, that there’s a great sympathy there.”

Alan Moore (1953) English writer primarily known for his work in comic books

Alan Moore on Anarchism (2009)

Life, Religion, Girl, Idea

“There is only one collective human civilisation comprised of geo-cultural domains and cultures.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.28

“Human beings have a demonstrated talent for self-deception when their emotions are stirred.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 135

“This implicit denigration of objectivity, and of the way science is done, irritates me immensely. It privileges anecdotes over data, “lived experience” over objective tests, and confirmation bias over uncomfortable truths. But that is the way that many humanities scholars, corrupted by postmodernism, have operated. Denying or denigrating an objective search for truth, they’re free to say whatever they want, or “discover” whatever they find ideologically convenient.”

Jerry Coyne (1949) American biologist

" Feminist geography at Dartmouth https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2018/04/02/feminist-geography-at-dartmouth/" April 2, 2018

Truth, Way, Search, Science

“The human race has only two unlimited capacities: one for suffering and one for lying. I want to fight religion as the root of all human lying and the only excuse for human suffering.”

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

Journals of Ayn Rand (1997)

Religion, Lying, Suffering, Fight

“Medicine, guarded too by preliminary impediments, and frightful medusa-heads of quackery, which deter many generous souls from entering, is of the half-articulate professions, and does not much invite the ardent kinds of ambition. The intellect required for medicine might be wholly human, and indeed should by all rules be,—the profession of the Human Healer being radically a sacred one and connected with the highest priesthoods, or rather being itself the outcome and acme of all priesthoods, and divinest conquests of intellect here below. As will appear one day, when men take off their old monastic and ecclesiastic spectacles, and look with eyes again! In essence the Physician's task is always heroic, eminently human: but in practice most unluckily at present we find it too become in good part beaverish,—yielding a money-result alone. And what of it is not beaverish,—does not that too go mainly to ingenious talking, publishing of yourself, ingratiating of yourself; a partly human exercise or waste of intellect, and, alas, a partly vulpine ditto;—making the once sacred… Human Healer, more impossible for us than ever!”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), Stump Orator (May 1, 1850)

Men, Money, Exercises, Soul

“Where would one find an answer? For the belief—the will to believe—was engrained deeply in the human fiber. Not entirely, either, in the matrix of the present situation, but in the blood and bone of Man clear back to the caves. There was in the soul of Man a certain deadly fascination with all things macabre. The situation as it stood had been grasped willingly, almost eagerly, by men for whom the world had become a rather tame and vapid place with no terror in it beyond the brute force terror of atomic weapons and the dread uncertainty of unstable men in power.”

Clifford D. Simak book Time is the Simplest Thing

Source: Time is the Simplest Thing (1961), Chapter 13 (p. 101)

Men, World, Soul

“The only true man is one who practices ‘humanism.’ (…) this is the only way to success in life.”

Haidakhan Babaji teacher in northern India

Humanity
Source: The Teachings of Babaji, 29 October 1983.

Life, Way, Success

“The conclusion this article reaches, based on the presented arguments, is that Evolutionary Psychology (EP) may be a contribution to psychological science at several different, important levels. First, EP allows psychologists to communicate between different areas of psychological interest, and with other branches of science relevant to psychology as a life science. Second, EP provides a well-researched, rigorously formulated theory for evaluating any other psychological theory. The theory may prevent one from suggesting abilities that could not evolve but have been suggested within almost all psychological disciplines. The versatility EP shows as a theoretical framework for disciplines as different as psychoanalysis and cognitive science, suggests that EP may succeed in integrating psychological science. It also supports the claim that EP is as theoretically valid a science as cognitive science and evolutionary biology. EP also brings to psychology the focus on a theoretically rigorous and predictive theory of Human Nature, and the functional approach, which may provide maturation from the level of mere descriptive science. At the level of generating new theories and insights about Human Nature, EP seems to have proven its worth.”

Leif Edward Ottesen Kennair (1970)

"Evolutionary Psychology: An Emerging Integrative Perspective Within The Science And Practice Of Psychology" (2002)

Life, Communication, Support, Nature

“One can meet all the emotional requisites of a human—except for the assurance that you’ll find a life after death—without the superstitions of religion.”

Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible

Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. xxi

Life, Death, Religion

“… our inherent assumption is that you convince people with rational arguments. But all the data shows that most people are not influenced by rational arguments. They're influenced by social pressure. … That's just the human condition, and we just have to acknowledge it and accept it.”

Steven Novella (1964) American neurologist, skepticist

SGU Podcast #254, May 26th, 2010 http://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcast/sgu/254 The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, Podcast, 2010s

People

“The development of economics as a science which is always based on human beings, the creative actors and protagonists in all social processes and events (the subjectivist conception), is undoubtedly the most significant and characteristic contribution made by the Austrian School of economics, founded by Carl Menger. In fact Menger felt it vital to abandon the sterile objectivism of the classical (Anglo-Saxon) school whose members were obsessed with the supposed existence of external objective entities (social classes, aggregates, material factors of production, etc.). Menger held that economists should instead always adopt the subjectivist view of human beings who act, and that this perspective should invariably exert a decisive influence on the way all economic theories are formulated, in terms of their scientific content and their practical conclusions and results.”

Jesús Huerta de Soto (1956) professor of political economy and author

Jesús Huerta de Soto (2006), Money, Bank Credit, and Economic Cycles, p. 267, Note 3,

School, Way, Decision, Science

“The Relativity theory, the copernican upheaval, or any great scientific convulsion, leaves a new landscape. There is a period of stunned dreariness; then people begin, antlike, the building of a new human world. They soon forget the last disturbance. But from these shocks they derive a slightly augmented vocabulary, a new blind spot in their vision, a few new blepharospasms or tics, and perhaps a revised method of computing time.”

Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957) writer and painter

"The Great God Flux".
Source: The Art of Being Ruled (1926), p. 336

People, World, Time, Forgetting

“Pride in one’s work carries with it a determination to accept the demands imposed by that work: in the case of philosophy to follow the argument where it leads, in the case of history to discover what actually happened, in the case of literature to explore to its depths a particular theme. In consequence, this sort of pride demands freedom: it has to be laid low in any authoritarian State. The historian, in such a system, has to conform to official interpretations of the past, the philosopher to dogmas, the writer to stereotypes of human action, the craftsman to “production-schedules.” More subtly, attempts are made to lay pride low in a consumer’s society: the film-director, the novelist, the craftsman are called upon to produce “what will sell” at whatever cost to their pride in workmanship.”

John Passmore (1914–2004) Australian philosopher

Source: The Perfectibility of Man (1971), p. 290.

History, Literature, Freedom, Past

“Mr Bush, Mr. Blair and now Mr Brown's sense of human rights precludes our people's right to their God-given resources, which in their view must be controlled by their kith and kin. I am termed dictator because I have rejected this supremacist view and frustrated the neo-colonialists.”

Robert Mugabe (1924–2019) former President of Zimbabwe

Speech to the United Nations General Assembly (26 September 2007)
2000s, 2005 - 2009

God, People, Sense

“ Of all forms of symbolism, language is the most highly developed, most subtle, and most complicated. It has been pointed out that human beings, by agreement, can make anything stand for anything. Now, human beings have agreed, in the course of centuries of mutual dependency, to let the various noises that they can produce […] stand for specified happenings in their nervous systems. We call that system of agreements language. For example, we who speak English have been so trained that, when our nervous systems register the presence of a certain kind of animal, we may make the following noise: "That's a cat." Anyone hearing us expects to find that, by looking in the same direction, he will experience a similar event in his nervous system -- one that will lead him to make an almost identical noise. Again, we have been so trained that when we are conscious of wanting food, we make the noise "I'm hungry."”

S. I. Hayakawa book Language in Thought and Action

Source: Language in Thought and Action (1949), Language as Symbolism, pp. 26-27

Food, Cats, Animals, Dependency

“What was centrally new about Christ … was His willingness to sacrifice, in the interest of non-resistant love, all other forms of human solidarity, including the legitimate national interests of the chosen people. The Jews had been told that in Abraham all the nations would be blessed and had understood this promise as the vindication of their nationalism. Jesus revealed that the contrary was the case: the universality of God's kingdom contradicts rather than confirms all particular solidarities and can be reached only by first forsaking the old aeon.”

John Howard Yoder (1927–1997) 20th century American Mennonite theologian

The Original Revolution (1971), p. 58

Love, God, People, Universe

“The man whose action habitually bears the stamp of his mind is a genius, but the greatest genius is not always equal to himself, or he would cease to be human.”

Honoré de Balzac book Une fille d'Ève

L'homme qui peut empreindre perpétuellement la pensée dans le fait est un homme de génie; mais l'homme qui a le plus de génie ne le déploie pas à tous les instants, il ressemblerait trop à Dieu.
Source: A Daughter of Eve (1839), Ch. 3: The Story of a Happy Woman.

“We can find our way back to thoughtful management for the long-term well-being of both humans and forests. But finding this way will require some quiet and humility.”

David G. Haskell (1950) writer, Biologist

"April 2nd — Chainsaw," page 67 The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature http://theforestunseen.com/ (2012)

Way

“If the house is to be demolished tomorrow anyhow, people seem to feel, we may as well burn the furniture today. None of our problems are insoluble…But it seems clear that to prevail we humans will have to act with a smartness and selflessness that has so far eluded us during our long and tangled history.”

Arthur C. Clarke book The Light of Other Days

Source: The Light of Other Days (2000), Chapter 4

People, Feeling, History, Problem

“Religious feeling is as much a verity as any other part of human consciousness; and against it, on the subjective side, the waves of science beat in vain.”

John Tyndall (1820–1893) British scientist

Professor Virchow and Evolution.
Fragments of Science, Vol. II (1879)

Feeling, Science, Parting

“Under the rule of a repressive whole, liberty can be made into a powerful instrument of domination. The range of choice open to the individual is not the decisive factor in determining the degree of human freedom, but what can be chosen and what is chosen by the individual.”

Herbert Marcuse book One-Dimensional Man

Source: One-Dimensional Man (1964), p. 7

Decision, Freedom

“It is fashionable to wax apocalyptic about the threat to humanity posed by the AIDS virus, "mad cow" disease, and many others, but I think a case can be made that faith is one of the world's great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate.”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

" Is Science a Religion? http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/articles/dawkins.html", The Humanist (January 1997)

World, Disease, Faith, Fashion

“Religion. Yes, that's behind all my books. What I am interested in is the relationship between the blundering human being and God. I belong to no church, but I have a religious faith; it's an attempt to express that, among other things, that I try to do. Whether he confesses to being religious or not, everyone has a religious faith of a kind. I myself am a blundering human being with a belief in God who made us and we got out of hand, a kind of Frankenstein monster. Everyone can make mistakes, including God. I believe God does intervene; I think there is a Divine Power, a Creator, who has an influence on human beings if they are willing to be open to him.”

Patrick White (1912–1990) English-born Australian writer

In The Making (1970)

God, Books, Faith, Religion

“How could we bear, nursed as we have been in a free atmosphere, to be gagged and muzzled; to have spies, eavesdroppers and delators at every corner; to have even private conversations caught up and used against us by the Secret Police and all their agents and creatures; to be arrested and interned without trial; or to be tried by political or Party courts for crimes hitherto unknown to civil law. How could we bear to be treated like schoolboys when we are grown-up men; to be turned out on parade by tens of thousands to march and cheer for this slogan or for that; to see philosophers, teachers and authors bullied and toiled to death in concentration camps; to be forced every hour to conceal the natural workings of the human intellect and the pulsations of the human heart? Why, I say that rather than submit to such oppression, there is no length we would not go to.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at Théâtre des Ambassadeurs, Paris (24 September 1936), quoted in Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth: Winston S. Churchill, 1922–1939 (London: Minerva, 1990), p. 788
The 1930s

Death, Men, Secret, Law

“I’ve always suspected that Judas was the most faithful of the apostles, and that his betrayal of Jesus was not a betrayal at all, simply a test to prove that Christ could not be betrayed. The way I see it, Judas hoped and expected that Christ would have worked some kind of miracle and turned away those soldiers when they came for him. Or perhaps he would not die on the cross. Or perhaps—well, never mind. In any case, Jesus didn’t do any of these things, probably because he was not capable of it. You see, I’ve also always believed that Christ was not the son of God, but just a very very good man, and that he had no supernatural powers at all, just the abilities of any normal human being. When he died, that’s when Judas realized that he had not been testing God at all—he’d been betraying a human being, perhaps the best human being. Judas’s mistake was in wanting too much to believe in the powers of Christ. He wanted Christ to demonstrate to everyone that he was the son of God, and he believed his Christ could do it—only his Christ wasn’t the son of God and couldn’t do it, and he died. You see, it was Christ who betrayed Judas—by promising what he couldn’t deliver. And Judas realized what he had done and hung himself. That’s my interpretation of it, Auberson—not the traditional, I’ll agree, but it has more meaning to me. Judas’s mistake was in believing too hard and not questioning first what he thought were facts. I don’t intend to repeat that mistake.”

David Gerrold book When HARLIE Was One

Section 37 (p. 216)
When HARLIE Was One (1972)

God, Faith, Hope, Way

“I believe all Americans are born with certain inalienable rights. As a child of God, I believe my rights are not derived from the Constitution. My rights are not derived from any government. My rights are not denied by any majority. My rights are because I exist. They were given to me and each of my fellow citizens by our creator, and they represent the essence of human dignity….”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

Page 194
2000s, Promises to Keep (2008)

God

“Fame without the money to insulate you from it is one of the most wretched human conditions possible.”

Douglas Coupland book Generation A

Source: Generation A (2009), p. 80

Money

“A genuine first-hand religious experience like this is bound to be a heterodoxy to its witnesses, the prophet appearing as a mere lonely madman. If his doctrine prove contagious enough to spread to any others, it becomes a definite and labeled heresy. But if it then still prove contagious enough to triumph over persecution, it becomes itself an orthodoxy; and when a religion has become an orthodoxy, its day of inwardness is over: the spring is dry; the faithful live at second hand exclusively and stone the prophets in their turn. The new church, in spite of whatever human goodness it may foster, can be henceforth counted on as a staunch ally in every attempt to stifle the spontaneous religious spirit, and to stop all later bubblings of the fountain from which in purer days it drew its own supply of inspiration.”

William James (1842–1910) American philosopher, psychologist, and pragmatist

Lectures XIV and XV, "The Value of Saintliness"
1900s, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902)

Faith, Religion, Spring, Appearance

“The subject matter of linguistics comprises all manifestations of human speech, whether that of savages or civilized nations, or of archaic, classical or decadent periods. In each period the linguist must consider not only correct speech and flowery language, but all other forms of expression as well. And that is not all: since he is often unable to observe speech directly, he must consider written texts, for only through them can he reach idioms that are remote in time or space.”

Ferdinand de Saussure book Course in General Linguistics

Source: Cours de linguistique générale (1916), p. 6

Time

“The essence of capital is its ability to mobilize social labor by buying labor power and setting it to work. This requires a market in which the capacity of human beings to work can be bought and sold like any other commodity: buyers of labor power offer wages, which sellers accept in return for a commodity, their own labor.”

Eric Wolf (1923–1999) American anthropologist

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 12 The New Laborers, p. 354.

“They have called me bizarre, neurotic or silly, and said that what I am doing is pointless. "Animals don't need a human to teach them how to behave." Many of these critics are generally misinformed about my intentions. This is not a one-time experiment. My "science," or my way of researching wolf behavior, is from inside the pack and actually becoming part of their world -- exploring the unknown and untested. I think the madness that some people will see in living alongside a pack of wolves will be justified when people see the results of what we've learned.”

Shaun Ellis (1977) American football player, defensive end

Interview with A Man Among Wolves: Shaun Ellis http://incubator.nationalgeographic.com/inside_ngc/2007/04/interview-with-a-man-among-wolves-shaun-ellis.html, Inside NGS, (2007)

People, World, Way, Behavior

“‘… the history of the “secular” as a cultural, humane, interstitial space in the midst of logos itself, has lost out to the idea of the “secular” as a fundamental manifestation of the rationality of the nation-state, just as the histories of modernity and cosmopolitanism in India have been subsumed, in our time, and for a variety of reasons, by a history of the nation.’”

Amit Chaudhuri (1962) contemporary Indian-English novelist

Clearing a Space (2008)

History, Idea, Time

“If a prophecy is to be called infallible, I fairly demand that it should state beforehand legibly, clearly, and distinctly that which no man could previously have known, and that the same should thereafter take place at the time appointed, but that it should not take place because it has been predicted. If, however, such a prophecy can only be verified through allegorical interpretations of words and interpretation of words and things; if it be only composed of dark and dubious words, and the expressions it contains are commonplace, vague, and uncertain; if the matter was thought probable, or was foreseen by human cunning; if it occurs because it was predicted; if the words used refer to some other matter and are only applied to the prophecy by a quibble; if it is only written down after the event has occurred; if a prophetic book or passage is given out to be older than it is; or lastly, if the thing predicted does not take place at all, then the prophecy is either doubtful or false.”

Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) German philosopher

Source: Fragments from Reimarus: Consisting of Brief Critical Remarks on the Object of Jesus and His Disciples as Seen in the New Testament, pp. 76–77

Books, Time, Falseness

“No honest historian can take part with — or against — the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should be merely a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Study, Parting

“Inherent in human beings are possibilities which we now can't even entertain. Before the space launch, space travel to many of us was the stuff of fantasy, of science fiction. We know what it is to explore the limits of what we consider to be a human being, but if we were to transform our understanding of ourselves, if we were to transform what we knew a human being to be, new possibilities of expression would open. We could function in a more creative way. In a more humane way. In the past we were transformed by the thrust of evolution or by accidental forces. This time we should transform ourselves with a conscious, committed degree of self-awareness.”

Werner Erhard (1935) Critical Thinker and Author

Interview with USA Today, "Mankind Must Find a New Self Awareness", Dan Neuharth and Miles White, December 14, 1982

Way, Travel, Understanding, Science

“I am concerned about information and technical processes that affect the change in human behavior, the changing forms of interaction between people. Mankind is in a hectic state, and the concentration of people’s attention exclusively on their internal thinking processes is transformed into a permanent meditative state in which people remain even when they go out and appear in public. I’ve watched it many times. These changes will ultimately change humans, and such people as me or you, most probably, will cease to exist. There will be others, and we will most likely be the last of Homo sapiens.”

Nicholas Ovcharov (1988) Ukrainian writer and film director

"The Interaction: modern media art in Ukraine" in EMPR (19 March 2018) https://empr.media/culture/movie/the-inetraction-modern-media-art-in-ukraine/

People, Behavior, Thinking, Appearance

“When we leave out people on the grounds of ethnicity we limit our options. As such, we become poorer because we are not making optimum use of our human resources, thereby depriving us of the returns and full benefit of our capabilities.”

Epeli Ganilau (1951) Fijian politician

From a speech to the Lautoka Rotary Club, 13 May 2005

People

“Science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity’s powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilisation drives itself to extinction.”

David Mitchell book Cloud Atlas

"Letters from Zedelghem", p. 462
Cloud Atlas (2004)

War, Science

“To explore the countercurrents of consciousness in a given circumstance—uncertain promises of other futures; to trace the struggle between spirit and structure in every domain of social and cultural life; to show how vision becomes embodied in institutions and practices and, in being embodied, is both undermined and corrected, but in any event transformed; to reveal how we forfeit our freedom to imagine and reconstruct, and then regain it, even against our will; to commandeer alien wisdom the better to criticize the established order and present experience; to give voice to what has lost a voice or not yet gained one; to display in every department of our experience, from the micro to the macro and from passion to calculation, the revolt of the infinite within us against the finite around us—all this is the work of the humanities when they recognize us for what we are and might become.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

124
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007)

Life, Wisdom, Imagination, Freedom

“When we valorize ignorance and debase reason, we diminish man and the humanity that dwells within him, to bum an old fashioned phrase from Kant.”

Laura Penny (1975) Canadian journalist

Source: More Money than Brains (2010), Chapter One, Don't Need No Edjumacation, p. 35

Fashion

“For the great mass of mankind the only saving grace that is needed is steady fidelity to what is nearest to hand and heart in the short moment of each human effort.”

Joseph Conrad (1857–1924) Polish-British writer

Notes on Life and Letters (1921), Part II,, "Tradition"

Effort, Heart

“Earlier fundamental work of Whitehead, Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, Whorf, etc., as well as my own attempt to use this earlier thinking as an epistemological base for psychiatric theory, led to a series of generalizations: That human verbal communication can operate and always does operate at many contrasting levels of abstraction. These range in two directions from the seemingly simple denotative level (“The cat is on the mat”). One range or set of these more abstract levels includes those explicit or implicit messages where the subject of discourse is the language. We will call these metalinguistic (for example, “The verbal sound ‘cat’ stands for any member of such and such class of objects”, or “The word, ‘cat’ has no fur and cannot scratch”). The other set of levels of abstraction we will call metacommunicative (e. g., “My telling you where to ﬁnd the cat was friendly”, or “This is play”). In these, the subject of discourse is the relationship between the speakers. It will be noted that the vast majority of both metalinguistic and metacommunicative messages remain implicit; and also that, especially in the psychiatric interview, there occurs a further class of implicit messages about how metacommunicative messages of friendship and hostility are to be interpreted.”

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

Gregory Bateson (1955) " A theory of play and fantasy http://sashabarab.com/syllabi/games_learning/bateson.pdf". In: Psychiatric research reports, 1955. pp. 177-178] as cited in: S.P. Arpaia (2011) " Paradoxes, circularity and learning processes http://www2.units.it/episteme/L&PS_Vol9No1/L&PS_Vol9No1_2011_18b_Arpaia.pdf". In: L&PS – Logic & Philosophy of Science, Vol. IX, No. 1, 2011, pp. 207-222

Friendship, Hostility, Communication, Cats