Quotes about humanity
page 76

“It is not necessary to conclude that the managerial groups have assumed complete domination over the concerns in which they are found, although this may be the fact in various instances, but only to reckon with the undoubted truth that the managerial factor in public and private enterprise has taken on a far more significant role than before.
This new role which has puzzled and alarmed the "owners" in industry and the policy-makers in government is not, however, primarily a power role, but a specialization of the evolving and complex character which we now confront in our civilization.
We may, of course, always raise the question-not in point of fact always raised-of what the relation of these managers is to the t! nds of the state or the ends of other groups and to the special techniques of the particular group and to its special social composition. In the complex power pattern of organization how are these managerial element-related to the organization of the consent of the governed, so vital a force in the life of every form of human association? In the struggle for advantage and mastery these larger factors may, indeed, pass unnoticed, but from the point of view of the student of politics and government, they are of supreme importance in judging the trends and possibilities of managerial evolution in modem society.”

Charles Edward Merriam (1874–1953) American political scientist

Source: Systematic Politics, 1943, p. 163-4 ; as cited in Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 15-16

Life, Truth, Question

“When software applications became larger and larger, people such as Shaw and Garlan coined the term software architecture. This notion of architecture deals with the key design principles underlying software artefacts. In the 1980s and 1990s, people became aware that the development of information technology (IT) should be done in conjunction with the development of the context in which it was used. This led to the identification of the so-called business/IT alignment problem. Solving the business/IT alignment problem requires enterprises to align human, organizational, informational, and technological aspects of systems. Quite early on, the term architecture was also introduced as a means to further alignment, and thus analyzes and solves business? IT alignment problems, Recently, the awareness emerged that alignment between business an IT is not enough, there are many more aspects in the enterprise in need of alignment. This has led to the use of the term architecture at the enterprise level: enterprise architecture.”

Erik Proper (1967) Dutch computer scientist

Martin Op 't Land, Erik Proper (2009) Enterprise Architecture: Creating Value by Informed Governance. p. 26-27

People, Business, Problem

“The neurobiologist Harry Jerison has made a long study of the trajectory of brain evolution since the advent of life on dry land. …the origin of new faunal groups is usually accompanied by a jump in the relative size of the brain, known as encephalization. …the first archaic mammals… were equipped with brains four to five times bigger than the average reptilian brain… primates are twice as encephalized as the average mammal. Within primates, the apes… are some twice the average size. And humans are three times as encephalized as the average ape.”

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

The Origin of Humankind (1994)

Life, Study, Time

“You have to look beyond race because as a human being you have to experience the person from the inside first”

Henrik Larsson

Henrik Larsson http://www.theredcard.ie/news/2006_03_01_archive.html

Personality

“I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it roaring and raging like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free, and ending just where it began.”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"Common Places," No. 60, The Literary Examiner (September - December 1823)

Hate, Effort, Rage, Sea

“Carbon dioxide, Mister Speaker, is a natural byproduct of nature. Carbon dioxide is natural. It occurs in Earth. It is a part of the regular lifecycle of Earth. In fact, life on planet Earth can't even exist without carbon dioxide. So necessary is it to human life, to animal life, to plant life, to the oceans, to the vegetation that's on the Earth, to the, to the fowl that — that flies in the air, we need to have carbon dioxide as part of the fundamental lifecycle of Earth…There isn't one such study because carbon dioxide is not a harmful gas, it is a harmless gas. Carbon dioxide is natural. It is not harmful. It is part of Earth's life cycle…And yet we're being told that we have to reduce this natural substance and reduce the American standard of living to create an arbitrary reduction in something that is naturally occuring in the earth.”

Michele Bachmann (1956) American politician

Stumped By Science: Michele Bachmann Calls CO2 'Harmless,' 'Negligible,' 'Necessary,' 'Natural'
Brad
Johnson
The Wonk Room
Think Progress
2009-04-24
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2009/04/24/bachmann-harmless-co2/
2011-05-27
2010s

Life, Nature, Study, Animals

“Computer programs are the most intricate, delicately balanced and finely interwoven of all the products of human industry to date. They are machines with far more moving parts than any engine: the parts don't wear out, but they interact and rub up against one another in ways the programmers themselves cannot predict.”

James Gleick (1954) American author, journalist, and biographer

James Gleick (2002). What just happened: a chronicle from the information frontier, p. 19 cited in: George Stepanek (2005), Software Project Secrets: Why Software Projects Fail, p. 10

Way, Parting

“When I was in my teens, I invented a term to describe them. I call it 'holiday consciousness'... because I often experienced this sense of optimism and wide-awakeness when setting out on a journey or a holiday. It was always the feeling that the world is self-evidently complex and beautiful, and that life is so obviously good that man's boredom and defeat is an absurdity... And then I used to ask: Why do men forget this so easily? And the answer seemed obvious: because the human will is so flabby and weak. Instead of being self-controlled, self-driven creatures, most men are little more than leaves on a stream, they drift along hoping for the best. I once wrote that men are like grandfather clocks driven by watchsprings.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: The Black Room (1975), p. 75

Life, Men, World, Beauty

“Harry Dresden: On the whole, we're a murderous race. According to Genesis, it took as few as four people to make the planet too crowded to stand, and the first murder was a fratricide. Genesis says that in a fit of jealous rage, the very first child born to mortal parents, Cain, snapped and popped the first metaphorical cap in another human being. The attack was a bloody, brutal, violent, reprehensible killing. Cain's brother Abel probably never saw it coming. As I opened the door to my apartment, I was filled with a sense of empathic sympathy and intuitive understanding. For freaking Cain.”

Jim Butcher The Dresden Files

Source: The Dresden Files, Dead Beat (2005), Chapter 1, opening lines

People, Understanding, Parent, Sense

“The quality of the human mind, considered in its collective aspect, which most strikes us, in surveying this record, is its colossal patience.”

E. W. Hobson (1856–1933) British mathematician

Source: Squaring the Circle (1913), p. 12

Patience

“I think we're living in an age which despises humanity and despises bravery and doesn't need bravery because modern warfare has rather gone beyond bravery. It is a kind of warfare where people are fighting enemies they never see, killing people of whom they know nothing.”

Robertson Davies (1913–1995) Canadian journalist, playwright, professor, critic, and novelist

"Sunday Morning".
Conversations with Robertson Davies (1989)

People, Age, Thinking, Fight

“Like the use of the word 'concupiscence' in an earlier age to describe sexual desire, the use of the word 'pollution' to describe essential aspects of the productive activities of an industrial society represents an attempt to defame an entirely proper human capacity by means of using an evil sounding name for it.”

George Reisman (1937) American economist

Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (1996)

Age, Evil

“I think if we study the primates, we notice that a lot of these things that we value in ourselves, such as human morality, have a connection with primate behavior. This completely changes the perspective, if you start thinking that actually we tap into our biological resources to become moral beings. That gives a completely different view of ourselves than this nasty selfish-gene type view that has been promoted for the last 25 years.”

Frans de Waal (1948) Dutch primatologist and ethologist

Frans de Waal, in a NOVA interview, " The Bonobo in All of Us" PBS (1 January 2007) http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/nature/bonobo-all-us.html; quotes from this interview were for some time misplaced on this page, which probably generated similar misattributions elsewhere, and the misplacement was not discovered until after this quotation had been selected for Quote of the Day, as a quote of Goodall. Corrections were subsequently made here, during the day the quote was posted as QOTD. The Bonobo in All of Us (2007)

Behavior, Thinking, Study, Change

“The scientific skepticism of our age professes to spring from a sense of the extreme fallaciousness of the human senses, and the liability besetting us all to deceive ourselves into a belief which gratifies the faculty of wonder. It is held as a rare and valuable gift to be able to observe a fact correctly. We are pathetically told that what a man thinks he saw, is often a mere hypothesis of his imagination as to what he saw, and may be wholly wrong.”

Robert Chambers (publisher, born 1802) (1802–1871) Scottish publisher and writer

Source: Testimony: its Posture in the Scientific World (1859), p. 1-2

Age, Imagination, Spring, Thinking

“It is so very important to remember that, while all healing is of God, we must find the answer to the question, "Which is the most relevant way of cooperating with God in the case of this particular patient? It may be surgery, or medicine, or psychiatry, or prayer. Prayer is not relevant in many cases, save as an aid to the patient’s mental condition, and God is not going to make of prayer an easy magic, just because we have not used our human resources of money and men in wiser ways.””

Leslie Weatherhead (1893–1976) English theologian

Source: The Christian Agnostic (1965), p.224

Men, Money, God, Way

“Judo should be free as art and science from any external influences, political, national, racial, and financial or any other organized interest. And all things connected with it should be directed to its ultimate object, the "Benefit of Humanity."”

Kanō Jigorō (1860–1938) Japanese educator and judoka

Human sacrifice is a matter of ancient history.
Budokwai Bulletin (1947)

Art, History, Science

“Neither love nor hate, nor any order of intense adherence to personal involvement in human experience, may be so apt to serve the soul as this freedom and this necessity to be kind.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

The Bicycle Rider In Beverly Hills (1952)

Love, Hate, Soul, Freedom

“Stupidity can win for a moment, but it can never really succeed because the nature of humans is to seek freedom. Rulers can delay that freedom, but they cannot stop it.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

" Living in Fear Is Worse Than Imprisonment http://mg.co.za/article/2012-06-28-living-in-fear-is-worse-than-imprisonment." Mail and Guardian, June 29, 2012. 2010-, 2012

Stupidity, Nature, Freedom

“Trust is the core of human relationships, of gregariousness among men. Friendship, a puzzle to the syllogistic and critical mentality, is not based on experiments or tests of another person's qualities but on trust. It is not critical knowledge but a risk of the heart which initiates affection and preserves loyalty in our fellow men.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

"The Holy Dimension", p. 339
Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity: Essays (1997)

Men, Friendship, Knowledge, Heart

“Thoughts about the art of portraiture. Some will not recognize the truthfulness of my mirror. Let them remember that I am not here to reflect the surface (this can be done by the photographic plate), but must penetrate inside. My mirror probes down to the heart. I write words on the forehead and around the corners of the mouth. My human faces are truer than the real ones.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Diary entry (1901), # 136, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, 1898-1918; University of California Press, 1964
1895 - 1902

Truth, Art, Heart

“There’s no forgiveness built into the system. I told Barbara so, dozens of times. She was always marching off to save the whales, save the trees, save some goddamn thing. It was endearing. But in the back of my head I always heard Dad’s voice: ‘This is only a holding action. Nothing is ever really saved.’ Barbara thought the greenhouse effect was like a virus, something you could stop if you came up with the right vaccine. I told her it was a cancer—the cancer of humanity on the vital organs of the earth. You can’t stop that by marching.”
“Isn’t that a little like giving up?”
“I think it’s called acceptance.”
Archer stood and walked to the door, where his silhouette obscured the motion of the trees.
“Very bleak attitude, Tom.”

Robert Charles Wilson book A Bridge of Years

“Experience bears it out.”
Source: A Bridge of Years (1991), Chapter 3 (pp. 52-53)

Forgiveness, Thinking, Tree, Time

“Progress is a fact. Even so, faith in progress is a superstition. Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. They are no different today from what they have always been. There is progress in knowledge, but not in ethics. This is the verdict both of science and history, and the view of every one of the world's religions. The growth of knowledge is real and - barring a worldwide catastrophe - it is now irreversible. Improvements in government and society are no less real, but they are temporary. Not only can they be lost, they are sure to be. History is not progress or decline, but recurring gain and loss. The advance of knowledge deludes us into thinking we are different from other animals, but our history shows that we are not.”

John Gray book Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

Non-Progress: De Quincey's Toothache (p. 155)
Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002)

World, Faith, Religion, History

“But public works, economic protectionism, cheap money, 'deficit-financed government spending,' and 'the animal spirits of the spendthrift' in the service of boosting 'consumption demand'… Doesn't Keynesianism simply appeal to the worst in human nature?”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"John Maynard Keynes: Where’s The Genius?! (Part 2) http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2013/08/john-maynard-keynes-wheres-genius-part-2.html Economic Policy Journal, August 23, 2013. 2010s, 2013

Money, Nature, Animals

“A manufacturing organization being a live, human thing, is like a municipality. Many of our shops are as fruitful fields for riddance of graft as are many of our cities. The graft in the shop consists mostly in the distortion of the managing and planning body into a wire-pulling and influence machine with easy berths filled by incompetents or idlers. This condition often exists not because of any intentional desire to be disloyal on the part of the employees, but simply on account of the work being allowed to drift without systematic attention to departmental organization.”

Hugo Diemer (1870–1937) American mechanical engineer

Source: "Industrial Engineering," 1905, p. 67

Parting

“He started for the conquest of ManDalgaDh on 26 Muharram, AH 861 (AD 24 December, 1456) after making full preparation… Reaching there the Sultãn issued orders that ‘trees should be uprooted, houses demolished and no trace should be left of human habitation’… A great victory was achieved on 1 Zilhijjã, AH 861 (AD 20 October, 1457). Sultãn Mahmûd offered thanks to Allãh in all humility. Next day, he entered the fort. He got the temples demolished and their materials used in the construction of a Jãmi‘ Masjid. He appointed there a qãzi, a muftî, a muhtasib, a khatîb and a mu‘zzin and established order in that place…”

Nizamuddin Ahmad (1551–1594) historian

Sultãn Mahmûd Khaljî of Malwa (AD 1436-1469) Mandalgadh (Rajasthan)
Tabqãt-i-Akharî

Tree, Victory, Housing

“Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device. For that tiny fraction, the copyright creates incentives to produce and distribute the creative work. For that tiny fraction, the copyright acts as an "engine of free expression."
But even for that tiny fraction, the actual time during which the creative work has a commercial life is extremely short. As I've indicated, most books go out of print within one year. The same is true of music and film. Commercial culture is sharklike. It must keep moving. And when a creative work falls out of favor with the commercial distributors, the commercial life ends.”

Lawrence Lessig book Free Culture

Free Culture (2004)

Life, Books, Music, Time

“Human needs, although originally derived from biological necessity, are thus a result of the existence of society and are conditioned by the stage of development which society has reached.”

Oskar R. Lange (1904–1965) Polish economist

"The Subject Matter of Political Economy: Elementary Concepts"

“Freedom means free speech, not politically correct safe spaces. Freedom means religious freedom, whether you are Christian, Jew, Muslim, or atheist. Whether you are gay, or straight, the Bill of Rights protects the rights of all of us to live according to our conscience. Freedom means the right to keep and bear arms, and to protect your family. Freedom means that every human life is precious and must be protected. Freedom means Supreme Court Justices who don't dictate policy, but instead follow the Constitution. And, freedom means recognizing that our Constitution allows states to choose policies that reflect local values. Colorado might decide something different than Texas. New York different than Iowa. That's the way it's supposed to be, diversity. If not, what's the point of having states to begin with?”

Ted Cruz (1970) American politician

2010s, Speech at the Republican National Convention (July 20, 2016)

Life, Family, Justice, Way

“The point is that humans are rarely at their best when they use rational reasoning.”

Didier Sornette (1957) French scientist

Source: Why Stock Markets Crash - Critical Events in Complex Systems (2003), Chapter 4, Positive Feedbacks, p. 106.

“A set of global values in keeping with human nature and dignity need to be identified and developed.”

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

Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.29

Nature

“Everyone else on the planet, from the lowest amoebae to the great blue whale, expresses all their component elements in a perfect dance with the world around them. Only human beings have unfulfilled lives.”

Nicholas Lore (1944) American social scientist

Wholeliving, 2004

World, Dance, Perfection

“In the whole of recorded modern history, this was, I believe, the one occasion when one man, with one soaring imagination, with one fire burning in him, and with one unrivalled capacity for conveying it to others, won a crucial victory not only for the forces (for there were many heroes in those days) but for the very spirit of human freedom. And so, on this great day, we thank him, and we thank God for him.”

Robert Menzies (1894–1978) Australian politician, 12th Prime Minister of Australia

Second Term as Prime Minister (1949-1966)

God, Imagination, History, Freedom

“A young man should serve his parents at home and be respectful to elders outside his home. He should be earnest and truthful, loving all, but become intimate with humaneness. After doing this, if he has energy to spare, he can study literature and the arts.”

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

Source: The Analects, Other chapters

Love, Truth, Art, Home

“Pharisaism, obtuseness and tyranny reign not only in the homes of merchants and in jails; I see it in science, in literature, and among youth. I consider any emblem or label a prejudice…. My holy of holies is the human body, health, intellect, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute of freedoms, the freedom from force and falsity in whatever forms they might appear.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Letter to Alexei Pleshcheev (October 4, 1888)
Letters

Love, Health, Youth, Home

“It is high time to mainstream human rights into all trade agreements and World Trade Organization (WTO) rules and regulations, so that trade representatives and dispute-settlers know that trade is neither a “stand alone” regime not an end in itself.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Mainstream human rights into trade agreements and WTO practice – UN expert urges in new report http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=20473&LangID=E#sthash.bn9VjkJJ.dpuf. 2016, Mainstream human rights into trade agreements and WTO practice – UN expert urges in new report

World, Time

“The law is the last result of human wisdom acting upon human experience for the benefit of the public.”

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer

Source: Anecdotes of Samuel Johnson (1786), p. 111

Wisdom, Law

“Economic progress… means the discovery and application of better ways of doing things to satisfy our wants. The piping of water to a household that previously dragged it from a well, the growing of two blades of grass where one grew before, the development of a power loom that enables one man to weave ten times as much as he could before, the use of steam power and electric power instead of horse or human power — all these things clearly represent economic progress.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Remark: Kenneth Boulding gave the same example in his 1945 The economics of peace, p. 74
Source: 1950s, Principles of economic policy, 1958, p. 23

Way, Grass, Water, Time

“It is beyond dispute that the state exercises very great power over human life and it always shows a tendency to go beyond the limits laid down for it.”

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874–1948) Russian philosopher

Slavery and Freedom (1939), p. 145

Life, Exercises

“What I've found is that, because most people are deeply disturbed by and feel guilty about eating meat, and yet at the same time fear not eating it, they defend themselves from having to acknowledge such conflicting feelings. These psychological defenses include denial (“Animals don't really suffer when they're raised and killed for meat.”); justification (“Animals are meant to be eaten by humans.”); dichotomization (“I'd never eat a dog, but I love bacon.”); avoidance (“Don't tell me that; you'll ruin my meal.”); and, most importantly, dissociation (“If I think about the animal when I'm eating meat I feel disgusted.”). … When people break through their dissociation, the feelings that typically emerge are empathy—and therefore disgust. That's why people tend to be disgusted by the idea of eating “unusual” animals, such as dogs and gorillas; they haven't learned to dissociate from these kinds of meat. It's also why vegetarians usually find all meats disgusting.”

Melanie Joy (1966) American psychologist

Source: Strategic Action for Animals (2008), p. 117

Love, People, Fear, Dogs

“We feel as if we were hard labor convicts where everything but our feeding has been made subject to iron rules. We have become lost as human beings, and have been turned into slaves.”

Samuel Gompers (1850–1924) American Labor Leader[AFL]

Out of Their Own Mouths: A Revelation and an Indictment of Sovietism, New York: NY, E.P Dutton and Company (1921) p. 84. Resolution from the Petrograd workers, (Sept. 5, 1920). Co-authored by William English Walling.

Feeling

“Two faiths were on trial. Human societies, like human beings, live by faith and die when faith dies… At heart, the Great Case was this critical conflict of faiths; that is why it was a great case.”

Whittaker Chambers Witness

Source: Witness (1952), p. 4

Faith, Heart

“Working in the abstract way seems to release one’s personality and sharpen the perceptions so that in the observation of humanity or landscape it is the wholeness of inner intention which moves one so profoundly. The components fall into place and one is no longer aware of the detail except as the necessary significance of wholeness and unity.... a rhythm of form which has its roots in earth but reaches outwards towards the unknown experiences of the future. The thought underlying this form is, for me, the delicate balance the spirit of man maintains between his knowledge and the laws of the universe.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Source: 1961 - 1975, Barbara Hepworth, A Pictorial autobiography', 1970, p. 286

Law, Way, Knowledge, Universe

“In you, humanity is precarious; and so, in dread and in shame, you kill the animal in you. And its slaughter poisons you.”

Olaf Stapledon book Last Men in London

Source: Last Men in London (1932), Chapter I: The World of the Last Men.

Animals

“…there has accumulated a vast tangle of emergency legislation, regulations, barriers and restraints, out of all proportion to and often missing and distorting the needs of the situation. For the restoration and modernisation of human civilization, this exaggerated outlawing of the fellow citizen whom we see fit to suspect as a traitor or revolutionary and also of the stranger within our gates, has to be restrained and brought back within the scheme of human rights.”

H. G. Wells (1866–1946) English writer

The Rights of Man, or what are we fighting for? (1940)

“Wherever applause breaks out in the liturgy because of some human achievement, it is a sure sign that the essence of liturgy has totally disappeared and been replaced by a kind of religious entertainment. Such attraction fades quickly - it cannot compete in the market of leisure pursuits, incorporating as it increasingly does various forms of religious titillation.”

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

2000, The Spirit of the Liturgy (2000)

“If we measured success by longevity, then dinosaurs must rank as the number one success story in the history of land life. Not only did dinosaurs exercise an airtight monopoly as large land animals, they kept their commanding position for an extraordinary span of time - 130 million years. Our own human species is no more than a hundred thousand years old. And our own zoological class, the Mammalia, the clan of of warm-blooded furry creatures, has ruled the land ecosystem for only seventy million years. True, the dinosaurs are extinct, but we ought to be careful in judging them inferior to our own kind. Who can say that the human system will last another thousand years, let alone a hundred million? Who can predict that our Class Mammalia will rule for another hundred thousand millennia?”

Robert T. Bakker book The Dinosaur Heresies

The Dinosaur Heresies: A Revolutionary View of Dinosaurs (1986), Longman Scientific & Technical, p. 16
The Dinosaur Heresies (1986)

Life, Exercises, History, Time

“Everyman is somebody because he is a child of God. And so when we say Thou shalt not kill, we're really saying that human life is too sacred to be taken on the battlefields of the world. Man is more than a tiny vagary of whirling electrons or a wisp of smoke from a limitless smoldering. Man is a child of God, made in His image, and therefore must be respected as such. Until men see this everywhere, until nations see this everywhere, we will be fighting wars. One day somebody should remind us that, even though there may be political and ideological differences between us, the Vietnamese are our brothers, the Russians are our brothers, the Chinese are our brothers; and one day we've got to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. But in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile. In Christ there is neither male nor female. In Christ there is neither Communist nor Capitalist. In Christ, somehow, there is neither bound nor free. We are all one in Christ Jesus. And when we truly believe in the sacredness of human personality, we won't exploit people, we won't trample over people with the iron feet of oppression, we won't kill anybody.”

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

1960s, A Christmas Sermon (1967)

Life, Men, God, War

“Not so long ago it was possible to take some little comfort from the idea that the clash, if it came, could perhaps be settled by what were called "conventional weapons "-bombs, tanks, cannon and men. Today that little grain of comfort is denied us for it has been made clear that the weapons of ultimate horror will certainly be used, and the military planning of nations is on that basis. The unconventional has become the conventional, and who knows what other examples of misguided and diabolical scientific skill have been discovered as a plague on humanity.”

Sukarno (1901–1970) first President of the Republic of Indonesia

Speech at the Opening of the Bandung Conference

Men, Idea

“There is nothing necessary or desirable for human nutrition to be found in meats or flesh foods, which are not found in and derived from vegetable products.”

John Harvey Kellogg (1852–1943) American physician

Source: The New Dietetics, What to Eat and How: A Guide to Scientific Feeding in Health and Disease, Battle Creek, MI: The Modern Medicine Publishing Co., 1921, p. 366 https://books.google.it/books?id=TNsMAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA366.

Food

“When the rains have fallen down
We can live our lives underground
No recollection of before
We'll make our own history
Fulfill our destiny
For sure, we can save humanity”

D. S. Bradford (1982) musician

A Call To The Stars II: A Home In The Sky https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/D-S-Bradford/A-Call-to-the-Stars-Ii-A-Home-in-the-Sky, verse 1 A Call To The Stars II: A Home In The Sky (2016)

History

“If we suppress all discussion, all criticism, proclaiming "This is the answer, my friends; man is saved!" we will doom humanity for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before.”

Richard Feynman (1918–1988) American theoretical physicist

The Value of Science (1955)
Context: We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.
... It is our responsibility to leave the people of the future a free hand. In the impetuous youth of humanity, we can make grave errors that can stunt our growth for a long time. This we will do if we say we have the answers now, so young and ignorant as we are. If we suppress all discussion, all criticism, proclaiming "This is the answer, my friends; man is saved!" we will doom humanity for a long time to the chains of authority, confined to the limits of our present imagination. It has been done so many times before.
... It is our responsibility as scientists, knowing the great progress which comes from a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, the great progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought, to proclaim the value of this freedom; to teach how doubt is not to be feared but welcomed and discussed; and to demand this freedom as our duty to all coming generations.

Imagination, Time

“What is now common to all men is a mere abstract universal, an H. C. F. [Highest Common Factor], and Man's conquest of himself means simply the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Abolition of Man

The Abolition of Man (1943)

Men, World, Universe

“Let us be honest. Did all the priests of Rome increase the mental wealth of man as much as Bruno? Did all the priests of France do as great a work for the civilization of the world as Diderot and Voltaire? Did all the ministers of Scotland add as much to the sum of human knowledge as David Hume? Have all the clergymen, monks, friars, ministers, priests, bishops, cardinals and popes, from the day of Pentecost to the last election, done as much for human liberty as Thomas Paine?”

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

as much for science as Charles Darwin?
The Great Infidels (1881)

Pain, World, Knowledge, Science

“Fear is proverbially a poor adviser for human action; for a party it is destruction. Fear of the labor movement and socialism has caused the political downfall of the German bourgeoisie; and the days of the Social Democracy are numbered as soon as the cry of fear finds a response in us. We should not challenge, but we should not sound the alarm and be misled by fear into taking steps that do not accord with the principles, the nature and the honor of our party. One does not disarm an enemy through timidity and gentleness; one simply emboldens him. Not that we should seek to run our heads through a wall. We wish to be and must be “practical.””

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

Fear, Democracy, Nature, Cry

“... you would be well advised to practice extreme discrimination on what filters through to that area of the brain that requires belief. Some or the more lucid, literate and better educated folks will tell you that they have conquered that base, primal nature of humanity and will inform that their brains do not require the gullible mechanism of blind acceptance called belief and their brains function far more clearly and with greater cogence. Just remember, Santa Claus is waiting.”

Kenny Young (1950) American songwriter

In reference to the subject of Alien Abductions in an e-mail from Young to Feeney on Wed, January 1, 2003. [citation needed]

Education, Nature, Waiting

“The race moves on. It has its human limitations. The tools we make have no limitations at all. When we educate ourselves to learn to handle those tools most efficiently we can go on to the next step, whatever it may be. Meanwhile there must be check and balance—rigid control.”

Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) American author

Source: The Time Axis (1949), Ch. 14 : Vega-Born

Education, Learning

“In the social sciences there has been a serious gap, except where administration is involved, between the theorist and the man who must act. As a result our social science theory continues to be detached from reality. There is great need for a new social science, namely, the Science of Administration, where social theory and action must meet. Administration as conceived in this paper is, therefore, a social science with its own techniques, its own abstractions clustering around the concept of action through human organizations, and its own problems of theory. It is vitally concerned in integrating other sciences, physical, biological, psychological, and social, at the point where action is involved. Its social importance is great. Indeed if our civilization breaks down, it will be mainly a breakdown of administration, both private and public.”

Wallace Brett Donham (1877–1954) American academic

Source: "The Theory and Practice of Administration", 1936, p. 409; as cited in: Albert Lepawsky (1949), Administration, p. 662-3

Problem, Reality, Science

“Nature's process of creation, as it exists in its timelessness, in its oneness and peace, has all the answers to man's needs of growth and progress and development. If the human endeavor first absorbs and then adopts these answers in its developmental process, the growth from cities to mega cities and path to progress would not create silent self digging graves of human extinction.”

Manav Gupta (1967) Indian artist

Rainforests and the Timeless Metaphors of Dreams by Manav Gupta (August 1997)
"on my eyot, umbilical cords of earth" by Manav Gupta (May 1999)
One minute films on environment consciousness (Commissioned by the Govt. of India) (2005)
1990s

Peace, Nature

“By the miracle of genius he created a masterpiece [Parzival], epic in scope, noble in purpose, humorous, humane, tender, and rational.”

Wolfram von Eschenbach (1170–1220) German knight and poet

Roger Sherman Loomis The Development of Arthurian Romance (New York: Dover, [1963] 2000) p. 67.
Criticism

“I would not hesitate to say that nine out of ten of the critics of the peace movement get the argument turned upside down. "You cannot change human nature" has become a sort of incantation with those critics. Perhaps you cannot "change human nature" — I don't indeed know what the phrase means. But you can certainly change human behavior, which is what matters, as the whole panorama of history shows.”

Norman Angell (1872–1967) British politician

Peace and the Public Mind (1935)

Peace, Behavior, History, Nature

“Reading lots of Dickens. Barnaby Rudge: the last Catholic pogrom - No Popery, the Gordon Riots in London - 1780, twenty years before Newman was born. He must have known people who had set fire to the houses, or taken in victims and refugees. Lord George Gordon who led the mob (obviously a religious maniac) died as late as 1793. Old Curiosity Shop, Nicholas Nickleby - this too, is part of Newman's background, this gallery of living gargoyles, ghouls and monsters. Might account, perhaps, even for some of Newman's pessimism about the world and human nature, which some attribute merely to his own melancholy disposition? That nineteenth century!!”

Ida Friederike Görres (1901–1971) Austrian writer and noble

Broken Lights Diaries 1955-57.

People, World, Nature, Reading

“And so it went until the alarm was struck in the famous Missouri debate. Then wise men remembered what Washington had said, 'Resist with care the spirit of innovation upon the principles of the Constitution'. They saw that the letting alone was all on one side, that the unfortunate anomaly was deeply scheming to become the rule, and they roused the country. The old American love of liberty flamed out again. Meetings were everywhere held. The lips of young orators burned with the eloquence of freedom. The spirit of John Knox and of Hugh Peters thundered and lightened in the pulpits, and men were not called political preachers because they preached that we are all equal children of God. The legislatures of the free States instructed their representatives to stand fast for liberty. Daniel Webster, speaking for the merchants of Boston, said that it was a question essentially involving the perpetuity of the blessings of liberty for which the Constitution itself was formed. Daniel Webster, speaking for humanity at Plymouth, described the future of the slave as 'a widespread prospect of suffering, anguish, and death'. The land was loud with the debate, and Rufus King stated its substance in saying that it was a question of slave or free policy in the national government. Slavery hissed disunion; liberty smiled disdain. The moment of final trial came. Pinckney exulted. John Quincy Adams shook his head. Slavery triumphed and, with Southern chivalry, politely called victory compromise.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Love, Death, Men, God

“The spread-the-work schemes, in brief, rest on the same sort of illusion that we have been considering. The people who support such schemes think only of the employment they would provide for particular persons or groups; they do not stop to consider what their whole effect would be on everybody.The spread-the-work schemes rest also, as we began by pointing out, on the false assumption that there is just a fixed amount of work to be done. There could be no greater fallacy. There is no limit to the amount of work to be done as long as any human need or wish that work could fill remains unsatisfied. In a modern exchange economy, the most work will be done when prices, costs, and wages are in the best relations to each other.”

Henry Hazlitt book Economics in One Lesson

Economics in One Lesson (1946), Spread-the-Work Schemes (ch. 8)

People, Support, Thinking, Personality

“Every religious, moral, economic, ethical, or other antithesis transforms into a political one if it is sufficiently strong to group human beings effectively according to friend and enemy. The political does not reside in the battle itself, which. possesses its own technical, psychological, and military laws, but in the mode of behavior which is determined by this possibility, by clearly evaluating the concrete situation and thereby being able to distinguish correctly the real friend and the real enemy.”

Carl Schmitt book The Concept of the Political

The Concept of the Political (1927)

Law, Behavior, Strong

“Put forth thy leaf, thou lofty plane,
East wind and frost are safely gone;
With zephyr mild and balmy rain
The summer comes serenely on;
Earth, air, and sun and skies combine
To promise all that’s kind and fair:
But thou, O human heart of mine,
Be still, contain thyself, and bear.”

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) English poet

In a London Square http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/C/CloughArthurHugh/verse/poemsproseremains/londonsquare.html, st. 1.

Sun, Heart, Summer

“Human life will no longer be regarded with the kind of superstitious awe which it is accorded in traditional thought, and the lives of non-humans will no longer be a matter of indifference. This means that human life will, in a sense, be devalued, while the value granted to non-human life will be increased. A revised view of such matters as suicide and euthanasia, as well as a revised view of how we should treat animals, will result.”

James Rachels (1941–2003) American philosopher

Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism (1990), p. 5

Life, Sense, Suicide, Animals

“Before, the wire studies were subjective, portraits, caricatures, stylized representations of beasts and humans. But these recent things have been viewed from a more objective angle and although their present size is diminutive, I feel that there is no limitation to the scale to which they can be enlarged... One of the canons of the futuristic painters, as propounded by Modigliani, was that objects behind other objects should not be lost to view, but should be shown through the others by making the latter transparent. The wire sculpture accomplishes this in a most decided manner.”

Alexander Calder (1898–1976) American artist

1920s, Statement on Wire Sculpture' (1929)

Feeling, Study

“Your recent meetings with Chinese dissidents at the White House are to be commended. However, your participation at the opening ceremony of the Olympics will send a signal to the Chinese people and the international community that could be misperceived as your approval, and that of the American people, for the draconian policies of the Chinese government. Therefore, it is essential that you unambiguously speak out for human rights and meet with the families of jailed prisoners of conscience while you are in Beijing. (In a letter to President Bush prior to his 2008 trip to Beijing's Summer Olympic Games”

Nancy Pelosi (1940) American politician, first female Speaker of the House of Representatives, born 1940

[Pelosi to Bush: It Is Essential That You Speak Out for Human Rights During Visit to China for the Olympics, August 1, 2008, http://web.ebscohost.com/ehost/detail?vid=5&hid=112&sid=e9e82631-01bc-425d-b19f-38189788ba53%40sessionmgr107&bdata=JnNpdGU9ZWhvc3QtbGl2ZQ%3d%3d#db=mth&AN=32X1376858305, 2008-11-08]
2000s

People, Family, Game, Communication

“To expect wickedness from human beings is the best way I know of to avoid surprises. And when I am surprised, it’s always pleasantly.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Source: The Tales of Alvin Maker, Heartfire (1998), Chapter 7.

Way

“How incomprehensible is woman's love! —it is not kindness that wins it, nor return that insures it; we daily see the most devoted attachment lavished on those who seem to us singularly unworthy. The Spectator shewed his usual knowledge of human nature, when, in speaking on this subject, he relates, that in a town besieged by the enemy, on the women being allowed to depart with whatever they held most precious, only one among them carried off her husband,—a man notorious for his tyrannical temper, and who had, moreover, a bad—or, as it turned out, a good—habit of beating his wife every morning. Well, all governments are maintained by fear—fear being our great principle of action; and fear, we are tempted to believe, heightens and strengthens the love of woman.”

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

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Love, Women, Fear, Nature

“I know that men ain't supposed to cry, but I think that's wrong. Crying's always been a way for me to get things out which are buried deep, deep down. When I sing, I often cry. Crying is feeling, and feeling is being human.”

Ray Charles (1930–2004) American musician

First years at School, p. 25
Brother Ray : Ray Charles' Own Story (1978)

Men, Way, Feeling, Thinking

“What the world calls virtue is a name and a dream without Christ. The foundation of all human excellence must be laid deep in the blood of the Redeemer's cross, and in the power of His resurrection.”

Frederick William Robertson (1816–1853) British writer and theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 612.

World, Dreams, Christ

“Culture, when it loses its sacred sense, loses all sense. With the disappearance of the sacred, which imposed limits to the perfection which could be attained by the profane, arises one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilization—the illusion that there are no limits to the changes that human life can undergo, that society is 'in principle' an endlessly flexible thing, and that to deny this flexibility and this perfectibility is to deny man's total autonomy and thus to deny man himself.”

Leszek Kolakowski (1927–2009) Philosopher, historian of ideas

"The Revenge of the Sacred in Secular Culture" (1973)

Life, Sense, Change, Perfection

“It’s early in the process for me, but my infatuation with fame is waning, my need for external approval and the control of other people’s opinions is expiring. Practically I’ve decided that profits from this book will go towards creating a place where recovering addicts like me can run a business based on the ideas in this book. A café and production company run to create community, not money, democratically managed by the workforce. No bosses. No profit. No bullshit. Selling food sourced ethically, grown locally, and served by people who have had a Revolution in their own lives and are now able to learn and give back. Supporting modest creative projects, building a community of people who want to be part of something other than the toxic hegemony. We will start small but we will grow quickly because we have a limitless resource and we are providing an alternative to a dying system. There are no limits to what we can achieve if we behave collectively, responsibly, and humanely.”

Russell Brand book Revolution

Revolution (2014)

Money, People, Books, Food

“We have seen how types of organization, of law, and of consciousness come together into more comprehensive wholes, the forms of social life. These forms of social life, exemplified in my essay by tribal, liberal, and aristocratic society and then again by the varieties of modernity, are the most general types available to social theory. Each of them represents a unique interpretation of what it means to be human. Each confronts its individual members with the recurring demands of human existence, but each presents these in a special way and limits the resources of matter and thought thst can be used to meet them. Perhaps the most pervasive of these continuing problems have to do with the antagonism between the requirements of human individuality and of human sociability, and with the attempt either to subordinate one to the other or to reconcile the two.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger (1947) Brazilian philosopher and politician

Source: Law in Modern Societyː Toward a Criticism of Social Theory (1976), p. 259-260

Life, Law, Way, Problem

“To truly teach is to instill the values and knowledge which promote the common good and protect a society from the folly of historical amnesia. The utilitarian, corporate ideology embraced by the system of standardized tests and leadership academies has no time for the nuances and moral ambiguities inherent in a liberal arts education. Corporatism is about the cult of the self. It is about personal enrichment and profit as the sole aim of human existence. And those who do not conform are pushed aside.”

Chris Hedges (1956) American journalist

“Why the United States Is Destroying Its Education System” (2011)

Education, Art, Knowledge, Time

“I have the responsibility to let the people know what happened to me, and did I commit the crime or if I didn’t, what is the real accusation? Why am I in this condition today? I think it reflects our human condition in this piece of land, and if I don’t bear some responsibility.... many, many people, their voice can never be heard.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, You’re There but You’re Not Existing, 2012

People, Thinking

“Human opinions are formed by accident and hardened by repetition. We cling to acquired opinions only because they give the illusion of being wise opinions. This creates division and hostility between people.”

Vernon Howard (1918–1992) American writer

Pathways to Perfect Living

Hostility, People

“For nearly four decades I placed some ideation, some ideal, some abstraction, before personal love, foolishly - inhumanly - believing that some cause, some goal, some ideology, was the most important thing and therefore that, in the interests of achieving that cause, that goal, implementing that ideology, one's own personal life, one's feelings, and those of others, should and must come at least second if not further down in some lifeless manufactured schemata. My pursuit of such things - often by violent means and by incitement to violence and to disaffection - led, of course, not only to me being the cause of suffering to other human beings I did not personally know but also to being the cause of suffering to people I did know; to family, to friends, and especially to those - wives, partners, lovers - who for some reason loved me. In effect I was selfish, obsessed, a fanatic, an extremist. Naturally, as extremists always do, I made excuses - to others, to myself - for my unfeeling, suffering-causing, intolerant, violent, behaviour and actions; always believing that 'I could make a difference' and always blaming some-thing else, or someone else, for the problems I alleged existed 'in the world' and which problems I claimed, I felt, I believed, needed to be sorted out […] Yet the honest, the obvious, truth was that I - and people like me or those who supported, followed, or were incited, inspired, by people like me - were and are the problem.”

David Myatt (1950) British writer

Source: Letter To My Undiscovered Self (2012) http://www.davidmyatt.info/letter-to-self.html

Love, Life, People, Truth

“With the passage of time, whatever a man had done, whether for good or evil, with the man's bodily organs, left the man's parish unaffected: only a man's thoughts and dreams could outlive him, in any serious sense, and these might survive with perhaps augmenting influence: so that Kennaston had come to think artistic creation in words — since marble and canvas inevitably perished — was the one, possibly, worth-while employment of human life. But here was a crude corporal deed which bluntly destroyed thoughts, and annihilated dreams by wholesale. To Kennaston this seemed the one real tragedy that could be staged on earth….”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 24 : Deals with Pen Scratches

Life, Dreams, Thinking, Sense

“To people off alone, as we were, there is something stirring about finding evidences of human labour and care in the soil of an empty country. It comes to you as a sort of message, makes you feel differently about the ground you walk over every day.”

Willa Cather book The Professor's House

Book II, Ch. 2
The Professor's House (1925)

People, Feeling, Country

“The spark within is akin to the Divine Ground. By identifying ourselves with the first we can come to unitive knowledge of the second. These empirical facts of the spiritual life have been variously rationalized in terms of the theologies of the various religions. The Hindus categorically affirm that Thou art That — that the indwelling Atman is the same as Brahman. For orthodox Christianity there is not an identity between the spark and God. Union of the human spirit with God takes place — union so complete that the word deification is applied to it; but it is not the union of identical substances. According to Christian theology, the saint is “deified,” not because Atman is Brahman, but because God has assimilated the purified human spirit in to the divine substance by an act of grace. Islamic theology seems to make a similar distinction. The Sufi, Mansur, was executed for giving to the words “union” and “deification” the literal meaning which they bear in the Hindu tradition. For our present purposes, however, the significant fact is that these words are actually used by Christians and Mohammedans to describe the empirical facts of metaphysical realization by means of direct, super-rational intuition.”

Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) English writer

Introduction to the Bhagavad-Gita (1944)

Life, God, Religion, Art

“Human nature is not simple and any classification that roughly divides men into good and bad, superior and inferior, slave and free, is and must be ludicrously untrue and universally dangerous as a permanent exhaustive classification.”

W.E.B. Du Bois (1868–1963) American sociologist, historian, activist and writer

Source: The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois (2003), p. 10

Men, Nature, Universe

“This contest has lasted now for more than four years. Were its scene at a distance from our neighborhood, we might be indifferent to its result, although humanity could not be unmoved by many of its incidents wherever they might occur. It is, however, at our door.”

Ulysses S. Grant (1822–1885) 18th President of the United States

1870s, Fourth State of the Union Address (1872)

Indifference

“I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change…The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful.”

James E. Lovelock (1919) independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist

Interview with The Guardian (29 March 2010)

Thinking, Change

“It is ridiculous to suppose that the great head of things, whatever it be, pays any regard to human affairs.”

Pliny the Elder book Natural History

Book II, sec. 20.
Naturalis Historia

“Social work as a profession is of relatively recent origin. The first social welfare agencies appeared in urban areas in the early 1800s. These agencies, or services, were private and were developed primarily at the initiation of the clergy and religious groups. Until the early 1900s, these services were provided exclusively by the clergy and affluent “do-gooders” who had no formal training and little understanding of human behavior or of how to help people. The focus of these private services was on meeting such basic physical needs as food and shelter and on attempting to cure emotional and personal difficulties with religious admonitions.”

Charles Zastrow (1942) American sociologist

Source: The practice of social work. (1995), p. 1; On the history of social work

People, Food, Behavior, Understanding

“We have time travel," she said, "and none of us, I am sure, really understands it. We stole it from the Infinites. To steal time travel was the one way we could fight back, the one way we could flee. The human race had far space travel before the Infinites showed up. I think it was our far travel that aroused the interest of the Infinites in us. I've often wondered if some of the very primitive principles of time might not have made our many-times-faster-than-light travel possible. Time is somehow tied into space, but I have never known quite how.”

Clifford D. Simak Highway of Eternity

Highway of Eternity (1986)

Way, Travel, Understanding, Thinking

“With each pattern, small piecework is standardized into a larger chunk or unit. Patterns become the building blocks for design and construction. Finding and applying patterns indicates progress in a field of human endeavor.”

Peter Coad (1953) American software entrepreneur

Source: Object-oriented patterns. (1992), p. 152

“A form of recreation not so accesible to many as games, but one which has in it a peculiar hold on that which is elemental in human nature, is hunting and fishing. These are true outdoor sports in the highest sense, and must be pursued in a way that develops energy, perseverance, skill, and courage of the individual. They call for personal direction, and can not be taken up vicariously. There is a great wealth of life and experience in this field which is never exhausted, and always fresh and new. It is accompanied by traits of character which make a universal appeal. A knowledge of these arts may well be cultivated and cherished like a knowledge of the humanities and the sciences. Around hunting and fishing is gathered a great wealth of prose and poetry, which testifies to the enduring interest which these sports have held all through the development of the race.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, The Democracy of Sports (1924)

Life, Art, Way, Game

“Compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us with firm and cheerful trust endure all trials, discharge all duties, accept all sacrifices, fulf1ll the law of universal and impartial love, and adopt as our own that cause of truth, righteousness, humanity, liberty, and holiness, — which being the cause of the All-Good, cannot but triumph over all powers of evil. Let us rise into blest assurance that everywhere and forever we are enfolded, penetrated, guarded, guided, kept by the power of the Father and Friend, who can never forsake us; and that all spirits who have begun to seek, know, love, and serve the All-Perfect One on earth shall be reunited in a celestial home, and be welcomed together into the freedom of the universe, and the perpetual light of His presence.”

William Ellery Channing (1780–1842) United States Unitarian clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 17

Love, Truth, Law, Home

“I think that to all living things there is a pleasure in the exercise of their energies, and that even beasts rejoice in being lithe and swift and strong. But a man at work, making something which he feels will exist because he is working at it and wills it, is exercising the energies of his mind and soul as well as of his body. Memory and imagination help him as he works. Not only his own thoughts, but the thoughts of the men of past ages guide his hands; and, as a part of the human race, he creates. If we work thus we shall be men, and our days will be happy and eventful.”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

Signs of Change (1888), Useful Work versus Useless Toil

Men, Happiness, Pleasure, Age

““Nothing is sacred to you, Mr. Munro. You base your beliefs on the products of human thought, so it could hardly be otherwise. You might believe in certain things, but you do not have faith. That comes with submission to the force of divine revelation.”
“So, because I don’t have what I think of as superstitions, because I believe we just happen to exist, and believe in… science, evolution, whatever; I’m not as… worthy as somebody who has faith in an ancient book and a cruel, desert God?””

Iain Banks (1954–2013) Scottish writer

“Piece” (p. 73)
Short fiction, The State of the Art (1991)

God, Books, Faith, Thinking

“The combination of low culture and high technology is one of the most fascinating social features of the video game phenomenon. Computers were invented as super drones to do tasks no human in her or his right mind (much less left brain) would have the patience, or the perseverance, to manage. […] Now our robot drones, the ones designed to take all the boring jobs, become the instrument for libidinal extravaganzas devoid of any socially productive component. Video games are computers neutered of purpose, liberated from functionality. The idea is intoxicating; like playing with the help on their night off.”

Charles Bernstein (1950) American writer

"Play It Again, Pac-Man" http://pmc.iath.virginia.edu/text-only/issue.991/pop-cult.991, Postmodern Culture, vol. 2 no. 1 (September 1991)

Game, Idea, Help, Patience

“Never was the Church blessed with a stranger ally than this freest of free thinkers, who looked at churches very much as he would have looked at a layer of extinct oysters in a buried mud-bank. Strong's notion was that since the Church continued to exist, it probably served some necessary purpose in human economy, though he could himself no more understand the good of it than he could comprehend the use of human existence in any shape. Since men and women were here, idiotic and purposeless as they might be, they had what they chose to call a right to amuse themselves in their own way, and if this way made some happy without hurting others, Strong was ready enough to help.”

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

Source: Esther: A Novel (1884), Ch. VIII

Women, Men, Happiness, Way

“I will not weary you with the proof of this. James Madison, who knew perhaps as well as any one what the makers of the Constitution meant, said, 'We intend this Constitution to be the great charter of Human Liberty to the unborn millions who shall enjoy its protection, and who should never see that such an institution as slavery was ever known in our midst'. And the Congress of 1787, in resigning its functions, echoed the meaning of his words in saying, 'Let it never be forgotten that the cause of the United States is the cause of human nature — not of white men nor black men nor red men nor brown men — but of man, of mankind.”

George William Curtis (1824–1892) American writer

1850s, The Present Aspect of the Slavery Question (1859)

Men, Nature

“The fact of the modern national States or empires not having originated organically does not prevent their being organs of that great entity which we call civilised humanity, and which is much too extensive to be included in any single State. And, indeed, these organs are at present necessary and of great importance for human development. On this point Socialists can scarcely differ now. And it is not even to be regretted, from the Socialist point of view, that they are not characterised purely by their common descent. The purely ethnological national principle is reactionary in its results. Whatever else one may think about the race-problem, it is certain that the thought of a national division of mankind according to race is anything rather than a human ideal. The national quality is developing on the contrary more and more into a sociological function. But understood as such it is a progressive principle, and in this sense Socialism can and must be national. This is no contradiction of the cosmopolitan consciousness, but only its necessary completion, The world-citizenship, this glorious attainment of civilisation, would, if the relationship to national tasks and rational duties were missing, become a flabby characterless parasitism. Even when we sing "Ubi bene, ibi patria," we still acknowledge a "patria," and, therefore, in accordance with the motto, "No rights without duties"; also duties towards her.”

Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932) German politician

Bernstein, Eduard. "Patriotism, Militarism and Social-Democracy." (Originally published as: "Militarism." Social Democrat. Vol.11 no.7, 15 July 1907, pp.413-419.) http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/works/1907/07/patriotism.htm

World, Problem, Thinking, Sense

“If greater-than-human artificial general intelligence is invented without due caution, it is all but certain that the human species will be extinct in very short order.”

Michael Vassar (1979) President of the Singularity Institute

Quoted in Patrick Caughill, "Another Expert Joins Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk in Warning About the Dangers of AI" https://futurism.com/2-expert-thinks-ai-will-undoubtably-wipe-out-humanity/, February 2017

Intelligence

“When there is not enough religion in the pulpit to organize a crusade against sin; nor justice in the court house to promptly punish crime; nor manhood enough in the nation to put a sheltering arm about innocence and virtue----if it needs lynching to protect woman's dearest possession from the ravening human beasts----then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary.”

Rebecca Latimer Felton (1835–1930) American politician

August 11, 1897

Religion, Justice, Time, Housing

“Shan had always said that in any multiple choice about human motivation, the real answer was always "all of the above."”

John Barnes book Earth Made of Glass

Earth Made of Glass (1998)

Motivation

Quotes about humanity page 76

Quotes about humanity
page 76