Quotes about humanity
page 71

“Be sceptical, question authority, be a rebel. Do not conform and don’t be ordinary. Remember, all human progress is the result of far-sighted people challenging orthodoxy, tradition and rich, powerful, vested interests. Be daring, show imagination, take risks. Fight against the greatest human rights violation of all: free market capitalism, which has created a world divided into rich and poor, where hundreds of millions of people are malnourished, homeless, without clean drinking water and dying from hunger and preventable diseases. Don’t accept the world as it is. Dream about what the world could be – then help make it happen.”

Peter Tatchell (1952) British gay rights activist

Honorary doctorate acceptance speech, 26 July 2010 http://www.pinknews.co.uk/2010/07/26/be-sceptical-and-daring-peter-tatchells-honorary-doctorate-acceptance-speech/

Hunger, People, World, Disease

“Mathematics is the fruitful Parent of, I had almost said all, Arts, the unshaken Foundation of Sciences, and the plentiful Fountain of Advantage to Human Affairs. In which last Respect, we may be said to receive from the Mathematics, the principal Delights of Life, Securities of Health, Increase of Fortune, and Conveniences of Labour: That we dwell elegantly and commodiously, build decent Houses for ourselves, erect stately Temples to God, and leave wonderful Monuments to Posterity: That we are protected by those Rampires from the Incursions of the Enemy; rightly use Arms, skillfully range an Army, and manage War by Art, and not by the Madness of wild Beasts: That we have safe Traffick through the deceitful Billows, pass in a direct Road through the tractless Ways of the Sea, and come to the designed Ports by the uncertain Impulse of the Winds: That we rightly cast up our Accounts, do Business expeditiously, dispose, tabulate, and calculate scattered 248 Ranks of Numbers, and easily compute them, though expressive of huge Heaps of Sand, nay immense Hills of Atoms: That we make pacifick Separations of the Bounds of Lands, examine the Moments of Weights in an equal Balance, and distribute every one his own by a just Measure: That with a light Touch we thrust forward vast Bodies which way we will, and stop a huge Resistance with a very small Force: That we accurately delineate the Face of this Earthly Orb, and subject the Oeconomy of the Universe to our Sight: That we aptly digest the flowing Series of Time, distinguish what is acted by due Intervals, rightly account and discern the various Returns of the Seasons, the stated Periods of Years and Months, the alternate Increments of Days and Nights, the doubtful Limits of Light and Shadow, and the exact Differences of Hours and Minutes: That we derive the subtle Virtue of the Solar Rays to our Uses, infinitely extend the Sphere of Sight, enlarge the near Appearances of Things, bring to Hand Things remote, discover Things hidden, search Nature out of her Concealments, and unfold her dark Mysteries: That we delight our Eyes with beautiful Images, cunningly imitate the Devices and portray the Works of Nature; imitate did I say? nay excel, while we form to ourselves Things not in being, exhibit Things absent, and represent Things past: That we recreate our Minds and delight our Ears with melodious Sounds, attemperate the inconstant Undulations of the Air to musical Tunes, add a pleasant Voice to a sapless Log and draw a sweet Eloquence from a rigid Metal; celebrate our Maker with an harmonious Praise, and not unaptly imitate the blessed Choirs of Heaven: That we approach and examine the inaccessible Seats of the Clouds, the distant Tracts of Land, unfrequented Paths of the Sea; lofty Tops of the Mountains, low Bottoms of the Valleys, and deep Gulphs of the Ocean: That in Heart we advance to the Saints themselves above, yea draw them to us, scale the etherial Towers, freely range through the celestial Fields, measure the Magnitudes, and determine the Interstices of the Stars, prescribe inviolable Laws to the Heavens themselves, and confine the wandering Circuits of the Stars within fixed Bounds: Lastly, that we comprehend the vast Fabrick of the Universe, admire and contemplate the wonderful Beauty of the Divine 249 Workmanship, and to learn the incredible Force and Sagacity of our own Minds, by certain Experiments, and to acknowledge the Blessings of Heaven with pious Affection.”

Isaac Barrow (1630–1677) English Christian theologian, and mathematician

Source: Mathematical Lectures (1734), p. 27-30

Life, God, War, Health

“Human life itself may be almost pure chaos, but the work of the artist — the only thing he's good for — is to take these handfuls of confusion and disparate things, things that seem to be irreconcilable, and put them together in a frame to give them some kind of shape and meaning. Even if it's only his view of a meaning. That's what he's for — to give his view of life.”

Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980) American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist

Writers at Work interview (1963)

Life

“The meeting of man and God must always mean a penetration and entry of the divine into the human and a self-immergence of man in the Divinity.”

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

Thoughts and Glimpses (1916-17)
Thoughts and Glimpses (1916-17)

God

“If humans pursue a business-as-usual course for the first half of this century, I believe the collapse of civilization due to climate change becomes inevitable.”

Tim Flannery book The Weather Makers

Source: The Weather Makers (2005), Chapter 22 (p. 209)

Business, Change

“The older I get, the more I realize the importance of exercising the various dimensions of my body, soul, mind and heart. Taken together, these aspects give me a sense of wholeness. I want to be a whole human being rather than one who limps on one leg because I don't know how to use all of my parts. Intellectual, emotional, and physical activity are not separate entities. Rather, they are dimensions of the same human being.”

Robert Fulghum (1937) American writer

"Pay Attention" in Handbook for the Soul (1995) edited by Benjamin Shield

Exercises, Soul, Sense, Heart

“And is not peace, in the last analysis, basically a matter of human rights — the right to live out our lives without fear of devastation — the right to breathe air as nature provided it — the right of future generations to a healthy existence?”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

1963, American University speech

Fear, Peace, Nature, Future

“A major danger in using highly abstractive methods in political philosophy is that one will succeed merely in generalizing one’s own local prejudices and repackaging them as demands of reason. The study of history can help to counteract this natural human bias.”

Raymond Geuss (1946) British philosopher

“Neither History Nor Praxis,” pp. 38-39.
Outside Ethics (2005)

History, Nature, Study, Help

“No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own. This is not only conspicuous in children, who implicitly embrace every opinion propos’d to them; but also in men of the greatest judgment and understanding, who find it very difficult to follow their own reason or inclination, in opposition to that of their friends and daily companions. To this principle we ought to ascribe the great uniformity we may observe in the humours and turn of thinking of those of the same nation; and ’tis much more probable, that this resemblance arises from sympathy, than from any influence of the soil and climate, which, tho’ they continue invariably the same, are not able to preserve the character of a nation the same for a century together. A good-natur’d man finds himself in an instant of the same humour with his company; and even the proudest and most surly take a tincture from their countrymen and acquaintance. A chearful countenance infuses a sensible complacency and serenity into my mind; as an angry or sorrowful one throws a sudden dump upon me. Hatred, resentment, esteem, love, courage, mirth and melancholy; all these passions I feel more from communication than from my own natural temper and disposition. So remarkable a phaenomenon merits our attention, and must be trac’d up to its first principles.”

David Hume book A Treatise of Human Nature

Part 1, Section 11
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 2: Of the passions

Love, Men, Children, Feeling

“Whatever the progress of human knowledge, there will always be room for ignorance, hence for chance and probability.”

Émile Borel

Quels que soient les progrès des connaissances humaines, il y aura toujours place pour l'ignorance et par suite pour le hasard et la probabilité.
[Emile Borel, Le hasard, Librairie Félix Alcan, 1914, 12-13]

Knowledge, Chance

“In the prosecution of these researches… extraneous fossils were no longer regarded merely as subjects of natural history, but as memorials of revolutions which have swept over the face of the earth, in ages antecedent to all human record and tradition.”

Gideon Mantell (1790–1852) British scientist and obstetrician

The Fossils of the South Downs; or Illustrations of the Geology of Sussex (1822)

Age, History, Nature, Memory

“No amount of money given in charity, nothing but the abandonment of this hateful trade, can atone for this great sin against God, Israel and Humanity.”

Hermann Adler (1839–1911) Chief Rabbi of the British Empire from 1891 to 1911

Condemning usury. p. 849
Quoted in Joseph H. Hertz, The Pentateuch and Haftorahs (One-volume edition)

Money, God, Hate

“The human heart dares not stay away too long from that which hurt it most. There is a return journey to anguish that few of us are released from making.”

Lillian Smith (author) (1897–1966) American author, social critic

Killers of the Dream https://books.google.com/books/about/Killers_of_the_Dream.html?id=fvab8gnFH_kC&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button#v=snippet&q=%22There%20is%20a%20return%20journey%20to%20anguish%20that%20few%20of%20us%20are%20released%20from%20making.%22&f=false, Chapter 1: "When I Was a Child", pp 25-26

Heart, Hurt

“Perhaps you will not only have some appreciation of this culture; it is even possible that you may want to join in the greatest adventure that the human mind has ever begun.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

volume III, "Feynman's Epilogue", p. 21-19 (closing sentence)
The Feynman Lectures on Physics (1964)

“… coincident with the explosive growth of research, the art of writing science suffered a grave setback, and the stultifying convention descended that the best scientific prose should sound like a non-human author addressing a mechanical reader. … We injure ourselves when we fail to make our discipline as clear and vibrant as we can to students - prospective scientists - and to the public who pay the taxes.”

David Mermin (1935) American physicist

Art, Suffering, Science

“For decades, the circle of liberty and security and development has been expanding in our world. This progress has brought unity to Europe, self-government to Latin America and Asia, and new hope to Africa. Now we have the historic chance to widen the circle even further, to fight radicalism and terror with justice and dignity, to achieve a true peace, founded on human freedom.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2004, Speech to United Nations General Assembly (September 2004)

World, Peace, Justice, Hope

“My interaction with the Himalayan tribespeople overturned my pre-conceptions. There was no superior or inferior being. I was just a human being like them […] I lived with people who had no electricity or cars and yet they lived very fulfilling lives. They had no schools but they were very intelligent people. I became even more thirsty to understand and learn more about the tribes people of the world.”

Stephen Corry (1951) British anthropologist and activist

An insight into the life of Stephen Corry http://www.mmegi.bw/2004/March/Thursday18/90140841657.html, Mmegi Online. March 18, 2004

People, World, School, Cars

“If you could only imprison a thought, then intellectual tyranny might succeed. If you could only take an argument and put a striped suit of clothes on it -- if you could only take a good, splendid shining fact and lock it up in some dungeon of ignorance, so that its light would never again enter the mind of man, then you might succeed in stopping human progress. Otherwise, no.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

The trial of Charles B. Reynolds for blasphemy (1887)

Light, Clothes

“My dad A. D. King, Uncle MLK, and Granddaddy King passed on to me their beliefs on biblical marriage. Life is a human and civil right, so is procreative marriage… We must now go back to the beginning, starting with Genesis, and teach about God’s plan for marriage… It's time to start from scratch and lay the foundation all over again.”

Alveda King (1951) American, civil rights activist, Christian minister, conservative, pro-life activist, and author

Human Sexuality: It All Started With An Apple! http://www.priestsforlife.org/library/5154-and-it-all-started-with-an-apple (January 13, 2015)

Life, God, Marriage, Time

“Coherence and harmony in relations and interactions between the members of a human social system are due to the coherence and harmony of their growth in it, in an ongoing social learning which their own social ( linguistic) operation defines and which is possible thanks to the genetic and ontogenetic processes that permit structural plasticity of the members.”

Humberto Maturana (1928) Chilean biologist and philosopher

Source: The tree of Knowledge (1987), p. 199 as cited in: Vincent Kenny (1989) " Life, the Multiverse and Everything; an Introduction to the Ideas of. Humberto Maturana http://www.oikos.org/vinclife.htm".

Learning

“Periodization sequesters human experience. The historicist separation of the past from the present prohibits empathy with the past and therefore precludes criticism in the present.”

Russell Berman (1950) American academic

Source: Fiction Sets You Free: Literature, Liberty and Western Culture (2007), p. 18.

Past

“I've seen how violently animals raised for food are treated, and I don't want to support that. … The fact that the meat on my plate was once a living, breathing creature became something I could no longer ignore or justify as food. … As someone who felt they were a confirmed meat-eater, I guess ultimately if I can do it, then anyone can, you know―it’s a really easy choice to make. And it’s a humane choice to make.”

Owain Yeoman (1978) British actor

“Owain Yeoman’s ‘Veggie Testimonials’,” in PETA.org (12 May 2009) https://www.peta.org/features/owain-yeomans-veggie-testimonials/.

Food, Support, Animals

“To rotate on its own axis is not the one movement for the human soul. There is also its wheeling round the Sun of an inexhaustible illumination.”

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

Thoughts and Glimpses (1916-17)

Soul, Sun

“Tony the Beat Poet says the words alone, lonely and loneliness are three of the most powerful words in the English language. I agree with Tony. Those words say that we are human; they are like the words hunger and thirst. But they are not words about the body, they are words about the soul.”

Donald Miller book Blue Like Jazz: nonreligious thoughts on Christian spirituality

Blue Like Jazz (2003, Nelson Books)

Hunger, Soul, Loneliness

“The life force that pulsates in the trees, plants, and animals is the same life force that pulsates within us. The same life energy that gives us the power to speak and to sing, is the power behind the song of the bird and the roar of the lion. The same consciousness that flows in and through every human being, lends its power to the movement of the wind, to the flow of the river, and to the light of the sun. How can there be any sense of difference once this subtle principle is understood? When we evaluate our growth and development in the light of this great Truth, we may wonder whether we human beings have really developed or grown at all. The progress that we see today is divided growth. Only some parts are growing—the world as a whole remains unhealthy. We cannot call this real progress.”

Mata Amritanandamayi (1953) Hindu spiritual leader and guru

Unity is Peace (1995)

Life, Truth, World, Bird

“I cannot write anything about landscape without writing about the human figure and the human spirit inhabiting the landscape, for me, the whole art sculpture is a fusion of these two element – the balance of sensation and the evocation of man in his universe. Every work in sculpture is either a figure I see, or a sensation I have, whether in Yorkshire, Cornwall or Greece, or the Mediterranean.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

'Studio International 171' – June 1966; as quoted in Voicing our visions, - Writings by women artists, ed. by Mara R. Witzling, Universe New York 1991, p. 280
1961 - 1975

Art, Universe

“…they were gathered together on that platform with one object. They wanted to stop this war of which they had heard so much talk. They would like to stop it while time remained, for we had had enough of the last war not to want another. The seriousness and urgency of the danger was exemplified by the divergency of political opinion represented on the platform. We had reached a fateful milestone in human history.”

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

Speech at the Albert Hall, London (3 December 1936) at a cross-party meeting organised by the League of Nations Union "in defence of freedom and peace", quoted in The Times (4 December 1936), p. 18
The 1930s

Fate, War, History, Time

“In the outside world, all forms of intelligence, whether of sound or sight, have been reduced to the form of varying currents in an electric circuit in order that they may be transmitted. Inside the human frame exactly the same sort of process occurs. Must we always transform to mechanical movements in order to proceed from one electrical phenomenon to another? It is a suggestive thought, but it hardly warrants prediction without losing touch with reality and immediateness.”

Vannevar Bush book As We May Think

As We May Think (1945)

World, Intelligence, Reality

“In each human being there is an emergency exit: that is, the cult of self under a multitude of manifestations, which means that when an obsession becomes too violent, you can escape, vanish with a snicker.”

Violet Trefusis (1894–1972) English writer and socialite

Author: Philippe Jullian, The other woman: A life of Violet Trefusis, including previously unpublished correspondence with Vita Sackville-West, published in (1976), pg.74

“That is to say that every single book will be magnetized, will be ordered under complicated mathematical clusters, by related subjects, and semantic markers. You will state your questions, or the subject you are interested in, and the computer will find the books for you. Instataneous retrieval brings with it enormous changes in our relation to the history of a subject, because there is a cut-off point in all these systems beond which the previous books are no longer relevant. They have been adequately subsumed in the later ones. You have a completely different way of organsing knowledge—an immensely efficient and in many ways powerfully logical way, but which blocks the essential motion of the hand reaching along a shelf and stumbling on what it did not know was there. When these great knowledge and data-banks, as they are called, are operative there will come a whole change in the way the human mind and eye live with books.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Do Books Matter? (ed. Brian Baumfield), ISBN 0705700143, p. 28.
Do Books Matter?

Books, Way, History, Mathematics

“All human things are subject to decay,
And, when fate summons, monarchs must obey.”

John Dryden (1631–1700) English poet and playwright of the XVIIth century

Source: Mac Flecknoe (1682), l. 1–2.

Fate

“The needs of man, if life is to survive, are usually said to be four -- air, water, food, and in the severe climates, protection. But it is becoming clear today that the human organism has another absolute necessity… This fifth need is the need for novelty -- the need, throughout our waking life, for continuous variety in the external stimulation of our eyes, ears, sense organs, and all our nervous network.”

John R. Platt (1918–1992) American physicist

John Radar Platt (1959) "The Fifth Need of Man," in: Horizon 1 (July 1959), p. 109. Cited in: W. B. Willers (1991) Learning to Listen to the Land. p. 184

Life, Food, Sense, Water

“The desire to force others to bend or break to her will was always there, usually hidden deeply enough that she could forget she had that wish within her, but occasionally surfacing to dangle the ripe fruit of power just out of her reach. She knew, as few others did, that the power to coerce depended entirely on the fear or weakness of other human beings. It was possible to use coercion, yes, but in the end you found yourself surrounded only by the weak and fearful, with all those of courage and strength arrayed against you.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Heartfire (1998), Chapter 6.

Fear, Courage, Dependency, Forgetting

“I'm trying to move towards making objects which are honest, objects for non-consumers, for "modern rebels". Look, there are already millions of excellent chairs which are very comfortable, lamps which provide light, and so on. Is it necessary to create any more? The only question is: what will it bring to the human being who is going to use it? The urgent thing today is not to create a car or a chair which is more beautiful than another; what is urgent is for us all to fight with every means at our disposal against the fact that something is becoming extinct: love.”

Philippe Starck (1949) French architect and industrial designer

Starck, 2000

Love, Beauty, Cars, Question

“The savage mind finds mysterious and arbitrary spiritual powers everywhere, in rivers and springs, inherent in the wind and rain, and presiding over the crops; but, with advance in civilization and the development of ordered knowledge, an ever wider compass is established as the for the reign of natural laws. Those who base their faith in God on the ever-receding miraculous phenomena, on the tacit assumption that human limitations prove the validity of religious interpretations, are ever pointing out some weak spots in the scientific web of cause and effect and saying "Here Science is baffled, and you must admit the need of God." But Science keeps extending her domain; and so the history of the thought of these men is the history of a continuous retreat. Their position is fundamentally a bad one because it makes God a personified symbol of our residuum of ignorance, and justifies Reinach's definition of religion as a "sum of scruples impeding the free use of the human faculties."”

Ralph Vary Chamberlin (1879–1967) American biologist (1879-1967)

No, the Creator must be seen as God of all Nature and of every natural law.
Life and Philosophy of W. H. Chamberlin (1925) pp.144-145

Men, God, Faith, Religion

“You know to make his rigid, tedious, boring paintings seem at least a little human, the Mondrian enthusiasts keep insisting that Mondrian was a great tango dancer.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Philip
8 1/2 Women

Painting

“Noah’s flood was understood to be world-wide and extinguish all human and animal life except for those in the ark.”

James Barr (1924–2006) British bible scholar

Letter to David C.C. Watson, 23 April 1984. Quoted from https://answersingenesis.org/ https://answersingenesis.org/genesis/oxford-hebrew-scholar-professor-james-barr-meaning-of-genesis/ link https://web.archive.org/web/20170612180930/http://members.iinet.com.au:80/~sejones/barrlett.html Source: The authenticity of this letter is not verified yet.

Life, World, Animals

“A callous disregard for the claims of innocent human life is the heart and soul of the evil of terrorism.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

Speech at Thanksgiving Point, Lehi, Utah, September 24, 2002. http://renewamerica.us/archives/speeches/02_09_24utah.htm. 2002

Life, Soul, Evil, Heart

“Poetry is the mother-tongue of the human race.”

Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) German philosopher

Sämtliche Werken, ed. Josef Nadler (Vienna: Verlag Herder, 1949-1957), vol. II, p. 197.

“People rag on western medicine a lot for its disregard of indirect causalities and holism, for its antisceptic deconstructivism, for its blindness to things like the union of mind and body, and for its proclivity for post-facto treatment…But these criticisms notwithstanding, modern medicine is the accumulation of years and years of human effort to taxonomically observe, understand and explain an enormous set of conditions within a massively complex, underspecified system. To me, this is impressive. Also, they use cool phrases like "the radiolucent lungs" and "ligamentous laxity."”

Nat Friedman (1977) American computer programmer

2002-09-27, 2006-08-22, September 27, 2002 blog entry http://www.nat.org/2002/september/#27-September-2002,

People, Understanding, Effort

“I feel the deepest veneration for the divine being, and therefore I am careful not to attribute to him unjust, fickle behavior, which would be condemned by the meanest mortal. Because of that, dear sister, I prefer not to believe that the almighty, benevolent being is at all concerned with human affairs. Rather I do attribute everything that happens to the living beings and certain effects of incalculable causes and I silently bow down before this being which is worthy of adoration, by admitting my ignorance concerning his ways, which his godly wisdom chose not to reveal.”

Frederick II of Prussia (1712–1786) king of Prussia

Ich empfinde für das göttliche Wesen die tiefste Verehrung und hüte mich deshalb sehr, ihm ein ungerechtes, wankelmütiges Verhalten zuzuschreiben, das man beim geringsten Sterblichen verurteilen würde. Aus diesem Grunde, liebe Schwester, glaube ich lieber nicht, dass das allmächtige, gütige Wesen sich im mindesten um die menschlichen Angelegenheiten kümmert. Vielmehr schreibe ich alles, was geschieht, den Geschöpfen und notwendigen Wirkungen unberechenbarer Ursachen zu und beuge mich schweigend vor diesem anbetungswürdigen Wesen, indem ich meine Unwissenheit über seine Wege eingestehe, die mir zu offenbaren seiner göttlichen Weisheit nicht gefallen hat.
Letter to princess Amalie von Preußen

Wisdom, Way, Behavior, Feeling

“It would seem that dead hunger strikers, who have extinguished their own lives, are of more use to PIRA than living members. Such is their calculated cynicism. This Government is not prepared to legitimise their cause by word or by deed. And we should be clear what that cause is. It is a dictatorship by force and by fear in Northern Ireland, and in the Republic. These men deny democracy everywhere; they seek power for themselves. Some people argue that the Government could make the problem go away. We can of course maintain and improve an already humane prison regime. But there is no point in pretending that this is what the PIRA want. They have remained inflexible and intransigent in the face of all that we have done because what they want is special treatment, treatment different from that received by other prisoners. They want their violence justified. It isn't, and it will not be.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech at Stormont Castle (28 May 1981) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104657 regarding the 1981 Irish hunger strike. First term as Prime Minister

Men, Hunger, People, Fear

“Why to bring revolution? They are also human beings. Why don’t we treat ourselves as human beings? I speak Hindi and you speak your native language, but we are all human beings. Why do you treat them as foreigners? They also want to adapt to our tradition- some are visiting temples, they become vegetarians, some have given up spoons and eat using their hands, they try to become Sadhus. Why do you want to treat them as foreigners, they are human beings! If we get influenced by their tradition, it’s okay. If they get influenced by our tradition, it’s okay. Younger generation who try to emulate them will eventually come back to their native tradition!”

Hariprasad Chaurasia (1938) Indian bansuri player

On Western Culture and the so-called Revolution.
Melodies of Brindavan: Pandit Hariprasad Chourasia

“…increasing remoteness of desires from needs. …increasing confusion between means and ends. The ends are human needs… Instead they want the means they have been brainwashed to accept… Never was any society in human history as rich and as powerful as Western Civilization and the United States, and it is not a happy society.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Happiness, History

“Cuba hopes that her children will see a better future, and that victory will not have to be won at the cost of millions of human lives destroyed by the atomic bomb.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

On Growth and Imperialism (1961)

Children, Hope, Future, Victory

“…I prefer to think of [young women] less as human beings than as pimply parcels of televisual reflexes.”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Fiction, The Eve of St. Venus (1964)

Women, Thinking

“Our intellectual development in the field of science has outstripped our human development in the field of character.”

L. P. Jacks (1860–1955) British educator, philosopher, and Unitarian minister

BBC Radio National Lecture (1938), quoted in Unitarian Universalist Biographical Dictionary http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/lawrencepearsalljacks.html.

Science

“Unlike a human smile, purring cannot be, as far as anyone knows, faked.”

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (1941) American writer and activist

Source: The Nine Emotional Lives of Cats (2002), Ch. 3

Smile

“Listening in response to criticism mandates a shift in our internal psyche that marks perhaps the most important single evolutionary shift humans can make.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000), p. 41.

“Two views on the scope of technology have pervaded (and shaped) studies of technology, reflecting the different claims to generalizability that researchers have intended with their work. The one set of studies has focused on technology as "hardware," that is, the equipment, machines, and instruments that humans use in productive activities, whether industrial or informational devices.”

Wanda Orlikowski American computer scientist

Source: "The duality of technology" 1992, p. 399

Study

“Tragedy springs from outrage; it protests at the conditions of life. It carries in it the possibilities of disorder, for all tragic poets have something of the rebelliousness of Antigone. Goethe, on the contrary, loathed disorder. He once said that he preferred injustice, signifying by that cruel assertion not his support for reactionary political ideals, but his conviction that injustice is temporary and reparable whereas disorder destroys the very possibilities of human progress. Again, this is an anti-tragic view; in tragedy it is the individual instance of injustice that infirms the general pretence of order. One Hamlet is enough to convict a state of rottenness.”

George Steiner (1929–2020) American writer

Source: The Death of Tragedy (1961), Ch. V (p. 167).

Life, Spring, Support

“This is the aim of the following essay: to show that, when we come to put the right construction on the Bible, we give to the Bible a real experimental basis, and keep on this basis throughout; instead of any basis of unverifiable assumption to start with, followed by a string of other unverifiable assumptions of the like kind, such as the received theology necessitates.
And this aim we cannot seek without coming in sight of another aim, too, which we have often and often pointed out, and tried to recommend: culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.”

Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) English poet and cultural critic who worked as an inspector of schools

Preface
Literature and Dogma (1873)

World, History

“I discovered long ago that, if you write a book about cats or dogs, everybody loves you, but if you dare to write a book about human beings, all hell breaks loose. It is impossible to write an uncensored, honest book about human behaviour without offending at least part of your audience. If you feel you have a basic truth to tell, then you must tell it and be prepared to suffer the inevitable criticisms.”

Desmond Morris (1928) English zoologist, ethologist and surrealist painter

Desmond Morris in: "The Dan Schneider Interview 8: Desmond Morris" at cosmoetica.com, first posted 2/16/08.

Love, Truth, Books, Dogs

“Some of my readers may find themselves thinking that the mere fact that millions of human beings, including many highly intelligent and deeply thoughtful ones, have had strongly held religious beliefs is itself a reason for giving them serious intellectual attention — not necessarily for believing them, of course, but for finding them interesting and for treating them with respect. I would agree with this if the reasons given for them commanded respect. But I have yet to encounter such reasons. What are claimed as proofs are not proofs, and all such "proofs" have long since been discredited, the most important of them by Christians themselves, such as Kant. Yet they go on being trotted out: assertions are made without evidence; mutually contradictory claims proliferate; historical knowledge is defied; mistranslations abound; language is used in a way that slithers unacknowledged between literal meaning and metaphor; the whole vocabulary rests on unsecured presuppositions. Superstitions and belief in magic are perennial in just the same way as religion, and something near to being universal among mankind; and why this is so may be interesting, but in most cases the beliefs themselves are devoid of interesting content, at least to me.”

Bryan Magee (1930–2019) British politician

Source: Confessions of a Philosopher (1997), p. 346

Religion, Way, Intelligence, Knowledge

“In spite of difference of soil and climate, of language and manners, of laws and customs—in spite of things silently gone out of mind, and things violently destroyed, the Poet binds together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

Preface.
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)

Law, Knowledge, Passion, Time

“The thing about most of the media is that they want to reduce everybody to the lowest common denominator. They don't want people to have any heroes. I've got nothing against criticism of political figures, but that's different from a personal attack. It's easier to do sensationalism and character assassination than focus on the real issues. And they're obsessed, it seems, with portraying the ugliest side of humanity—the dishonesty, hypocrisy, ego battles, and fights.
How dare Fox, CNN, and MSNBC call themselves news stations? They're entertainment stations.”

Jesse Ventura (1951) American politician and former professional wrestler

Source: Don't Start the Revolution Without Me! (2008), Ch. 3 (p. 51)

People, Fight, Personality

“The nature of this trade, certainly not the most honourable in the world, affords room for much investigation and remark in a moral or humane point of view: in a political or commercial light it is perhaps less conspicuously an object of attention. It consists chiefly of commodities that are considered as holding a first rate place in the animal and the mineral world, for which in return the Africans receive the most rascally articles that the ingenuity of Europeans has found means to produce. In return to our fellow creatures, for gold, and for ivory, we exchange the basest of those articles that are suited to the taste or the fancy of a despicable set of barbarians. Whether the spirituous liquirs or the fire-arms that are sent there are most calculated for the destruction of the purchasers, might become a question not very easy to determine. The noxious quality of the one is at least equalled by the danger of attending the use of the other. There does not seem to be that regard to honour in this trade, which ought to make part of the nice character of the English merchant, unimpeachable, unimpeached, upon the 'Change of London or of Amsterdam. It seems as if we kept our honour for ourselves, and that with those barbarians (who are more our inferiors in address and cunning, than perhaps in any thing else) no honour, humanity, or equity, were at all necessary.”

William Playfair (1758–1824) British mathematician, engineer and political economist

Observations on the Trade to Africa, Chart XVI, page 65.
The Commercial and Political Atlas, 3rd Edition

World, Question, Nature, Light

“Democracy is shot through with this delight in the incredible, this banal mysticism. I have alluded to its touching acceptance of the faith that progress is illimitable and ordained of God - that every human problem, in the very nature of things, may be solved.”

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

1920s, Notes on Democracy (1926)

God, Faith, Democracy, Nature

“The bow cannot always stand bent, nor can human frailty subsist without some lawful recreation.”

Miguel de Cervantes (1547–1616) Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright

Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part I, Book IV, Ch. 21.

Law

“It is difficult for Britons to realise what Verdun means to France. The world can show no battlefield to correspond to it. On those heights Gaul and Teuton had, from the blizzards of February [1916] to the snows of the following December, been fighting out a racial feud which had existed for thousands of years. The concentrated fury of ages raged and tore, shattered and killed for ten months in one intensive struggle which has no parallel in the history of human savagery. The very road that carried the reinforcements, the guns and the shells that redeemed Verdun, is to this hour for Frenchmen the Via Sacra of their country.”

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

On the Battle of Verdun, War Memoirs: Volume I (London: Odhams, 1938), p. 875.
War Memoirs

Age, World, History, Rage

“May not this religious reticence, in these devout good souls, be perhaps a merit, and sign of health in them? Jocelin, Eadmer, and such religious men, have as yet nothing of 'Methodism;' no Doubt or even root of Doubt. Religion is not a diseased self-introspection, an agonising inquiry: their duties are clear to them, the way of supreme good plain, indisputable, and they are traveling on it. Religion lies over them like an all-embracing heavenly canopy, like an atmosphere and life- element, which is not spoken of, which in all things is presupposed without speech. Is not serene or complete Religion the highest aspect of human nature.”

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

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

Life, Men, Health, Disease

“Psychology is an attempt to gain a scientific understanding of human nature. We are all deeply interested in knowing human nature. When we are not talking about ourselves we are usually talking about our neighbors.”

Everett Dean Martin (1880–1941)

Source: Psychology and Its Use (1933), p. 9

Understanding, Nature

“…the turns of the screw that Sophocles administered throughout the play [Oedipus Tyrannos] must have been received with sharp pain… because these cocky, princely, Oedipal Greeks were being made to feel acutely the limitations of human society—in which no political leader, no matter how gifted or courageous, can remain a savior forever, in which every man must come to know that he is no hero but essentially a flawed and luckless figure and that "the pains we inflict upon ourselves hurt most of all."”

Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer

Source: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003), Ch.IV The Politician and the Playwright: How to Rule

Pain, Feeling, Courage, Hurt

“In the great flood of human life that is spawned upon the earth, it is not often that a man is born.”

Clarence Darrow (1857–1938) American lawyer and leading member of the American Civil Liberties Union

Funeral oration for John Peter Altgeld (14 March 1902); published in an appendix to The Story of My Life (1932)

Life

“Of all the affections which attend human life, the love of glory is the most ardent.”

Richard Steele (1672–1729) British politician

No. 139 (9 August 1711)
The Spectator (1711-1714)

Love, Life

“I assure you, that this inestimable memento of his Excellency will be retained in my possession while I live — an object of sacred interest — a token not merely of the kind consideration in which I have reason to know that the President was pleased to hold me personally, but as an indication of his humane interest in the welfare of my whole race.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

Letter to Mary Todd Lincoln (17 August 1865).
1860s

Personality

“The Englishman wants to be recognized as a gentleman, or as some other suitable species of human being, the American wants to be considered a good guy.”

Louis Kronenberger (1904–1980) American critic and writer

Source: Company Manners: A Cultural Inquiry into American Life (1954), p. 120.

Guy

“It is a curious fact, that the true has always been more opposed at the outset than the false; the circulation of the blood and vaccination nearly lost their discoverers credit and practice, while some vender of quack medicines makes a rapid fortune. This may perhaps be accounted for, simply, that the impostor addresses the multitude, while the scientific discoverer appeals to his brethren in knowledge, all of whom are inclined to deny, what, if admitted, must show, that a great part of their own research and acquirement has been in vain; still he who trades on human credulity will have a good stock on hand, especially when the lure held forth is that of gain.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Literary Remains

Knowledge, Parting, Falseness

“When I was a boy, while watching the funeral procession of the Great Martin Luther King Jr. on NBC, I observed a rickety wooden cart being pulled by two mules and behind the cart, a sea of people. In the cart lay the body of MLK; at that moment, he represented the totality of the human struggle. I remember feeling then, while watching the procession on TV, that we, as a country, were either going to pull together or else come apart.”

Robert Davi (1953) American actor and jazz singer

Davi: To Influence Hollywood, Conservatives Need to Grow a Pair http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2017/03/13/davi-influence-hollywood-conservatives-need-grow-pair/ (March 13, 2017)

People, Feeling, Boy, Sea

“As it had been explained to David long ago, genetic diversity was very, very important. The more diverse the human gene pool was, the better were humanity’s chances of adapting to any new and unexpected conditions it might encounter, now that it was beginning to push outward into Space, to say nothing of surviving any unexpected natural disasters such as polar shifts or meteor strikes on Earth.
Unfortunately, humanity had been both unlucky and foolish. Out of the dozens of races that had once lived in the world, only a handful had survived into modern times. Some ancient races had been rendered extinct by war. Some had been simply crowded out, retreating into remote regions and forced to breed amongst themselves, which killed them off with lethal recessives.
That had been the bad luck. The foolishness had come when people began to form theories about the process of Evolution. They got it all wrong: most people interpreted the concept of “survival of the fittest” to mean they ought to narrow the gene pool, reducing it in size. So this was done, in genocidal wars and eugenics programs, and how surprised people were when lethal recessives began to occur more frequently! To say nothing of the populations who died in droves when diseases swept through them, because they were all so genetically similar there were none among them with natural immunities.”

Kage Baker book The Machine's Child

Source: The Machine's Child (2006), Chapter 29, “Still Another Morning in 500,000 BCE” (p. 330)

War, Bad luck, People, World

“The untransacted destiny of the American people is to subdue the continent — to rush over this vast field to the Pacific Ocean — to animate the many hundred millions of its people, and to cheer them upward — to set the principle of self-government at work — to agitate these herculean masses — to establish a new order in human affairs — to set free the enslaved — to regenerate superannuated nations — to change darkness into light — to stir up the sleep of a hundred centuries — to teach old nations a new civilization — to confirm the destiny of the human race — to carry the career of mankind to its culminating point — to cause stagnant people to be re-born — to perfect science — to emblazon history with the conquest of peace — to shed a new and resplendent glory upon mankind — to unite the world in one social family — to dissolve the spell of tyranny and exalt charity — to absolve the curse that weighs down humanity, and to shed blessings round the world!
Divine task! immortal mission! Let us tread fast and joyfully the open trail before us! Let every American heart open wide for patriotism to glow undimmed, and confide with religious faith in the sublime and prodigious destiny of his well-loved country.”

William Gilpin

Address to the U.S. Senate (2 March 1846); quoted in Mission of the North American People, Geographical, Social, and Political (1873), by William Gilpin, p. 124.

Love, People, World, Family

“Randomness works well in search—sometimes better than humans.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder

Source: Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (2012), p. 103

“As when men to keep from being swept overboard in the storm clutch at each other's hands to resist being torn apart, so our bodies fused a link in the human chain that kept us from being swept into nothing.”

Daniel Keyes book Flowers for Algernon

Flowers for Algernon (1966)

Men

“The creativity that can occur when a feel for both the humanities and the sciences combine in one strong personality was the topic that most interested me in my biographies of Franklin and Einstein, and I believe that it will be a key to creating innovative economies in the twenty-first century.”

Walter Isaacson book Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs (2011), Simon & Schuster (U.S.), Ch. 19: "Pixar: Technology Meets Art", ISBN 1-4516-4853-7

Feeling, Strong, Science, Personality

“Islam chose to unite earth and heaven in a single system, present both in the heart of the individual and the actuality of society, recognizing no separation of practical exertion from religious impulse. … The center of its being and the field of its action is human life in its entirety, spiritual and material, religious and worldly. Such a religion cannot continue to exist in isolation from society, nor can its adherents be true Muslims unless they practice their faith in their social, legal and economic relationships.”

Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966) Egyptian author, educator, Islamic theorist, poet, and politician

Source: Social Justice in Islam (1953), p. 26

Life, Faith, Religion, Heart

“It is an old and ironic habit of human beings to run faster when we have lost our way; and we grasp more fiercely at research, statistics, and technical aids in sex when we have lost the values and meaning of love.”

Rollo May book Love and Will

Source: Love and Will (1969), Ch. 1 : Introduction : Our Schizoid World, p. 15

Love, Sex, Way

“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes that 'if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression', human rights should be protected by the rule of law. That just laws which uphold human rights are the necessary foundation of peace and security would be denied only by closed minds which interpret peace as the silence of all opposition and security as the assurance of their own power.”

Aung San Suu Kyi (1945) State Counsellor of Myanmar and Leader of the National League for Democracy

In Quest of Democracy (1991)

Peace, Law, Silence, Universe

“Not that he was jealous of the machine—but it was reassuring to know that there was still something that human beings could do that machines could not master.
Love.”

David Gerrold book When HARLIE Was One

Section 32 (p. 189)
When HARLIE Was One (1972)

Love

“Global rationality, the rationality of neoclassical theory, assumes that the decision maker has a comprehensive, consistent utility function, knows all the alternatives that are available for choice, can compute the expected value of utility associated with each alternative, and chooses the alternative that maximizes expected utility. Bounded rationality, a rationality that is consistent with our knowledge of actual human choice behavior, assumes that the decision maker must search for alternatives, has egregiously incomplete and inaccurate knowledge about the consequences of actions, and chooses actions that are expected to be satisfactory”

Herbert A. Simon (1916–2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, and psychologist

attain targets while satisfying constraints
Simon (1997, p. 17); As cited in: Gustavo Barros (2010, p. 460).
1980s and later

Behavior, Search, Knowledge, Decision

“I've had letters from Chinese scientists at the peak of the SARS epidemic who said the problem is a hybridization between the viruses planted into GMO feed, which is then fed to animals, then the virus jumped from the animals to humans. We're going to see more and more of these kinds of risks. I think the whole issue of the H1N1 virus was the fact that it had genes for three influenza types--human, chicken, pig. All of these crossings are becoming possible because of the crossing of genes across species barriers.”

Vandana Shiva (1952) Indian philosopher

On the SARS epidemic, as quoted in " A Visit to My Kitchen: Vandana Shiva http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maria-rodale/a-visit-to-my-kitchen-van_b_775298.html?ir=India&adsSiteOverride=in", The Huffington Post (28 October 2011)

Problem, Thinking, Animals

“No Mr Huckabee, history –and criminal statistics- have both shown that tragedies will only increase, the more religious any society becomes. The more influence religion has over law, the lower our quality of life, and the more human rights are violated. It is true that any population of hundreds of millions will produce a proportionate percentage of sociopaths. But what we need there is more efficient provisions of mental health care –so that those suffering dementia and other disorders will be identified, treated, or isolated as need be –BEFORE they go berserk. Religion doesn’t want that either –as a matter of self-preservation. Because a fair amount of divine revelation can be cured with the same medications that treats schizophrenia. Where would the churches be if that many of their clergymen were clothed in straight-jackets?”

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

Patheos, Fukkenuckabee http://www.patheos.com/blogs/reasonadvocates/2012/12/21/fukkenuckabee/ (December 21, 2012)

Life, Health, Religion, Law

“Because I love all animals so much, people, I feel like they should realize they don’t have to cut into something to learn about it. … If you feel weird about dissecting something, say “no.” I would totally say, “I'm not cutting into this animal.” I would never do that… You’ll learn so much more off of the computer. If you have the other option, why not take it? You should ask your teacher for other human alternatives.”

Noah Cyrus (2000) American singer and actress

“#DissectionKills, With Noah Cyrus,” video for peta2 (8 April 2015) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HVLjUqL2xzw.

Love, People, Feeling, Learning

“What humans have spontaneously identified as good and bad — or as positive and negative — are evolutionary complementations in need of more accurate identifications.”

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

From 1980s onwards, Critical Path (1981)

“A review of our party's seventy-plus-year history elicits an important conclusion. Our party earned the people's support during the historical periods of revolution, construction and reform because it always represented the requirements for developing China's advanced productive forces, the orientation of China's advanced culture and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people. The party also earned popular support because it fought tirelessly to realize the fundamental interests of the country and the people by formulating a correct line, principles and policies. Today, humanity once again stands at the beginning of a new century and a new millennium. How our party can better effectuate the Three Represents under the new historical conditions is a major issue all Party comrades, especially high-ranking party cadres, must consider deeply.”

Jiang Zemin (1926) former General Secretary of the Communist Party of China

Three Represents (25 February 2000).
2000s

People, History, Support, Country

“Consideration for other persons or for other living beings is very vital for goodness and want of consideration for other people makes human beings selfish, regardless for other people's good.”

Morarji Desai (1896–1995) Former Indian Finance Minister, Freedom Fighters, Former prime minister

19th World Vegetarian Congress 1967

People, Personality, Selfishness

“A car crash harnesses elements of eroticism, aggression, desire, speed, drama, kinesthetic factors, the stylizing of motion, consumer goods, status — all these in one event. I myself see the car crash as a tremendous sexual event really: a liberation of human and machine libido”

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) British writer

if there is such a thing
Interview in Penthouse (September 1970)

Cars, Speed

“Regarding the doll in the Purge, since it's one of my favorite moments in the series: The Custodians are the physical embodiment of a very vaporous notion -- human conscience. Does conscience really exist, or is it just a way of convincing ourselves that a center for moral judgment resides within us, thus lending our judgments a natural authority? As always, Trevor prefers to provide a tangible solution. He can't tolerate uncertainty. Whether it is real or not, Trevor understands the usefulness of the belief in conscience as a tool for practical ends, the improvement of society. In the end, the doll which emerges from the Custodian reveals to us that Trevor's artificial conscience, like the classical notion, is no more than a flimsy gimmick, a parlor trick, a plaything of the mind powered by a circular process. (Advocating the existence of conscience usually involves an appeal to our conscience). Notice that Trevor himself winds up the toy while in the train earlier in the episode.”

Peter Chung (1961) Korean-American animator

Response on LUSENET http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=003FAq

Way, Understanding, Nature, Training

“Human beings are social beings with or without religion.”

Leo Igwe (1970) Nigerian human rights activist

An Interview with Dr. Leo Igwe — Founder, Nigerian Humanist Movement (2017)

Religion

“If welfare and equality are to be primary aims of law, some people must necessarily possess a greater power of coercion in order to force redistribution of material goods. Political power alone should be equal among human beings; yet striving for other kinds of equality absolutely requires political inequality.”

Tibor R. Machan (1939–2016) Hungarian-American philosopher

Source: Private Rights and Public Illusions (1994), p. 81

People, Law

“We know for a fact that the Buddha refused to speculate with his disciples on whether there was such a thing such as life after death. ‘Such questions,’ he said, ‘are not relevant to the practice of the Path and cannot be answered while bound by the restraints of human existence.’ Most of Buddhism, you see, gentlemen, can be explored, appreciated, and utilized as a tool toward enlightenment without descending into the supernatural.”

Dan Simmons book The Rise of Endymion

Source: The Rise of Endymion (1997), Chapter 19 (p. 375)

Life, Death, Question

“Here is Christianity. Whence came it? What is it? It is a force in the world, a prodigious force. It has revolutionized society. It has lifted man out of himself. It has changed the face of the world. There it lies, imbedded in more than eighteen centuries of human history; and history of no mean sort, the best record of the race.”

Herrick Johnson (1832–1913) American clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 135.

World, History, Change

“Humanity is my temple, and I am its worshiper. The disabled are my supreme God, and I am their grace seeker.”

Rāmabhadrācārya (1950) Hindu religious leader

Mānavatā hī merā mandira maiṃ hūँ isakā eka pujārī ॥
haiṃ vikalāṃga maheśvara mere maiṃ hūँ inakā kṛpābhikhārī ॥
[Rambhadracharya, Jagadguru (Speaker), 2003, जगद्गुरु रामभद्राचार्य विकलांग विश्वविद्यालय, Hindi, Jagadguru Rambhadracharya Handicapped University, CD, Chitrakoot, Uttar Pradesh, India, Jagadguru Rambhadracharya Handicapped University, 00:02:16, मानवता ही मेरा मन्दिर मैं हूँ इसका एक पुजारी ॥ हैं विकलांग महेश्वर मेरे मैं हूँ इनका कृपाभिखारी ॥]

God

“Corporations are neither physical nor metaphysical phenomena. They are socioeconomic ploys — legally enacted game-playing — agreed upon only between overwhelmingly powerful socioeconomic individuals and by them imposed upon human society and its all unwitting members.”

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

From 1980s onwards, Grunch of Giants (1983)

Game

“It will say just about everything I have ever had to say, or will ever have to say, on the human condition of war and what it means to us, as against what we claim it means to us.”

James Jones book Whistle

Introduction for his unfinished novel, Whistle (1978) the third part of his war trilogy (which was completed by Willie Morris); quoted in TIME magazine (13 March 1978) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,919437,00.html

War

“Human suffering, while it is asleep, is shapeless. If it is wakened it takes the form of the waker.”

Antonio Porchia (1885–1968) Italian Argentinian poet

La pena humana, durmiendo, no tiene forma. Si la despiertan, toma la forma de quien la despierta,
Voces (1943)

Suffering

“Supplies of wood fuel may be a byproduct of thinning, pruning, and harvesting homestead tree crops. These trees also provide the homestead with groundwater [for natural evaporative cooling and fruit], with protection from the sun, wind, and erosion, and with fodder, fruit, and nuts for animal and human consumption. Tree crops also furnish shelter and forage for the wild birds…”

Ken Kern American writer

p, 125
Ken Kern's Masonry Stove (1983)

Nature, Bird, Tree, Sun

“It would be tedious to dwell upon every striking mark of national decline: some, however, will press themselves forward to particular notice; and amongst them are: that Italian-like effeminacy, which has, at last, descended to the yeomanry of the country, who are now found turning up their silly eyes in ecstacy at a music-meeting, while they should be cheering the hounds, or measuring their strength at the ring; the discouragement of all the athletic sports and modes of strife amongst the common people, and the consequent and fearful increase of those cuttings and stabbings, those assassin-like ways of taking vengeance, formerly heard of in England only as the vices of the most base and cowardly foreigners, but now become so frequent amongst ourselves as to render necessary a law to punish such practices with death; the prevalence and encouragement of a hypocritical religion, a canting morality, and an affected humanity; the daily increasing poverty of the national church, and the daily increasing disposition still to fleece the more than half-shorne clergy, who are compelled to be, in various ways, the mere dependants of the upstarts of trade; the almost entire extinction of the ancient country gentry, whose estates are swallowed up by loan-jobbers, contractors, and nabobs, who, for the far greater part not Englishmen themselves, exercise in England that sort of insolent sway, which, by the means of taxes raised from English labour, they have been enabled to exercise over the slaves of India or elsewhere; the bestowing of honours upon the mere possessors of wealth, without any regard to birth, character, or talents, or to the manner in which that wealth has been acquired; the familiar intercourse of but too many of the ancient nobility with persons of low birth and servile occupations, with exchange and insurance-brokers, loan and lottery contractors, agents and usurers, in short, with all the Jew-like race of money-changers.”

William Cobbett (1763–1835) English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist

Political Register (27 October 1804).

Death, Money, People, Fear

“Life’s always been a business of working hard and fighting the cold,” Pa was saying. “The earth’s always been a lonely place, millions of miles from the next planet. And no matter how long the human race might have lived, the end would have come some night. Those things don’t matter. What matters is that life is good. It has a lovely texture, like some thick fur or the petals of flowers—you’ve never seen those, but you know our ice-flowers—or like the texture of flames, never twice the same. It makes everything else worth while. And that’s as true for the last man as for the first.”

Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) American writer of fantasy, horror, and science fiction

“A Pail of Air” (p. 20); originally published in Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1951
Short Fiction, A Pail of Air (1964)

Love, Life, Flowers, Business

“Devotion as an expression of gratitude to God can turn into a social force and bring about transformative changes in all aspects of human life and at all levels of society.”

Pandurang Shastri Athavale (1920–2003) Indian philosopher, spiritual leader and social reformer

Acceptance speech while receiving the 1997 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, from HRH Prince Philip at a public ceremony held in Westminster Abbey, May 6, 1997. Source: Leader of Spiritual Movement Wins $1.2 Million Religion Prize http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9902E3DB1230F935A35750C0A961958260 New York Times, March 6, 1997.

Life, God, Change, Gratitude

“The Declaration of Independence proclaimed to a world, organized politically and spiritually around the concept of the inequality of man, that the dignity of human personality was inherent in man as a living being. The Emancipation Proclamation was the offspring of the Declaration of Independence. It was a constructive use of the force of law to uproot a social order which sought to separate liberty from a segment of humanity.”

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

1960s, Emancipation Proclamation Centennial Address (1962)

World, Law, Personality

Quotes about humanity page 71

Quotes about humanity
page 71