Quotes about humanity
page 68

Agatha Christie (1890–1976) English mystery and detective writer

A Murder is Announced (1950)

“The problem you have put me will remain a problem till the globe of the world and the globe of the sun meet in their common center and the one consumes the other. This answer I have proposed, however, humanity will know and forget, know and forget, know and forget again. And that knowing and forgetting will approximate the peaks and depths of civilization as closely as the quotient of your tosses approximates that number which, rationally, we know is not there.”

Samuel R. Delany book Neveryóna

Source: Neveryóna (1983), Chapter 12, “Of Models, Monsters, Night, and the Numinous” (p. 358)

World, Problem, Sun, Forgetting

“Perplext no more with Human or Divine,
To-morrow's tangle to the winds resign,
And lose your fingers in the tresses of
The Cypress — slender Minister of Wine.”

Omar Khayyám (1048–1131) Persian poet, philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer

The Rubaiyat (1120)

Wine

“But who can fathom the subtleties of the human heart? Certainly not those who expect from it only decorous sentiments and normal emotions.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Moon and Sixpence

Source: The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Ch. 43, p. 154

Heart

“[The animals] are now especially bred for eating purposes, and if the demand decreased, the supply would decrease also. Further, how is it that we are not overrun by wild animals of all sorts? … People need not worry about the future welfare of the bovine race, if they would only be a little more humane in their treatment of its present representatives!”

Hereward Carrington (1880–1958) Jersey parapsychologist

Source: The Natural Food for Man, p. 159-160

People, Future, Animals

“With God's foreknowledge man's free will! what monster-growth of human brain,
What powers of light shall ever pierce this puzzle dense with words inane?”

Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890) British explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, lin…

The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870)

God, Light

“He considers [it's] insulting and false to say that gods are magical anthropomorphic immortals. But however insensitive that may seem, we cannot fairly dismiss all the hundreds of gods who were worshiped by millions of people for thousands of years. However we define what a god is, that definition must include every entity already universally accepted as a deity by those who worship it. My research in this area would have me submit that all gods are magical anthropomorphic immortals, because that description does seem to apply to all of them. They all have miraculous powers and human characteristics, and even if you can kill the body, they still exist and can still return in some other form, or the same form, or be literally born again as it was with Dionysus II. Even on the rare occasion that gods can be killed, none of them die from cancer or old age, and all of them survive for centuries. Even the immortals in movie, the Highlander could be killed–one particular way only. Otherwise, they’re immortal with human characteristics. Give them magic powers and they’d be gods.”

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

Patheos, Philosophistry http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2017/04/12/philosophistry/ (April 12, 2017)

God, People, Age, Way

“Apparently this was a design flaw in the unaugmented human brain, a lagging of consciousness behind intent.”

Jon Courtenay Grimwood (1953) British writer

Source: Stamping Butterflies (2004), Chapter 16 (p. 106)

“I suspect our human "thinking processes" often "break down," but you rarely notice anything's wrong, because your systems so quickly switch you to think in different ways, while the systems that failed are repaired or replaced.”

Marvin Minsky book The Emotion Machine

The Emotion Machine (2006)

Way, Thinking

“When news had reached me through well-informed channels that my Aunt Agatha for many years a widow, or derelict, as I believed it is called, was about to take another pop at matrimony, my first emotion, as was natural in the circumstances, had been a gentle pity for the unfortunate goop slated to step up the aisle with her - she, as you are aware, being my tough aunt, the one who eats broken bottles and conducts human sacrifices by the light of the full moon.”

P.G. Wodehouse book Joy in the Morning

Joy in the Morning (1947)

Nature, Light

“We are deeply concerned about the situation in Russia with regards to human rights. There are several examples of this situation, such as the new law requiring NGOs to register as “foreign agents”, the law banning homosexual “propaganda”, problems with the rule of law and arbitrary judicial processes, and court rulings against the opposition.”

Cecilia Malmström (1968) Swedish politician

" Situation in Russia http://blogs.ec.europa.eu/malmstrom/situation-in-russia/", My Blog, European Commission, 17 January 2014.

Law, Problem

“God Himself is the nearest to hand, as the absolutely simple must be, and at the same time the most distant, as the absolutely simple must also be. God Himself is the irresolvable and at the same time that which fills and embraces everything else. God Himself in His being for Himself is the one being which stands in need of nothing else and at the same time the one being by which every thing else came into being and exists. God Himself is the beginning in which everything begins, with which we must and can always begin with confidence and without need of excuse. And at the same time He is the end in which everything legitimately and necessarily ends, with which we must end with confidence and without need of excuse. God Himself is simple, so simple that in all His glory He can be near to the simplest perception and also laugh at the most profound or acute thinking so simple that He reduces everyone to silence, and then allows and requires everyone boldly to make Him the object of their thought and speech. He is so simple that to think and speak correctly of Him and to live correctly before Him does not in fact require any special human complexities or for that matter any special human simplicities, so that occasionally and according to our need He may permit and require both human complexity and human simplicity, and occasionally they may both be forbidden us…”

Karl Barth book Church Dogmatics

2:1
Church Dogmatics (1932–1968)

God, Confidence, Thinking, Silence

“The capacity to accept suffering for the sake of goodness, truth and justice is an essential criterion of humanity, because if my own well-being and safety are ultimately more important than truth and justice, then the power of the stronger prevails, then violence and untruth reign supreme. Truth and justice must stand above my comfort and physical well-being, or else my life itself becomes a lie. In the end, even the “yes” to love is a source of suffering, because love always requires expropriations of my “I”, in which I allow myself to be pruned and wounded. Love simply cannot exist without this painful renunciation of myself, for otherwise it becomes pure selfishness and thereby ceases to be love.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2007

Love, Life, Pain, Truth

“In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.”

Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910) American abolitionist, social activist, and poet

Mother's Day Proclamation (1870)

Women, Peace, Question

“See, before the Flood came, the people lived to be 900. But after the Flood, life spans dropped off to 400, and then 200, and then 100; but that's still a long time to live. And it's a simple fact the bones of your eyebrow ridge never stop growing. So if you could live to be three or four hundred years old, your eyebrow ridge would stick way out! People today that use their jaws a lot, like the Aborigines in Australia always using their jaws as a vice (they don't carry a toolbox with them), their eyebrow ridge sticks out really far, because of the chewing muscles. It pulls on the bone. The Neanderthals are perfectly normal humans that are living to be two or three hundred years old. That's all they are. Their brain's bigger than ours. They're not subhuman at all!”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), The Garden of Eden

Life, People, Way, Time

“Three revolutions mark the history of life on earth. The first was the origin of life itself… The second… was the origin of multicellular organisms… The origin of human consciousness… was the third… Life became aware of itself, and began to transform the world of nature to its own ends.”

Richard Leakey (1944) Kenyan paleoanthropologist, conservationist, and politician

The Origin of Humankind (1994)

Life, World, History, Nature

“It is a consolation to remember that corruption pushed beyond a certain point provides its own remedy, and that this sort of thing cannot indefinitely continue; but it is less consoling to remember another truth, to wit, that the correction of political and social evil may come in the form of irremediable catastrophe, and that the innocent, who are the greater number, would then suffer most. It is still less consoling to remember the universal human experience that when evil is redressed by the only partly conscious force of reaction, it is not succeeded by a corresponding good, but by some other new and unexpected evil.”

Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953) writer

Source: The Cruise of the 'Nona (1925), pp. 248–9

Truth, Suffering, Universe, Evil

“Ingenuity, knowledge, and organization alter but cannot cancel humanity's vulnerability to invasion by parasitic forms of life. Infectious disease which antedated the emergence of humankind will last as long as humanity itself, and will surely remain, as it has been hitherto, one of the fundamental parameters and determinants of human history.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

Source: Plagues and Peoples (1976), Ch.6.

Life, Disease, History, Knowledge

“Like other human freedoms, the freedoms embodied in market institutions are justified inasmuch as they meet human needs. Insofar as they fail to do this they can reasonably be altered. This is true not only of the rights that are involved in market institutions. It is true of all human rights.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

'Modus Vivendi' (p.36)
Gray's Anatomy: Selected Writings (2009)

Freedom

“The human being cannot live in a condition of emptiness for very long: if he is not growing toward something, he does not merely stagnate; the pent-up potentialities turn into morbidity and despair, and eventually into destructive activities.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Man’s Search for Himself (1953), p. 24

Despair

“The gods love salt. The sweat of human endeavour adds savour to every sacrifice.”

Mary Stewart book The Hollow Hills

The Hollow Hills (1973)

Love, God

“"In great misfortunes," he told himself, "people want to be alone. They have a right to be. And the misfortunes that occur within one are the greatest. Surely the saddest thing in the world is falling out of love — if once one has ever fallen in."
Falling out, for him, seemed to mean falling out of all domestic and social relations, out of his place in the human family, indeed.”

Willa Cather book The Professor's House

Book III, Ch. 4
The Professor's House (1925)

Love, People, World, Family

“Our enemy really isn't capitalism, it's cynicism. That's one the things I learned from Woody (Guthrie)… Not to be cynical… That cynicism… It destroys you, it rots you away from the inside. So that sense of optimism and humanity… which 20 years ago I would have called socialism but now I'll call compassion… You know, that idea is still out there and alive and if you can plug into that and encourage that it makes it all worth while.”

Billy Bragg (1957) English singer-songwriter and left-wing political activist

From Curtis, Hillman, MTIV, Process, Inspiration and Practice for the New Media Designer (Indianapolis: New Riders, 2002), page 221.

Idea, Optimism, Sense, Learning

“The scientific world picture does not include … things that have not been constructed, that are not understood as artefacts … Instead of the final cause one starts to speak about purpose, which nature itself does not have. Only humans can set aims and achieve them by their activities if they know the laws of nature and set up various processes based on them and organise them purposively.”

Rein Vihalemm (1938–2015) Estonian philosopher of chemistry

Source: Chemistry as an Interesting Subject for the Philosophy of Science, 2001, p. 192

World, Law, Nature

“On examination, I have found [Hinduism] to be the most tolerant of all religions known to me. Its freedom from dogma makes a forcible appeal to me in as much as it gives the votary the largest scope for self-expression. Not being an exclusive religion, it enables the followers of the faith not merely to respect all the other religions, but it also enables them to admire and assimilate whatever may be good in the other faiths. Non-violence is common to all religions, but it has found the highest expression and application in Hinduism. (I do not regard Jainism or Buddhism as separate from Hinduism.) Hinduism believes in the oneness not of merely all human life but in the oneness of all that lives.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

October 1927. The Collected Works, Volume 35, New Delhi, 1968, pp. 166-67. As quoted in Goel, S.R. History of Hindu-Christian Encounters (1996)
1920s

Life, Faith, Religion, Freedom

“My father Giannino Castiglioni was a sculptor. His was a realistic sculpture, always linked to the human image, not fantastic and unreal, had an attitude of continuous analysis of the characteristics of people”

Achille Castiglioni (1918–2002) Italian designers and architect

Giannino Castiglioni. Milano, 1884 - Lierna (Lago di Como), 1971. Scultore. in: II personaggi pubblici., p. 42 ( online http://www.alessandraubertazzi.eu/wp-content/pdf/monumentale/personaggipubblici.pdf)

People

“We are approaching a more fluid state. I have talked about cultural boiling. The idea of the phase-transition period which, in fractal mathematics, is the chaotic flux between one state and another. …Culturally, and as a species, we are approaching a phase-transition. I don’t know quite what that means, on a human level.”

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

De Abaitua interview (1998)

Mathematics, Idea

“My father was an absolutely wonderful human being. From him I learned to always assume positive intent. Whatever anybody says or does, assume positive intent.”

Indra Nooyi (1955) Indian-born, naturalized American, business executive

Top 15 quotes from PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi

Learning

“I cannot forbear adding to these reasonings an observation, which may, perhaps, be found of some importance. In every system of morality, which I have hitherto met with, I have always remarked, that the author proceeds for some time in the ordinary way of reasoning, and establishes the being of a God, or makes observations concerning human affairs; when of a sudden I am surprized to find, that instead of the usual copulations of propositions, is, and is not, I meet with no proposition that is not connected with an ought, or an ought not. This change is imperceptible; but is, however, of the last consequence. For as this ought, or ought not, expresses some new relation or affirmation, it is necessary that it should be observed and explained; and at the same time that a reason should be given, for what seems altogether inconceivable, how this new relation can be a deduction from others, which are entirely different from it. But as authors do not commonly use this precaution, I shall presume to recommend it to the readers; and am persuaded, that this small attention would subvert all the vulgar systems of morality, and let us see, that the distinction of vice and virtue is not founded merely on the relations of objects, nor is perceived by reason.”

David Hume book A Treatise of Human Nature

Part 1, Section 1
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 3: Of morals

God, Way, Change, Time

“If the Church would have her face shine, she must go up into the mount, and be alone with God. If she would have her courts of worship resound with eucharistic praises, she must open her eyes, and see humanity lying lame at the temple gates, and heal it in the miraculous name of Jesus.”

Frederic Dan Huntington (1819–1904) American bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 145.

God, Lying

“Humans: The only animal who can laugh!/ We can enjoy the lighter side of life/ And we can also laugh at others/ And ridicule others!”

Kuruvilla Pandikattu (1957) Indian philosopher

Life: Relish It!
Life: Relish It! (2012)

Life, Animals

“Nine-tenths the calamities of the human race are due to the union of high intelligence with low desires.”

Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800–1859) British historian and Whig politician

"Lord Bacon", (1837) in Essays 2:183
Attributed

Intelligence

“There is another meaning that might be attached to this admonition to be oneself; that one should not try to disguise himself. I suspect this comes nearer to what psychologists mean when they urge people to be themselves. It is presumed that the person who faces the world barefaced is more spontaneous, that he expresses himself more fully, and that he has a better chance of developing all his resources if he assumes no disguises.
But this doctrine of psychological nakedness in human affairs, so much talked about today and which allows the self neither make-up nor costume, leaves very little to the imagination. Not does it invite one to be venturesome. I suspect, for example, that in the Garden of Eden it might have occurred to Adam to take a chance much sooner than he did if Eve had been paying a little more attention to her wardrobe. As it was I hear she had to bribe him with an apple. Later on they say she contrived a saucy little something out of fig leaves.”

George Kelly (psychologist) (1905–1967) American psychologist and therapist

Source: The Language of Hypothesis, 1964, p. 157-8

People, World, Imagination, Chance

“The historian is not only a lover of truth, not only a chronicler of events. These, indeed, he must be at his peril, but how much more! Insight into human nature—and this implies the rarest knowledge and finest sympathy of which man is capable; the power of tracing the delicate relation between deed and motive, and the pressure of action upon circumstance and circumstance upon action; knowledge of the world, in short, in the highest sense of that expression.”

Henry Nettleship (1839–1893) British schoolteacher

Lectures and Essays https://archive.org/details/lecturesandessa00havegoog (1895), p. 245

Truth, World, Lovers, Motivation

“In the entire world, there is not a single establishment of the security industry that is not based on monopoly or on communism. […] Political economy has disapproved equally of monopoly and communism in the various branches of human activity, wherever it has found them. Is it not then strange and unreasonable that it accepts them in the security industry?”

Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912) Belgian political economist and classical liberal theorist

Source: The Production of Security (1849), p. 27–28

World, Communication

“In the United States, … there prevails a simple faith that the formulae of the democratic state will solve all the social problems of humanity, even though their application be limited and hindered by an autocratic economic order.”

Harry F. Ward (1873–1966) American methodist minister

Source: The New Social Order (1920), pp. v-vi

Faith, Problem

“Fascism is a purely stately principle. Mussolini said in 1932, 'The first thing is the state - and from the state are derived the rights and fate of the people. Humans come second.' In National Socialism, it was the opposite. People and humans come first, and the state is secondary.”

Otto Ohlendorf (1907–1951) German general

To Leon Goldensohn, March 1, 1946, from "The Nuremberg Interviews" by Leon Goldensohn, Robert Gellately - History - 2004.

Fate, People

“When I look up at the starry heavens at night and reflect upon what it is that I really see there, I am constrained to say, "There is no God." The mind staggers in its attempt to grasp the idea of a being that could do that. It is futile to attempt it. It is not the works of some God that I see there. I am face to face with a power that baffles speech. I see no lineaments of personality, no human traits, but an energy upon whose currents solar systems are but bubbles. In the presence of it man and the race of man are less than motes in the air. I doubt if any mind can expand its conception of God sufficiently to meet the astounding disclosures of modern science. It is easier to say there is no God. The universe is so unhuman, that is, it goes its way with so little thought of man. He is but an incident, not an end. We must adjust our notions to the discovery that things are not shaped to him, but that he is shaped to them. The air was not made for his lungs, but he has lungs because there is air; the light was not created for his eye, but he has eyes because there is light. All the forces of nature are going their own way; man avails himself of them, or catches a ride as best he can. If he keeps his seat he prospers; if he misses his hold and falls he is crushed.”

John Burroughs (1837–1921) American naturalist and essayist

Source: The Light of Day (1900), Ch. XII: God and Nature

God, Way, Idea, Nature

“There is a need for enormous violence for the awakening of humanity and the acceptance of the system of the Mahdi. I mean people do not draw closer to accepting the Truth, unless they are subjected to violence.”

Harun Yahya (1956) Turkish author

4 January 2014.
A9 TV addresses, 2014

People, Truth, Drawing

“I must tell you that in this moment all doubt as to my attested worth went out of me, who had redeemed a kingdom, and begotten a king, and created a god. So you waste time, my friend, in trying to convince me of all human life's failure and unimportance, for I am not in sympathy with this modern morbid pessimistic way of talking. It has a very ill sound, and nothing whatever is to be gained by it.”

James Branch Cabell book Figures of Earth

Manuel, in Ch. XXXIX : The Passing of Manuel
Figures of Earth (1921)

Life, God, Way, Failure

“The fact that human evolution has been recent, copious and regional is not widely recognized, even though it has now been reported by many articles in the literature of genetics. The reason is in part that the knowledge is so new and in part because it raises awkward challenges to deeply held conventional wisdom.”

Nicholas Wade (1942) British writer

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (2014)

Wisdom, Literature, Knowledge, Parting

“For the first time in history, children are growing up whose earliest sexual imprinting derives not from a living human being, or fantasies of their own; since the 1960s pornographic upsurge, the sexuality of children has begun to be shaped in response to cues that are no longer human. […] Today's children and young men and women have sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from Playboy to music videos to the blank female torsos in women’s magazines, features obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman.”

Naomi Wolf book The Beauty Myth

Source: The Beauty Myth (1991), Chapter 5 : 'Sex', p. 162

Women, Men, Children, Music

“In the last few years there has been a harvest of books and lectures about the "Mysterious Universe." The inconceivable magnitudes with which astronomy deals produce a sense of awe which lends itself to a poetic and philosophical treatment. "When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy hands, the moon and the starts, whuch thou hast ordained: what is man that thou art mindful of him? The literary skill with which this branch of science has been exploited compels one's admiration, but alos, a little, one's sense of the ridiculous. For other facts than those of astronomy, oother disciplines than of mathematics, can produce the same lively feelings of awe and reverence: the extraordinary finenness of their adjustments to the world outside: the amazing faculties of the human mind, of which we know neither whence it comes not whither it goes. In some fortunate people this reverence is produced by the natural bauty of a landscape, by the majesty of an ancient building, by the heroism of a rescue party, by poetry, or by music. God is doubtless a Mathematician, but he is also a Physiologist, an Engineer, a Mother, an Architect, a Coal Miner, a Poet, and a Gardener. Each of us views things in his own peculiar war, each clothes the Creator in a manner which fits into his own scheme. My God, for instance, among his other professions, is an Inventor: I picture him inventing water, carbon dioxide, and haemoglobin, crabs, frogs, and cuttle fish, whales and filterpassing organisms ( in the ratio of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1 in size), and rejoicing greatly over these weird and ingenious things, just as I rejoice greatly over some simple bit of apparatus. But I would nor urge that God is only an Inventor: for inventors are apt, as those who know them realize, to be very dull dogs. Indeed, I should be inclined rather to imagine God to be like a University, with all its teachers and professors together: not omittin the students, for he obviously possesses, judging from his inventions, that noblest human characteristic, a sense of humour.”

Archibald Hill (1886–1977) English physiologist and biophysicist

The Ethical Dilemma of Science and Other Writings https://books.google.com.mx/books?id=zaE1AAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false (1960, Cap 1. Scepticism and Faith, p. 41)

God, War, People, Books

“We feel that we are surrounded by the congregated bones of the great men of past times, who have filled history with their deeds, and the earth with their renown. And yet it almost provokes a smile at the vanity of human ambition to see how they are crowded together and jostled in the dust; what parsimony is observed in doling out a scanty nook, a gloomy corner, a little portion of earth, to those whom, when alive, kingdoms could not satisfy, and how many shapes and forms and artifices are devised to catch the casual notice of the passenger, and save from forgetfulness for a few short years a name which once aspired to occupy ages of the world's thought and admiration.”

Washington Irving book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

"Westminster Abbey".
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820)

Men, Age, World, Smile

“The great moral teachers of humanity were, in a way, artistic geniuses in the art of living.”

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

1940s, Religion and Science: Irreconcilable? (1948)

Art, Way, Teachers

“Human character is never found "to enter into its glory," except through the ordeal of affliction. Its force cannot come forth without the offer of resistance, nor can the grandeur of its free will declare itself, except in the battle of fierce temptation.”

James Martineau (1805–1900) English religious philosopher

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 8.

Affliction

“Either you are a man of unusual ability, Thorn, or a man with a rather inadequate grasp of human nature. I just hope it’s the former.”

Alastair Reynolds book Redemption Ark

Source: Redemption Ark (2002), Chapter 27 (p. 495)

Hope, Nature

“In these two essays [the papers of 1955 and 1956] the focus is upon ways of simplifying the choice problem to bring it within the power of human computation… The key to the simplification of the choice process in both cases is the replacement of the goal of maximizing with the goal of satisficing, of finding a course of action that is ‘good enough’. I have tried, in these two essays, to show why this substitution is an essential step in the application of the principle of bounded rationality.”

Herbert A. Simon book Administrative Behavior

Source: 1940s-1950s, Administrative Behavior, 1947, p. 204‑5; As cited in: Gustavo Barros (2010) " Herbert A. Simon and the concept of rationality: boundaries and procedures http://www.scielo.br/pdf/rep/v30n3/a06v30n3.pdf." Revista de Economia Política 30.3. p. 461.

Way, Problem

“Changes in the structure of society are not brought about solely by massive engines of doctrine. The first flash of insight which persuades human beings to change their basic assumptions is usually contained in a few phrases.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Section 5: A Note on Ruskin's Writings on Society and Economics
Ruskin Today (1964)

Change

“When you truly embrace your human impermanence you connect with the power you have, and influence you have, over the time you have.”

Steve Maraboli (1975)

Source: Life, the Truth, and Being Free (2010), p. 123

Time

“This movie is not merely bad, but incompetent. I get tapes in the mail from 10th graders that are better made than this… I have often asked myself, "What would it look like if the characters in a movie were animatronic puppets created by aliens with an imperfect mastery of human behavior?"”

Roger Ebert (1942–2013) American film critic, author, journalist, and TV presenter

Now I know. Review http://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/friends-and-lovers-1999 of Friends & Lovers (30 April 1999) Reviews, Half-star reviews

Behavior

“The corporate state is an immensely powerful machine, ordered, legalistic, rational, yet utterly out of human control, wholly and perfectly indifferent to any human values.”

Charles A. Reich book The Greening of America

Source: The Greening of America (1970), Chapter V : Anatomy Of The Corporate State, p. 88

Indifference

“The Church owns property, needs income, employs men, works on human material, and banks on its moral prestige. Its present efficiency and future standing are bound up for weal or woe with the social welfare of the people and with the outcome of the present struggle.”

Walter Rauschenbusch (1861–1918) United States Baptist theologian

Source: Christianity and the Social Crisis (1907), Introduction, p.xiv

Men, People, Future

“Chile offered refuge and asylum to Erich Honecker, the tyrant of East Germany who wanted the tanks in the streets. Everyone said, "It is time to bury the past without bitterness." But then Chile clamored for justice for General Augusto Pinochet. On the same day, Spain indicted Chile's Pinochet for crimes against humanity, and welcomed with honors, Fidel Castro, while Castro's critics or any group that annoyed the tyrant, lay dead or rotted in prison, or tried to recover from the deadly work camps to which he sent them.”

Alan Charles Kors (1943) American academic

2010s, Socialism's Legacy (2011)

Justice, Time, Past, Dead

“My view point is essentially that of questioning layman, who enquires in order to find out the why and whither of human conduct and the achievements of history as well as the prospects of civilization.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

During his scholarly lecture tours as a philosopher, in Ghana, in Jayachamaraja Wodeyar – A Princely scholar http://www.mysoresamachar.com/j_wadiyar_ann2.htm

History, Question

“The tenement – the name derives from a fifteenth-century legal term for a multiple dwelling – always seemed to me a “ship afloat in concrete.” After all didn’t the building carry passengers on a voyage through life? No. 55 sat at the corner of Dropsie avenue near the elevated train, or the elevated as we called it in those days. It was a treasure house of stories that illustrated tenement life as I remembered it, stories that needed to be told before they faded from memory. Within its “railroad flats,” with rooms strung together train-like lived low-paid city employees or laborers and their turbulent families. Most were recent immigrants, intent n their own survival. They kept busy raising children and dreaming of the better lie they knew existed “uptown.” Hallways were filled with a rich stew of cooking aromas, sounds of arguments and the tinny wail from Victrolas. What community spirit there was stemmed from the common hostility of tenants to the landlord or his surrogate superintendent. Typically, the buildings tenants came and went with regularity, depending on the vagaries of their fortunes But many remained for a lifetime, imprisoned by poverty or old age. There was no real privacy or anonymity. Everybody knew about everybody. Human dramas, both good and bad, instantly gathered witness like ants swarming around a piece of dropped food. From window to window or on the stoop below, the tenants analyzed, evaluated and critiqued each happening, following an obligatory admission that it was really none of their business.”

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

XV-XVI, December 2004
A Contract With God (2004)

Life, Hostility, Children, Lie

“Relativity distorted classical expectations in a way that Clavain still did not find entirely intuitive. Slam two objects towards each other, each with individual velocities just below light-speed, and the classical result for their closing velocity would be the sum of their individual speeds: just under twice the speed of light. Yet the true result, confirmed with numbing precision, was that the objects saw each other approach with a combined speed that was still just below the speed of light. Similarly, the relativistic closing velocity for two objects moving towards each other with individual speeds of one-half of light-speed was not light-speed itself, but eight-tenths of it. It was the way the universe was put together, and yet it was not something the human mind had evolved to accept.”

Alastair Reynolds book Redemption Ark

Source: Redemption Ark (2002), Chapter 26 (p. 463)

Way, Light, Universe, Speed

“One of the enduring pathologies of human culture is the tendency to raise children to fear and demonize other human beings on the basis of religious faith.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Source: 2000s, Letter to a Christian Nation (2006), p. 80

Children, Fear, Faith

“More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Wisdom, Help

“Morals have a perfectly firm and objective foundation in human personality. If men can be brought to understand this, then moral faith may be restored. The problem is really one of education.”

Walter Terence Stace (1886–1967) British civil servant, educator and philosopher.

Men, Education, Faith, Understanding

“O Friend! Don't even speak of war. Get rid of atomic weapons.
Become immortal with the help of the treasure of camaraderie. Practice control over the senses, compassion and charity in your heart and in your actions.
By doing so, the humanity in you will rise even above divinity. Worship Lord Dattatreya, who is Bahudhari (one who possesses many aspects or one who is of the form of the tune 'Bahudhari'), the One who bestows auspiciousness and peace.
Experience Truth, Knowledge and Bliss and become exalted.”

Ganapathy Sachchidananda Swamiji (1942) Indian guru

Jaya Jaya Bhuvi Divi Manava (2002)

War, Truth, Peace, Knowledge

“American progressivism maintains a hyper-consciousness of race, obsessively emphasizing its centrality to human identity and relentlessly breaking down populations by racial categories. If nothing else, aggressive affirmative action requires that everyone be identified racially. When it’s time to measure political opinions, nothing is as salient as race, and the Trump phenomenon gets explained almost exclusively in terms of racial distributions, as white rage or white nationalism.”

Crispin Sartwell (1958) American philosopher

White Liberals: We’re Not Racist (August 29, 2016)

Rage, Time

“Honest and peace-loving people shun the Courts and are prepared to suffer loss rather than fall into a Lawyer's clutches. However, the vagaries and inconsistencies of human nature are such that people are unwillingly dragged in and the experiences they undergo leave an indelible and nauseating impression. One of these is the flagrant and plausible manner in which clients are fleeced, and snowed under a series of documents and forms which not only puzzle them, but which are always accompanied with demands for payment. There is, of course, the Lawyer's fee, but this is accompanied with the fees of his clerk (real or imaginary), then typing charges, copying charges and numerous other innumerable heads and sub-heads. In this context it is refreshing to recall that eminent legal luminary, the late Pt. Motilal Nehru was paid Rs. 5/- as his first fee and the remuneration of Dr. John Mathai was a bunch of bananas. These latter have increased immeasurably in value and are good foreign exchange getters and it is not so easy now to slip on a banana peel!”

Peter de Noronha (1897–1970) Indian businessman

The Pageant of Life (1964), On Lawyers

Love, People, Peace, Nature

“Creativity, no matter how elementally miniscule or broad in scope, is what differentiates human beings as superior to any material value, and also empowers the achievement of excellence beyond personal flaws.”

Vanna Bonta (1958–2014) Italian-American writer, poet, inventor, actress, voice artist (1958-2014)

State of the Art (2000)

Personality

“The fine art world and the commercial art industry are both all about money. It's hard to say which is more contemptible: the fine art world with its double talk and pretensions to the cultural high ground, or the world of commercial art trying to sell to the largest mass market it can reach. A serious artist really shouldn't be too deeply involved in either of these worlds. It's best to be on the fringe of them. In general, if you want to be a success and make the money, you have to play the game. It's no different in the fine art world, it's just a slightly different game. Essentially, you're marketing an illusion. It's much easier to lie to humans and trick them than to tell them the truth. They'd much rather be bamboozled than be told the truth, because the way to trick them is to flatter them and tell them what they want to hear, to reinforce their existing illusions. They don't want to know the truth. Truth is a bring-down, a bummer, or it's just too complicated, too much mental work to grasp.”

Robert Crumb (1943) American cartoonist

The R. Crumb Handbook by Robert Crumb and Peter Poplaski (2005), p. 297

Money, Truth, Lie, World

“Every human society possesses a mythology which is inherited, transmitted and diversified by literature.”

Northrop Frye (1912–1991) Canadian literary critic and literary theorist

Words with Power : Being a Second Study of The Bible and Literature (1990), Introduction, p. xiii http://books.google.com/books?id=ZnSJb6PPnBoC&pg=PP81&lpg=PP81&dq=%22which+is+inherited,+transmitted+and+diversified+by+literature%22&source=bl&ots=xJ1cLDaUCI&sig=m6agYWMBlW0qfDYMA7aX9aNM8IE&hl=en&sa=X&ei=PaCqUsiEM-issQT_4oGAAg&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q=%22which%20is%20inherited%2C%20transmitted%20and%20diversified%20by%20literature%22&f=false "Quotes"

Literature

“Of course one could claim that the human embryo or fetus is not (yet) a human being, but that's just science-denial. Or one could claim that human beings in early developmental stages don't have dignity but that is a denial that dignity is inherent and that all humans are equal.”

Robert P. George (1955) American legal scholar

Twitter post https://twitter.com/McCormickProf/status/941035451904856064 (13 December 2017) 2017

Science

“Just as Darwinian adaptationists assume that every biological phenomenon must be explained in terms of natural selection (no matter how unconducive to reproductive fitness it may appear initially), so too Nietzsche assumes that whatever explains “life” must also explain these particular instances of life which appear hostile to it. "'Life against life,'" Nietzsche says is a "self-contradiction" that "can only be apparent; it has to be a sort of provisional expression, an explanation, formula, adjustment, a psychological misunderstanding of something, the real nature of which was far from being understood" (GM III:13). … The crux of Nietzsche’s explanation turns on three claims:
(1) Suffering is a central fact of the human condition.
(2) Meaningless suffering is unbearable and leads to "suicidal nihilism" (GM III:28).
(3) The ascetic ideal gives meaning to suffering, thereby seducing the majority of humans back to life.”

Brian Leiter (1963) American philosopher and legal scholar

"The Hermeneutics of Suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud"

Life, Hostility, Nature, Suicide

“One night at Socko and a year of probation were no comparison to the punishment at home. My rehabilitation was one of the fastest in adolescent history. I had it coming, and it taught me that moral rehab is possible. I behaved during my term of probation and stopped all of my criminal activity. But I would always retain my strong impulse to challenge authority and to think and act on my own whenever possible. There is room for such types in America, even in the disciplined confines of the United States Army. I’m a big believer in the value of unconventional men and women. They are the innovators and risk takers. Apple, one of the world’s most creative and successful high-tech companies, lives by the vision of transformation through exception. “Here’s to the crazy ones,” Apple’s campaign says. “The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” If you talk to my colleagues, they’ll tell you that I’m cut from the same cloth. My military biography starts badly. I was a miserable dropout in my freshman year of college (1.2 GPA), enlisted in a delayed-entry Marine Corps program, went to work as a lifeguard at a local beach, and then came the first of several miracles: an Army ROTC scholarship. Little did I know that my rebellious activities, such as skipping class and sundry other mistakes, would lead me to playing basketball (which I was very good at) with an ROTC instructor who saw something in me. Not only that, he took surprising initiative.”

Michael T. Flynn (1958) 25th United States National Security Advisor

Introduction
The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies (2016)

Women, Men, People, World

“"Saving the biosphere" depends first and foremost on human beings reaching mutual understanding and unforced agreement as to common ends. And that intersubjective accord occurs only in the noosphere. Anything short of that noospheric accord will continue to destroy the biosphere.”

Ken Wilber book Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

Sex, Ecology, Spirituality (1995, 2000)

Understanding, Dependency

“This rich, proud Empire did not pay its children, who had maintained and built up its glory and upon whom they had to depend in future against every foe, enough to keep themselves, their wives, and their children above a state of semi-starvation. (Cries of "Shame.") The land of Britain, which ought to be rearing a virile, healthy, independent, prosperous people, was held under conditions which positively discouraged capital, enterprise, and brains, sapped independence and undermined vitality. The condition of things was one which demanded the immediate attention of every man who loved his native land and who had any heart to sympathize with humanity in despair.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech to the National Liberal Club (31 January 1913), quoted in The Times (1 February 1913), p. 8.
Chancellor of the Exchequer

Love, Children, People, Future

“There is an inherently minimum set of essential concepts and current information, cognizance of which could lead to our operating our planet Earth to the lasting satisfaction and health of all humanity.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

1970s, Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (1975), The Wellspring of Reality

Health

“There are, while human miseries abound,
A thousand ways to waste superfluous wealth,
Without one fool or flatterer at your board,
Without one hour of sickness or disgust.”

John Armstrong (1709–1779) British poet

Book II, line 195.
The Art of Preserving Health (1744)

Fools, Way, Wealth

“The real menace, the disease eating away at the heart of Western society, is white ethnomasochism: hatred of one’s own type, one’s own race, one’s own ancestors, one’s own parents, one’s own fellow citizens who do not share a bizarrely unreal and idealistic view of human nature.”

John Derbyshire (1945) writer

After the Atrocity In Nice http://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/after-the-atrocity-in-nice/, The Unz Review, July 17, 2016.

Disease, Nature, Parent, Heart

“I think we all thought the show would be good, but I didn't ever assume it would catch on in a mass audience sort of way, that's unexpected, and we're flattered and relieved. Our characters act silly, even totally ridiculous at times, and most of our jokes don't come out of pop cultural references, he added. It seems like we're aiming at a child audience, but everyone can laugh at the basic human traits that are funny. It's playful, the humor is playful, the world is playful. You can kind of let go.”

Stephen Hillenburg (1961–2018) American marine biologist, cartoonist, animator, storyboard artist, director, producer, and writer

FOR YOUNG VIEWERS; For This Scientist, Children Are Like, er, Sponges http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/29/tv/for-young-viewers-for-this-scientist-children-are-like-er-sponges.html (July 29, 2001)

World, Way, Thinking, Time

“I contend that the continued racial classification of Homo sapiens represents an outmoded approach to the general problem of differentiation within a species. In other words, I reject a racial classification of humans for the same reasons that I prefer not to divide into subspecies the prodigiously variable West Indian land snails that form the subject of my own research.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Ever Since Darwin

"Why We Should Not Name Human Races—A Biological View", p. 231
Ever Since Darwin (1977)

Problem

“Human rights and individual liberties, including religious freedom, will be at the heart of the new Iraq.”

Jalal Talabani (1933–2017) Iraqi politician

Michael Howard (July 25, 2005) "Freedom at heart of new Iraq, says Talabani : Suicide bomb kills 40 as president calls for calm", The Guardian.

Freedom, Heart

“The family only represents one aspect, however important an aspect, of a human being's functions and activities…A life is beautiful and ideal, or the reverse, only when we have taken into our consideration the social as well as the family relationship.”

H. Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) British physician, writer, and social reformer

Source: Little Essays of Love and Virtue http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15687/15687-h/15687-h.htm (1922), Ch. 1

Life, Family, Beauty

“Man is a rational animal, and if human affairs are hard to regulate, his twofold nature is usually the cause. Reason is something ultimate; it would be the same in another planet, or in another universe, as it is here. Animal nature is something contingent; it might have been different. Our life is a compromise, a blend between the animal and the rational.”

Ralph George Hawtrey (1879–1975) British economist

Source: The Economic Problem (1925), Chapter I, "The Problem Profounded", p. 1

Life, Nature, Universe, Animals

“I add that the French people know and love Morocco. Between our two countries there exists a cultural, social and human capillarity which transcend the circumstantial difficulties. But in France there is also, a reflex of security because we amalgamate Morocco with other countries of the southern Mediterranean. Morocco has a different identity.”

Mohammed VI of Morocco (1963) King of Morocco

Original French: J’ajoute que les Français connaissent et aiment le Maroc. Entre nos deux pays, il y a une capillarité culturelle, sociale et humaine qui transcende les difficultés de la conjoncture. Mais il y a aussi, en France, un réflexe sécuritaire parce qu’on fait l’amalgame entre le Maroc et d’autres pays de la rive sud de la Méditerranée. Interview with Le Figaro–September 2001 http://www.maroc.ma/fr/discours-royaux/interview-accord%C3%A9e-par-sa-majest%C3%A9-le-roi-mohammed-vi-au-quotidien-fran%C3%A7ais-%C2%AB-le

Love, People, Country

“Broadly speaking, the object of industry is to set up economic ways and means of satisfying human wants and in so doing to reduce everything possible to routines requiring a minimum amount of human effort.”

Walter A. Shewhart (1891–1967) American statistician

Source: Economic Control of Quality of Manufactured Product,1931, p. vii

Way, Effort

“Our exploration of emergent social structures across domains of human activity and experience leads to an over-arching conclusion: as an historical trend, dominant functions and processes in the Information Age are increasingly organized around networks. Networks constitute the new social morphology of our societies, and the diffusion of networking logic substantially modifies the operation and outcomes in processes of production, experience, power, and culture. While the networking form of social organization has existed in other times and spaces, the new information technology paradigm provides the material basis for its pervasive expansion throughout the entire social structure.”

Manuel Castells (1942) Spanish sociologist (b.1942)

Source: The Rise of the Network Society, 1996, p. 500

Age, Time

“Commentators — even, and especially, Christian ones — frequently lapse into a kind of moral parochialism when it comes to discussions about animals, as if God only cared for one of the millions of species in the created world. This, in turn, has led to a practical form of idolatry. By "idolatry" I mean here the deification of the human species by regarding human beings as the sole, main, or even exclusive concern of God the Creator.”

Andrew Linzey (1952) British theologian and divine

Source: Animal Gospel: Christian Faith as if Animals Mattered (1998), p. 115

God, World, Animals

“Boredom is a powerful incentive to come up with bad ideas, especially for intellectuals. "Capitalism," says Irving Kristol, "is the least romantic conception of a public order that the human mind has ever conceived." The reason it's so unromantic is that it doesn't tell people what to do and that can be very frustrating for intellectuals who want to tell people what to do. Indeed, court intellectuals have always been more influential where the people are less free, because when an intellectual persuades a dictator or a socialist prime minister (a small distinction to be sure), their advice gets translated into reality. When an intellectual says, "It would be a better society if all beer was free" a free-market politician would, or at least should, say "Maybe, but what can I do about it?"”

Jonah Goldberg (1969) American political writer and pundit

2000s, 2001, Free-Market Boring…Losing Consciousness (2001)

People, Idea, Beer, Reality

“Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about a modern battlefield is the desolation and emptiness of it all…one cannot emphasize too much. Nothing is to be seen of war or soldiers--only the split and shattered trees and the burst of an occasional shell reveal anything of the truth. One can look for miles and see no human being. But in those miles of country lurk (like moles or rats, it seems) thousands, even hundreds of thousands of men, planning against each other perpetually some new device of death. Never showing themselves, they launch at each other bullet, bomb, aerial torpedo and shell. And somewhere too (on the German side we know of their existence opposite us) are the little cylinders of gas, waiting only for the moment to spit forth their nauseous and destroying fumes. And yet the landscape shows nothing of all this--nothing but a few shattered trees and three or four lines of earth and sandbags, these and the ruins of towns and villages are the only signs of war anywhere visible. The glamour of red coats--the martial tunes of flag and drum--aide-de-camps scurrying hither and thither on splendid chargers--lances glittering and swords flashing--how different the old wars must have been!”

Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) British politician

letter to his mother, May 13, 1916
1910s

Death, Men, War, Truth

“Politicians are all on the same platform when it comes down to me. I think it’s because they think that if they can satisfy the Muslim fundamentalists they will get votes. I believe I am a victim of votebank politics. This also shows that how weak the democracy is and politicians ask votes by banning a writer … Even though I am not staying there, she (Banerjee) has not allowed my book ‘Nirbasan’ to be published. Also, she has stopped the broadcast of a TV serial scripted by me after Muslim fundamentalists objected to it. She is not allowing me to enter the state… This is a dangerous opposition … I wrote to Mamata Banerjee. But there was no response to that… No I am not going to write to her again. I do not think she will consider my request. I feel very hopeless because I expected something positive. I think when it comes down to me, she has similar vision like that of the Left leaders…. I do not consider India as a foreign country. The history of this country is my history. It’s the country of my forefathers. I love this country and in Kolkata, I feel at home because I can relate that place to my homeland. … I have sacrificed my freedom and have been sacrificing for a big cause… All these (problems) are because of my writings. I could have stopped writing against fundamentalists and possibly the bans would have been removed and I had got back my freedom and allowed to enter my motherland again. But I will never do that. … I have spoken of humanism and equal rights for women and secularism stating that religion and nation should be treated separately. One should not get confused with nation and religion. Rules should be made based on equality, and not on religion. … I know that only by writing I will not be able to change an entire society. The laws need to be changed. Equal rights cannot be established in a short time, it requires a long time and huge efforts … I have got many awards but the best is when people come forward and tell me that my writings have help them change their vision,… I do not think I would have been treated in the same manner if I was born there (Europe). I am a writer, not an activist… I write with a pen and if you have any problem why do not you pick up a pen to protest…. The surprising thing in this part of the world is that they have picked up arms against me because I have expressed my views. I have never enforced my thoughts on anybody ever, then why they are trying to kill me. I am not a supporter of violence.”

Taslima Nasrin (1962) Poet, columnist, novelist

Taslima Nasrin about Mamata, Indian Express https://indianexpress.com/article/india/mamata-banerjee-turned-out-harsher-than-left-in-my-case-taslima-nasreen-4486028/

Love, Women, People, Books

“Each human reality is at the same time a direct project to metamorphose its own For-itself into an In-itself-For-itself, a project of the appropriation of the world as a totality of being-in-itself, in the form of a fundamental quality. Every human reality is a passion in that it projects losing itself so as to found being and by the same stroke to constitute the In-itself which escapes contingency by being its own foundation, the Ens causa sui, which religions call God. Thus the passion of man is the reverse of that of Christ, for man loses himself as man in order that God may be born. But the idea of God is contradictory and we lose ourselves in vain. Man is a useless passion.”

Jean Paul Sartre book Being and Nothingness

Part 4, Chapter 2, III
Being and Nothingness (1943)

God, World, Religion, Idea

“It returns us to the dark ages of human oppression, which America was founded to remove humanity from, and it is the whole point of the push for homosexual marriage and homosexual rights. The aim is not compassion for homosexuals, respect for homosexuals and all of this; the aim in the mind of these hardheaded, calculating, leftist, Communist, totalitarians is to destroy the family and to establish the notion that once you have seized power there is no limit whatsoever to what you can do. If you want to tolerate abuses then those abuses can be imposed upon the people. Once you establish that, the abuses are then not going to be confined to egregious outrages like this; those abuses are going to be committed against the whole society and they will in the end include the murder of the masses as has occurred in all Communist regimes that existed.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

2013-04-12
The Talk to Solomon Show Live, quoted in * 2013-04-12
Keyes: Gay Marriage Will Lead to Communism and 'The Murder of the Masses'
Brian
Tashman
Right Wing Watch
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/keyes-gay-marriage-will-lead-communism-and-murder-masses
2009

Marriage, People, Age, Family

“I see those pretended politicians who place all their subtlety, and who think they serve their country best, in circumventing those with whom they treat, interpreting the conditions of a treaty in such a manner, that all the advantage results to their own country. Far from blushing at conduct so contrary to equity, to right, and to national honesty, they boast of their dexterity, and pretend that they deserve the name of great negociators. How long shall public men boast of conduct which would disgrace a private individual? …Shall powerful states abandon openly that which is honest, for that which may appear useful? It often happens for the happiness of the human race, that this pretended utility is fatal to the powers who follow it, and that, even among sovereigns, candour and right are found to be the safest policy.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech in the House of Commons (16 July 1832), quoted in George Henry Francis, Opinions and Policy of the Right Honourable Viscount Palmerston, G.C.B., M.P., &c. as Minister, Diplomatist, and Statesman, During More Than Forty Years of Public Life (London: Colburn and Co., 1852), p. 206.
1830s

Men, Happiness, Thinking, Appearance

“It is true that other people can help you, and to lasting effect... If I hadn't had Beckett in 1940 [in Paris, when Van Velde was strongly demoralized by the death of his wife], I'm not sure I could have stood it. I am really not sure... At that time he [Beckett] he was driven by an extremely aggressive and fiery Irish spirit. That has lessened as time has gone on... I don't know anywhere in modern art any more faithful or more impressive picture of contemporary humanity than the one he offers us in 'The Unamable.”

Bram van Velde (1895–1981) Dutch painter

2 November 1970; p. 79
1970's, Conversations with Samuel Beckett and Bram van Velde (1970 - 1972)

Death, People, Faith, Art

“To Leonardo a landscape, like a human being, was part of a vast machine, to be understood part by part and, if possible, in the whole. Rocks were not simply decorative silhouettes. They were part of the earth's bones, with an anatomy of their own, caused by some remote seismic upheaval. Clouds were not random curls of the brush, drawn by some celestial artist, but were the congregation of tiny drops formed from the evaporation of the sea, and soon would pour back their rain into the rivers.”

Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) Art historian, broadcaster and museum director

Source: Leonardo da Vinci (1939), Ch. Six: 1497-1503

Parting, Sea

“Before Christianity suicide was not in any way troubling. Our lives were our own, and when we tired of them we were at liberty to end them. One might think that as Christianity has declined, this freedom would be reclaimed. Instead secular creeds have sprung up, in which each person’s life belongs to everyone else. To hand back the gift of life because it does not please is still condemned as a kind of blasphemy, though the offended deity is now humanity instead of God.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

Sweet Morality (p. 231-2)
The Immortalization Commission: The Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011)

Life, God, Way, Thinking

“In brief, our genetic heritage is at odds with our genetic future. For the first time in human history, the qualities it takes to survive as a species are compatible with the qualities it takes to love.”

Warren Farrell book The Myth of Male Power

Source: The Myth of Male Power (1993), Part 1: The Myth of Male Power, p. 65.

Love, History, Time, Future

“(The staff common room) was real boredom, not just modish ennui. Boredom, the numbing annual predictability of life, hung over the staff like a cloud. From it flowed cant, hypocrisy, and the impotent rage of the old who know they have failed and the young who suspect they will fail. The senior masters stood like Gallows sermons; with some of them one had a sort of vertigo, a glimpse of the bottomless pit of human futility…a sere notifier of what is.”

John Fowles book Daniel Martin

Daniel Martin (1977)

Life, Rage

“To the question, What is the right relation between reason and religion, you will now understand me to answer, It is that reason should be the source of which religion is the issue; that reason, when most itself, will unquestionably be religious, but that religion must for just that cause be entirely rational; that reason is the final authority from which religion must derive its warrant, and with which its contents must comply; that all religious doctrines and instrumentalities, all religious practices, all religious institutions, and all records of religion, whether in tradition or in scripture, must alike submit their claims at the bar of general human reason, and that only those approved in that tribunal can be regarded as of weight or of obligation; in short, that the only real basis of religion is our human reason, the only seat of its authority our genuine human nature, the only sufficient witness of God the human soul. Reason, I shall endeavour to show, is not confined to the mastery of the sense-world and the goods of this world only, but does cover all the range of being, and found and rule the world eternal; it is not merely natural, it is also spiritual; it is itself, when come to itself, the true divine revelation.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Right Relation of Reason to Religion, p.224-5

God, World, Religion, Soul

“For me, Deism doesn't work because I find I can only think of a creator in human terms, and the concept of a human-like creator of muons and neutrinos has no meaning for me. But more profoundly, Deism spoils my covenant with Mystery. To assign attributes to Mystery is to disenchant it, to take away its luminance. I think of the ancients ascribing thunder and lightning to godly feuds, and I smile. The need for explanation pulsates in us all.”

Ursula Goodenough book The Sacred Depths of Nature

Source: The Sacred Depths of Nature (1998), p. 11

Smile, Thinking

“Israel is the Middle East’s only legitimate democracy, surrounded by cadres, warlords and villains that do not respect democracy or human rights. These bellicose nations jealously regard Israel, envying its success, stability, and might. Israel faces an impossible calculus between defending itself and facing angry outcries or risking its own destruction.”

Stephen Harper (1959) 22nd Prime Minister of Canada

Stephen Harper, as quoted in " We Must Support Democracy in the Middle East http://www.thebarrieexaminer.com/2014/01/31/we-must-support-democracy-in-the-middle-east" (31 January 2014), The Barrie Examiner. 2014

Democracy, Success, Envy

“I was forced, through seeing the error of their foundation, to abandon all belief in every religion which had been taught to man. But my religious feelings were immediately replaced by the spirit of universal charity — not for a sect, or a party, or for a country or a colour — but for the human race, and with a real and ardent desire to do good.”

Robert Owen (1771–1858) Welsh social reformer

Life of Robert Owen (1857) his autobiography, as quoted by Jim Herrick, in "Bradlaugh and Secularism: 'The Province of the Real'" (1990) http://www.positiveatheism.org/india/s1990c33.htm.

Religion, Error, Feeling, Universe

“The tree of human history, as it has grown from age to age, has been but the unfolding of a single germ — but the development of Christ and Him crucified.”

John McClellan Holmes (1834–1911) US Christian minister and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 216.

Age, History, Tree, Christ

“The public be damned. What does the public care for railroads except to get as much out of them for as small a consideration as possible? I don't take any stock in this silly nonsense about working for anybody's good but our own, because we are not. When we make a move, we do it because it is in our interest to do so, and not because we expect to do somebody else good. Of course, we like to do everything possible for the benefit of humanity in general, but when we do, we first see that we are benefiting ourselves. Railroads are not run on sentiment, but on business principles and to pay, and I don't mean to be egotistic when I say that the roads which I have had anything to do with have generally paid pretty well.”

William Henry Vanderbilt (1821–1885) American philanthropist

Quoted in Clarence P. Dresser, "Vanderbilt in the West" New York Times (9 October 1882). Dresser's account has Vanderbilt denying that he ran a particular passenger express service for the public benefit, but rather to drive down prices of a competing Pennsylvania Railroad service. By some accounts Dresser fabricated the interview except for the first sentence, which Vanderbilt said in refusing to give an interview. See "Reporter C. P. Dresser Dead", New York Times (25 April 1891).
Disputed

Business

Quotes about humanity page 68

Quotes about humanity
page 68