Quotes about humanity
page 82

“Whoever hasn’t yet arrived at the clear realization that there might be a greatness existing entirely outside his own sphere and for which he might have absolutely no feeling; whoever hasn’t at least felt obscure intimations concerning the approximate location of this greatness in the geography of the human spirit: that person either has no genius in his own sphere, or else he hasn’t been educated to the level of the classic.”

Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel (1772–1829) German poet, critic and scholar

Lucinde and the Fragments, P. Firchow, trans. (1991), “Critical Fragments,” § 36

Education, Feeling, Personality

“Adieu, the city's ceaseless hum,
The haunts of sensual life, adieu!
Green fields, and silent glens we come,
To spend this bright spring-day with you.Whether the hills and vales shall gleam
With beauty, is for us to choose;
For leaf and blossom, rock and stream,
Are coloured with the spirit's hues.Here, to the seeking soul, is brought
A nobler view of human fate,
And higher feeling, higher thought,
And glimpses of a higher state.Through change of time, on sea and shore,
Serenely nature smiles away;
Yon infinite blue sky bends o'er
Our world, as at the primal day.The self-renewing earth is moved
With youthful life each circling year;
And flowers that Ceres' daughter loved
At Enna, now are blooming here.Glad nature will this truth reveal,
That God is ours and we are His.
O friends, my friends! what joy to feel
That He our loving Father is!”

James Aldrich (1810–1856) American editor and minor poet

A Spring-Day Walk.

Love, Life, God, Fate

“"And here's some legislation: Thank the good lord that this passed before the break for vaycay. No cloning! No cloning! Urgent! Big red rubber stamper! Let's get this out of the way! Let's deal with this! The no cloning issue. Uhm, I wasn't really worried about it. I don't know about anybody else, but it really wasn't keeping me up nights. I think I'll worry about it when we finally get our jetpacks and our food pills for five course meals. I think then we'll deal with that because I think during Roddenberry times we were promised those two things and I haven't seen them, but just in case that wasn't enough for you, for Congress to get involved, the Vatican had something to say about it. The Vatican Counsel met, and I took this out of the New York Times, here's what they said after a big meeting, " 'Human cloning would not lead to identical souls because only God can create a soul,' a panel set up by Pope John Paul has concluded." Right on! They also took care of a couple other things that were burning issues. Apparently Trix are indeed for kids, and one other thing. After much deliberation it has been decided that no you cannot tackle the kid after he releases the ball in Smear The Queer. Can't do it. So we got that out of the way."”

Janeane Garofalo (1964) comedian, actress, political activist, writer

self-titled TV comedy special, 1997
Standup routines

God, Food, Way, Soul

“Projects for integral human development cannot ignore coming generations, but need to be marked by solidarity and inter-generational justice”

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

2009, Cartias in Vertitate (29 June 2009)

Justice

“Cargo. They were cargo. I think it started the day I first saw the Totenlager in Treblinka. I remember Wirth standing there, next to the pits full of blue-black corpses. It had nothing to do with humanity-it couldn't have; it was a mass-a mass of rotting flesh. Wirth said, 'What shall we do with this garbage?”

Franz Stangl (1908–1971) Austrian-born SS officer, commandant at first Sobibór extermination camp and then Treblinka extermination c…

I think unconsciously that started me thinking of them as cargo.
About the victims. Quoted in "Good and Evil After Auschwitz: Ethical Implications for Today" - Page 96 - by Jack Bemporad, John Pawlikowski, Joseph Sievers - History - 2000.

Thinking

“Only humans have the ability to know that God exists, yet still deny His existence.”

Ray Comfort (1949) New Zealand-born Christian minister and evangelist

You Can Lead an Atheist to Evidence, But You Can't Make Him Think (2009)

God

“Let none think that there is no more knowledge for them to gain. The depth of human intellect may be measured; the works of human authors may be mastered; but the highest, deepest, broadest flight of the imagination cannot find out God. There is infinity beyond all that we can comprehend. We have seen only the glimmering of divine glory and of the infinitude of knowledge and wisdom; we have, as it were, been working on the surface of the mine, when rich golden ore is beneath the surface, to reward the one who will dig for it.”

Ellen G. White book Christ's Object Lessons

Source: Christ's Object Lessons (1900), Ch. 8, p. 114

Wisdom, God, Imagination, Knowledge

“The one irreducible truth about humanity is diversity.”

Martin Firrell (1963) British artist and activist

"The One Irreducible Truth about Humanity" (2005)

Truth

“Circumcision is startling, all right, particularly when performed by a garlicked old man upon the glory of a newborn body, but then maybe that’s what the Jews had in mind and what makes the act seem quintessentially Jewish and the mark of their reality. Circumcision makes it clear as can be that you are here and not there, that you are out and not in — also that you’re mine and not theirs…. Quite convincingly, circumcision gives the lie to the womb-dream of life in the beautiful state of innocent prehistory, the appealing idyll of living "naturally," unencumbered by man-made ritual. To be born is to lose all that. The heavy hand of human values falls upon you right at the start, marking your genitals as its own.”

Philip Roth book The Counterlife

Source: The Counterlife (1986), Ch. 5

Life, Lie, Beauty, Dreams

“I do not tolerate the so-called "cultic" (or ego-made, and ego-reinforcing) approach to Me. I do not tolerate the seeking ego's "cult" of the "man in the middle". I am not a self-deluded ego-man—making much of himself, and looking to include everyone-and-everything around himself for the sake of social and political power. To be the "man in the middle" is to be in a Man-made trap, an absurd mummery of "cultic" devices that enshrines and perpetuates the ego-"I" in one and all. Therefore, I do not make or tolerate the religion-making "cult" of ego-Man. I do not tolerate the inevitable abuses of religion, of Spirituality, of Truth Itself, and of My own Person (even in bodily human Form) that are made (in endless blows and mockeries) by ego-based mankind when the Great Esoteric Truth of devotion to the Adept-Realizer is not rightly understood and rightly practiced.”

Adi Da Samraj (1939–2008) American writer

http://www.adidam.org/teaching/first_word/complete_text.html

Truth, Religion, Personality

“Seeking unceasingly for the First Cause of All,
in question for what special purpose he was made,
Man, in the unsearchable darkness, knoweth one thing:
that as he is, so was he made; and if the Essence
and characteristic faculty of humanity
is our conscient Reason and our desire of knowledge,
that was Nature's Purpose in the making of man.”

Robert Seymour Bridges (1844–1930) British writer

The Testament of Beauty (1929-1930)

Question, Nature, Knowledge

“Only when the stock of wealth can be related to human energy by purchasing living energy as "labor power", offered for sale by people who have no other means of using their labor to ensure their livelihood: and only when it can relate that labor power to purchased machines - embodiments of past transformation of nature by human energy expended in the past - only then does "wealth" become "capital."”

Eric Wolf (1923–1999) American anthropologist

Source: Europe and the People Without History, 1982, Chapter 10, Crises and Differentiation in Capitalism, p. 298.

People, Nature, Past, Wealth

“There is no way to sort-of compartmentalise human liberty into "okay, I have social liberty and I have economic freedom." No, they're the same thing. You have— If you don't have economic freedom, you don't have personal liberty, and vice versa, if you don't have personal liberty, you don't have economic freedom, either.”

Glenn Jacobs (1967) American professional wrestler and actor

06:17&#8211;06:34. "WWE Wrestler Kane Talks Libertarianism, and His Heroes" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpqUIwu8nuc (2013)

Way, Freedom, Personality

“We will worship by impromptu symbols, till the religion is framed for all Humanity. The beauty grows around us daily, the trees are now all in blossom and some of the vines; there is a Crown Imperial just in perfection, to which I paid my evening worship by the light of the fire, which reached to us, and there are flashes of lightening too. But I do not like the lightening so well as once, having been in too great danger. Yet just now a noble flash falls upon my paper, it ought to have noble thoughts to illumine, instead of these little nothings, but indeed to-night I write only to say: thou dear, dear friend, and we must must meet soon.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Letter IV to James Nathan (March 1845).
The Love Letters Of Margaret Fuller (1903)

Religion, Beauty, Tree, Light

“The retrieval process begins when a lack of information shows itself in a human mind and the decision is taken to ﬁnd out if this information has been discovered and published”

Douglas John Foskett (1918–2004)

Source: Classification and indexing in the social sciences (1963), p. 86; As cited in: Mei Hong (2006, p. 44)

Decision

“Cicero’s style is a key to the success of De officiis, and not just the literary style, but the political and intellectual style. Regulus aside, the demands of duty generally stretch only as far as the well-educated, well-to-do man is likely to follow. Thus, he insists, in a famous metaphor that Machiavelli later stood on its head, that courage is necessary but the courage of a human being is not the ferocity of the lion, just as wisdom is necessary but the intelligence of the human being is not the cunning of the fox.”

Alan Ryan (1940) British philosopher

On Politics: A History of Political Thought: From Herodotus to the Present (2012), Ch. 4 : Roman Insights: Polybius and Cicero

Wisdom, Education, Intelligence, Courage

“If I say, "I am a monk." or "I am a Buddhist," these are, in comparison to my nature as a human being, temporary. To be human is basic.”

Tenzin Gyatso (1935) spiritual leader of Tibet

"Kindness and Compassion" p. 47.
The Dalai Lama: A Policy of Kindness (1990)

Nature

“Cultural theory as we have it promises to grapple with some fundamental problems, but on the whole fails to deliver. It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals and foundations, and superficial about truth, objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on. It is also, as we have suggested before, rather an awkward moment in history to find oneself with little or nothing to say about such fundamental questions.”

Terry Eagleton (1943) British writer, academic and educator

2000s, After Theory (2003)

Love, Death, Truth, Religion

“We meet here to express our deep resentment at the claim made by South Africa though its governments and parliaments since the union, to determine and shape our destiny without consulting our wishes, and arrogantly to assign us a position of permanent inferiority in our land, contrary to the plan and purpose of God our Creator, who created "all men equal." And into us too, not to whites only, He breathed the divine spirit of human dignity. And so we have every human and moral right to resist laws and policies which create a climate inimical to the full development of our personalities as individuals, and our development as a people.”

Albert Lutuli (1898–1967) South African politician

July 11, 1954.
Resist apartheid! (1954)

Men, God, People, Law

“Liberty (or freedom) is the absence of coercion by other human beings.”

John Hospers (1918–2011) American philosopher and politician

Source: Libertarianism: A Political Philosophy for Tomorrow, (1971), p. 10

Freedom

“ONAELIA: One step to human bliss is sweet revenge.”

Thomas Dekker The Noble Spanish Soldier

The Noble Spanish Soldier (1622)

Revenge

“I was filled with joy when studying quantum physics at the university as a means to understand the universe. But at the same time, I was preoccupied with the oppressive conditions in my country and the tyranny suffered by our universities, intellectuals, and the media. Like many others in our universities, I felt compelled to join the struggle for freedom. What we experience is a decades-old tyranny, that cannot tolerate freedom of speech and thought. In the name of religion, it restricts and punishes science, intellect, and even love. It labels as a threat to national security and toxic to society whatever is not compatible with its political and economic interests. It considers punishing unwelcome ideas as a positive thing. It does not tolerate differences of opinion; it responds to logic not by logic, discussion or dialog, but by suppression. By tyranny I mean a ruling power that tries to make only one voice—the voice of a ruling minority in Iran—dominant, with no regard for pluralism in the society. By tyranny I mean a judiciary that disregards even the Islamic Republic’s own constitution, and sentences intellectuals, writers, journalists, and political and civil activists to long prison terms, without due process and trial in a court of law. … By tyranny I mean power-holders who believe they stand above the law and who disregard justice and the urgent demands of the human conscience.”

Narges Mohammadi (1972) Iranian human rights activist

Letter Accepting 2018 Andrei Sakharov Prizefrom (2018)

Love, Religion, Justice, Law

“Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body like robins or bison or maybe you believe love is how forces or nature or luck is benign to you in particular not maiming or killing you but if so doing it for your own good. Love is none of that. There is nothing in nature like it. Not in robins or bison or in the banging tails of your hunting dogs and not in blossoms or suckling foal. Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn - by practice and careful contemplations - the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God-carefully. And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. A diploma conferring certain privileges: the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it. How do you know you have graduated? You don't. What you do know is that you are human and therefore educable, and therefore capable of learning how to learn, and therefore interesting to God, who is interested only in Himself which is to say He is interested only in love. Do you understand me? God is not interested in you. He is interested in love and the bliss it brings to those who understand and share the interest. Couples that enter the sacrament of marriage and are not prepared to go the distance or are not willing to get right with the real love of God cannot thrive. They may cleave together like robins or gulls or anything else that mates for life. But if they eschew this mighty course, at the moment when all are judged for the disposition of their eternal lives, their cleaving won't mean a thing. God bless the pure and holy. Amen.”

Toni Morrison book Paradise

Paradise (1997)

Love, Life, God, Marriage

“Thus our duties to animals are indirectly duties to humanity.”

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German philosopher

Part II, p. 213
Lectures on Ethics (1924)

Animals

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "press on" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”

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

Quote from a program at a Coolidge memorial service (1933); cited in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1999). The passage did not originate with Coolidge, but evolved over several decades, appearing as early as 1881 in a youth guidance book. From [Garson O’Toole, https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/01/12/persist/, Purpose and Persistence Are Required for Success: Unrewarded Genius Is Almost a Proverb, Quote Investigator, January 12, 2016]
1930s

Men, World, Education, Problem

“Freedom is not an abstraction, nor is a little of it enough. A little more of it is not enough either. Having less, being less, impoverished in freedom and rights, women then inevitably have less self-respect: less self-respect than men have and less self-respect than any human being needs to live a brave and honest life. Intercourse as domination battens of that awful absence of self respect.”

Andrea Dworkin book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 7

Life, Women, Men, Freedom

“The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.”

John Buchan (1875–1940) British politician

Montrose and Leadership (1930), p 24; republished in Men and Deeds (1977)

Leadership

“In Luther's writings concerning Law and Gospel, he had already observed concerning the phrase, "I am Yahweh your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.." "This is purest Gospel." In other words, the structure of the Christian faith is identical to that of the original biblical covenant, and both are similar to the ways of thinking in ecumenical world politics at the time of Moses: that obedience to a set of stipulations is the required result of gratitude for benefits that have already been received. It is a matter of cause and effect, not simply an arbitrary command.This is the structure of the original Old Testament and of New Testament religious ethics. This contrasts in the sharpest possible way to the attitudes and tactics of far too many religious zealots of the present world, who are determined to use the force of law to compel people to act in accordance with their concept of divine commands. This in turn is one of the major causes of the widespread antipathy to religion that is growing in the modern world, and of the desecration of the name of God.Thus, the misunderstanding of ancient covenants has led to the distortion of the ten commitments of faith into commandments, usually of some human authority.”

George E. Mendenhall (1916–2016) American academic

Our Misunderstood Bible (2006)

God, People, World, Faith

“No chronology of Soviet atrocities can convey the crushing of the human spirit under Lenin and his successors. But the retelling of 70 years of grisly facts leaves little doubt that what we face today in Soviet communism is, indeed, an 'evil empire.”

Michael Johns (1964) American businessman

Seventy Years of Evil: Soviet Crimes from Lenin to Gorbachev," Policy Review, Fall 1987, by Michael Johns: In the former Soviet Union, we face an 'Evil Empire'

Communication, Evil

“The English Channel is the perfect stretch of water to truly test the human mind.”

Lewis Pugh (1969) Environmental campaigner, maritime lawyer and endurance swimmer

25 November 2011, Twitter
Speaking & Features

Water, Perfection

“The individual, his character, and his fate are for real. Each individual is different from every other individual who has ever lived or who will ever live. A human life is a dramatic and irreversible movement from birth to death, surrounded by mystery and overshadowed by chance.”

Roberto Mangabeira Unger book The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound

Source: The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound (2007), p. 18

Life, Death, Fate, Birth

“We want to find [life]. Absolutely. And even now it's really disappointing when you think that, if there is extraterrestrial life, it’s probably bacteria and microbial life. Because you want Star Wars. I want to meet Spock. I think that, as intellectual beings, we fantasize about meeting other intellects similar to our own. It's just a basic human desire.”

Claudia Alexander (1959–2015) American geophysicist and planetary scientist

Life, War, Disappointment, Star

“Jesus was not divine because he was less human than his fellowmen but for the opposite reason that he was supremely human, and it is this of which his divinity consists, the fullness and perfection of him as an intellectual, moral and spiritual human being.”

Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) American labor and political leader

Jesus, the Supreme Leader (1914)

Perfection

“Is it reasonable to think that Morocco respects human rights in the north of the country and transgresses them in the south?”

Mohammed VI of Morocco (1963) King of Morocco

Original French: En effet, est-il raisonnable de penser que le Maroc respecte les droits de l'Homme dans le nord du pays et les transgresse dans le sud ? Televised speech–6 November 2013 http://www.maroc.ma/fr/discours-royaux/discours-de-sm-le-roi-loccasion-du-38eme-anniversaire-de-la-marche-verte

Thinking, Country

“Brethren, let me close with a note of buoyant optimism and also a word of caution that masonry is not always on trial, but we, as Masons, are perpetually on trial. Let us remind ourselves that Masonry represents Manhood at its best and let me venture to express the hope that in building the City of Fraternity or what W. M Mallaradya more appropriately calls it, the Ideal Temple of Humanity and in fostering its growth, we shall be able to qualify ourselves to be men of true enlightenment, character, integrity, gentility and sympathetic understanding and Masons with a burning desire to dedicate ourselves to the service of humanity in our own limited sphere of activity.”

Jayachamarajendra Wadiyar (1919–1974) Indian writer

In his address to the members of the Masonic Fraternity on the occassion of his joining as member of the Masonic Lodge. quoted in "Article # 14 Initiate responds to his Toast R.W.Bro. Jaya Chamaraja Wadeyar".

Men, Hope, Optimism, Understanding

“Another explanation for the persistence of the paranormal, I submit, is due to the transcendental temptation. In my book by that name, I present the thesis that paranormal and religious phenomena have similar functions in human experience; they are expressions of a tendency to accept magical thinking. This temptation has such profound roots within human experience and culture that it constantly reasserts itself.”

Paul Kurtz (1925–2012) American professor of philosophy

Source: The Skeptical Inquirer, Vol. 25, (2001), p. 47

Books, Thinking

“Odious ideas are not entitled to hide from criticism behind the human shield of their believers' feelings.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

"Sayings" at Richard Stallman's personal site (c. 2001)
2000s

Feeling, Idea

“Mathematics, from the earliest times to which the history of human reason can reach, has followed, among that wonderful people of the Greeks, the safe way of science. But it must not be supposed that it was as easy for mathematics as for logic, in which reason is concerned with itself alone, to find, or rather to make for itself that royal road. I believe, on the contrary, that there was a long period of tentative work (chiefly still among the Egyptians), and that the change is to be ascribed to a revolution, produced by the happy thought of a single man, whose experiments pointed unmistakably to the path that had to be followed, and opened and traced out for the most distant times the safe way of a science. The history of that intellectual revolution, which was far more important than the passage round the celebrated Cape of Good Hope, and the name of its fortunate author, have not been preserved to us. … A new light flashed on the first man who demonstrated the properties of the isosceles triangle (whether his name was Thales or any other name), for he found that he had not to investigate what he saw hi the figure, or the mere concepts of that figure, and thus to learn its properties; but that he had to produce (by construction) what he had himself, according to concepts a priori, placed into that figure and represented in it, so that, in order to know anything with certainty a priori, he must not attribute to that figure anything beyond what necessarily follows from what he has himself placed into it, in accordance with the concept.”

Immanuel Kant book Critique of Pure Reason

Preface to the Second Edition [Tr. F. Max Müller], (New York, 1900), p. 690; as cited in: Robert Edouard Moritz, Memorabilia mathematica or, The philomath's quotation-book https://openlibrary.org/books/OL14022383M/Memorabilia_mathematica, Published 1914. p. 10 Critique of Pure Reason (1781; 1787)

Happiness, People, Hope, Way

“It is therefore necessary to prepare the imminent and inevitable identification of man with the motor, facilitating and perfecting an incessant exchange of intuition, rhythm, instinct and metallic discipline, quite utterly unknown to the majority of humanity and only divined by the most lucid mind.”

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876–1944) Italian poet and editor, founder of the Futurist movement

1910's, Multiplied Man and the Reign of the Machine' 1911
Source: Günter Berghaus (2000) International Futurism in Arts and Literature. p. 318

Perfection

“A tiny blue dot set in a sunbeam. Here it is. That's where we live. That's home. We humans are one species and this is our world. It is our responsibility to cherish it. Of all the worlds in our solar system, the only one so far as we know, graced by life.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

58 min 56 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Traveller's Tales [Episode 6]

Life, World, Home

“Humanity has been around for at least some 5,000 years or so, and I doubt that the basic challenges it has confronted are any worse now, or, alas, even much different, from what they ever were.”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart graduation commencement speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJSOOYx6wYM, . 2010s

“In the summer camp mentality of American universities, the ferocity of genuine intellectual debate would just seem like spoiling everyone’s fun. Ambitious humanities professors go about the business behind a brick wall of “theory,” which they imagine is the dernier cri, but which has long been out of fashion, even in Paris. Drab, uncultivated philistines, without broad knowledge of the arts, have seized the top jobs in the Ivy League, simply because they have the right opinions and know the right people. In the past twenty years, conferences became the infernal engine driving the academic profession. The conference crowd, an international party circuit of literary luminaries ever on the move, was put together by the new humanities centers. These programs had the initially laudable aim of fostering interdisciplinary exchanges outside the repressive framework of the conservative, static and over-tenured university departments. But the epidemic of French theory was abroad in the world. The humanities centers quickly became careerist stockyards, where greedy speculation and insider trading were as much the rules of the game as on Wall Street.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), p. 101

People, World, Art, Imagination

“I should be inexcusable, considering the share I have formerly had in that unhappy business, if, upon this occasion, I should omit to mention the African slave-trade. I do not rank this amongst our national sins, because I hope, and believe, a very great majority of the nation earnestly long for its suppression. But, hitherto, petty and partial interest prevail against the voice of justice, humanity and truth. This enormity, however, is not sufficiently laid to heart. If you are justly shocked by what you hear of the cruelties practised in France, you would, perhaps, be shocked much more, if you could fully conceive of the evils and miseries inseparable from this traffic, which I apprehend, not from hearsay, but from my own observation, are equal in atrocity, and, perhaps superior in number, in the course of a single year, to any or all the worst actions which have been known in France since the commencement of their revolution. There is a cry of blood against us; a cry accumulated by the accession of fresh victims, of thousands, of scores of thousands, I had almost said of hundreds of thousands, from year to year.”

John Newton (1725–1807) Anglican clergyman and hymn-writer

As quoted in The Works of the Rev. John Newton... to which are Prefixed Memoirs of His Life (1839), Vol. 2, U. Hunt, pages 429-230.

Truth, Justice, Hope, Business

“The science of human nature belongs to people who are not afraid to live independent lives. They alone have the flexible access to experience which can bring human wisdom and strength into being, and once these assets exist, they will send forth their influence with an authority that cannot be resisted, unmindful of artificial man made boundaries, reaching anywhere in the world.”

Paul Rosenfels (1909–1985) American sociologist

A Renegade Psychiatrist's Story

Wisdom, People, World, Nature

“Eons and unimaginable eons ago, before mankind existed on earth, only the waters existed. There was no land. And from the slime there sprang up a race of beings which dwelt in the sunken abysses of the ocean, inhuman creatures that worshipped Dagon, their god. When eventually the waters receded and great continents arose, these beings were driven down to the lowest depths. Their mighty kingdom, that had once stretched from pole to pole, was shrunken as the huge land masses lifted. Mankind came — but from whence I do not know — and civilizations arose. … These things hate man, for they feel that man has usurped their kingdom. Their greatest hope is to sink the continents again, so that the seas will roll over all the earth, and not a human being will survive. Their power will embrace the whole world, as it once did eons ago. They are not human, you see, and they worship Dagon. They want no other gods worshipped on Earth. Ishtar, dark Eblis, even Poseidon of the sunlit seas....”

Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) American author

Short fiction, The Spawn Of Dagon (1938)

God, Hate, World, Hope

“Traditional organizational theories have tended to view the human organization as a closed system. This tendency has led to a disregard of differing organizational environments and the nature of organizational dependency on environment. It has led also to an over-concentration on principles of internal organizational functioning, with consequent failure to develop and understand the processes of feedback which are essential to survival.”

Daniel Katz (1903–1998) American psychologist

Source: The Social Psychology of Organizations (1966), p. 34

Failure, Understanding, Nature, Dependency

“For Moses, that God should "visit the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generation" (Exod. 20:5) is an unacceptable form of group punishment akin to the morally indiscriminate punishment of Sodom. Challenging God's pronouncement of the punishment of the sons for the sins of the fathers, Moses argues with God, against God, and in the name of God. Moses engages God with fierce moral logic:
Sovereign of the Universe, consider the righteousness of Abraham and the idol worship of his father Terach. Does it make moral sense to punish the child for the transgressions of the father? Sovereign of the Universe, consider the righteous deeds of King Hezekiah, who sprang from the loins of his evil father King Achaz. Does Hezekiah deserve Achaz's punishment? Consider the nobility of King Josiah, whose father Amnon was wicked. Should Josiah inherit the punishment of Amnon? (Num. Rabbah, Hukkat XIX, 33)
Trained to view God as an unyielding authoritarian proclaiming immutable commands, we might expect that Moses will be severely chastised for his defiance. Who is this finite, errant, fallible, human creature to question the explicit command of the author of the Ten Commandments? The divine response to Moses, according to the rabbinic moral imagination, is arresting:
By your life Moses, you have instructed Me. Therefore I will nullify My words and confirm yours. Thus it is said, "The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers."”

Harold M. Schulweis (1925–2014) American rabbi and theologian

Deut. 24:16
Conscience: The Duty to Obey and the Duty to Disobey (2008)

Life, Death, God, Children

“I am deeply opposed to violence in all its forms, and yet I myself am violent in spirit, in my quarrel with the unbeatable: myself, my daemon, God, the human race, the world, time, pain, disorder, disgrace and death.”

William Saroyan (1908–1981) American writer

My Heart's in the Highlands (1939)

Death, God, Pain, World

“The phenomena and underlying mechanisms discussed in this book may thus become even more relevant to a larger and larger portion of human activity. Understand their origin, and be prepared for subtle but significant precursors!”

Didier Sornette (1957) French scientist

Source: Why Stock Markets Crash - Critical Events in Complex Systems (2003), Chapter 10, 2050: The End Of The Growth Era?, p. 396.

Books, Understanding

“Let us admit that most of us writers feel an essential aversion to politics. By taking such a position, however, we accept the perverted principle of specialization, according to which some are paid to write about the horrors of the world and human responsibility and others to deal with those horrors and bear the human responsibility for them.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

Address to the Prague World Congress of International PEN Club (7 November 1994) http://www.englishpen.org/writersinprison/wipcnews/peninternationaldeeplysaddenedbydeathofvclavhavelaconstantchampionforfreedomofexpression/

World, Feeling

“Education is a process by which the individual is developed into something better than he would have been without it. … The very though seems in a way the height of presumption. For one thing, it involves the premise that some human beings can be better than others.”

Richard M. Weaver (1910–1963) American scholar

“Education and the individual,” p. 43.
Life Without Prejudice (1965)

Education, Way

“Systems analysis, conceived in a policy sciences framework, is the macro instrument of the systems manager for understanding, evaluating and improving human systems — which are defined as goal oriented interdependent units incorporating people, organization and some form of technology for control, administration or output.”

Richard F. Ericson (1919–1993) American academic

Richard F. Ericson (1979) Improving the human condition: quality and stability in social systems : proceedings of the Silver Anniversary International Meeting, London, England, August 20-24, 1979. Society for General Systems Research. p. 621

People, Understanding, Science

“Put another way, the chimpanzees' closest relative is not the gorilla but humans.”

Jared Diamond book The Third Chimpanzee

The Third Chimpanzee (1991)
The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal (1991)

Way

“As Simone Weil— perhaps the strangest and most unlikely Thoreauvian solitary, outcast, and transcendentalist of all— wrote, echoing Thoreau's sense of awareness: "The authentic and pure values— truth, beauty, and goodness— in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object." Or, more tersely yet: "Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer."
It is perhaps the saddest, most hopeless thing we can say about our culture that it is a culture of distraction. "Attention deficit" is a cultural disorder, a debasement of spirit, before it is an ailment in our children to be treated with Ritalin.”

Curtis White (1951) American academic

"The spirit of disobedience: an invitation to resistance"

Children, Truth, Beauty, Sense

“Our civilization has essentially globalized only the surfaces of our lives. But our inner self continues to have a life of its own. And the fewer answers the era of rational knowledge provides to the basic questions of human Being, the more deeply it would seem that people, behind its back as it were, cling to the ancient certainties of their tribe. Because of this, individual cultures, increasingly lumped together by contemporary civilization, are realizing with new urgency their own inner autonomy and the inner differences of others.”

Václav Havel (1936–2011) playwright, essayist, poet, dissident and 1st President of the Czech Republic

The Need for Transcendence in the Postmodern World (1994)

Life, People, Question, Knowledge

“I consider it extremely doubtful whether the happiness of the human race has been enhanced by the technical and industrial developments that followed in the wake of rapidly progressing natural science.”

Erwin Schrödinger (1887–1961) Austrian physicist

Science and Humanism (1951)

Happiness, Nature, Science

“The human heart is a wide moor under a dull sky, with voices of invisible birds calling in the distance.”

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

Four Minute Essays Vol. 5 (1919), The Human Heart

Bird, Heart

“And ninety-nine percent of the human race, no matter how smart they are, will do the convenient thing instead of the wise thing, and kid themselves into thinking they can somehow escape the consequences. We’re just built that way.”

Poul Anderson book Brain Wave

Source: Brain Wave (1954), Chapter 4 (p. 28)

Way, Thinking

“And that, of course, is the tragic flaw in the narcotics laws — that possession of marijuana is a felony. Regardless of whether it is as harmless as some believe, or as evil and vicious as others believe, savage and uncompromising law is bad law, and the good and humane judge will jump at any technicality that will keep him from imposing a penalty so barbaric and so cruel. The self-righteous pillars of church and society demand that "the drug traffic be stamped out" and think that making possession a felony will do the trick. Their ignorance of the roots of the drug traffic is as extensive as their ignorance of the law.”

John D. MacDonald (1916–1986) writer from the United States

Travis McGee series, (1969)

Law, Penalty, Thinking, Evil

“As against the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith, there has to be a visible hand of politicians whose objective is to have the kind of society that is caring and humane.”

Pierre Trudeau (1919–2000) 15th Prime Minister of Canada

Part 3, 1974 - 1979 Victory And Defeat, p. 190
Memoirs (1993)

“If the passion for truthfulness is merely controlled and stilled without being satisfied, it will kill the activities it is supposed to support. This may be one of the reasons why, at the present time, the study of the humanities runs a risk of sliding from professional seriousness, through professionalization, to a finally disenchanted careerism.”

Bernard Williams (1929–2003) English moral philosopher

Source: Truth and Truthfulness (2002), p. 3

Truth, Support, Study, Passion

“I got disappointed in human nature as well and gave it up because I found it too much like my own.”

J. P. Donleavy book A Fairy Tale of New York

A Fairy Tale of New York (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973) p. 224.

Disappointment, Nature

“Unfortunately for the modern dramatist, during the past century and a half the public realm has been less and less of a realm where human deeds are done, and more and more of a realm of mere human behavior. The contemporary dramatist has lost his natural subject.”

W. H. Auden book The Dyer's Hand

"Genius & Apostle", p. 435
The Dyer's Hand, and Other Essays (1962)

Behavior, Nature, Past

“The age of Chivalry has gone. An age of Humanity has come. The Horse, whose importance more than human, have the name to that early period of gallantry and war, now yields his foremost place to Man. In serving him, in promoting his elevation, in contributing to his welfare, in doing him good, there are fields of bloodless triumph, nobler far than any in which Bayard or Du Guesclin conquered.”

Charles Sumner (1811–1874) American abolitionist and politician

Speech on "The Scholar, the Jurist, the Artist, the Philanthropist," oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard University at their anniversary (August 27, 1846)

War, Age, Horse

“Tis as human a little story as paper could well carry”

James Joyce book Finnegans Wake

115.36
Finnegans Wake (1939)

“Destiny is something not be to desired and not to be avoided. A mystery not contrary to reason, for it implies that the world, and the course of human history, have meaning.”

Dag Hammarskjöld (1905–1961) Swedish diplomat, economist, and author

Markings (1964)

World, History

“Since Islam cannot abdicate from its mission to bring the whole of humanity to its own path - the 'Right Path' - relations between the City of Faith and the City of War cannot but be hostile. As long as Islam is not strong enough to impose its will on the inhabitants of the City of War by force, it may observe a period of truce. But there can never be peace between the two. A state of truce could be tolerated as long as the two warring camps touched one another only at their physical frontiers. The real danger came when the City of War started to conquer the land of Islam from within.”

Amir Taheri (1942) Iranian journalist

Holy Terror: The inside story of Islamic terrorism (1987)

Hostility, War, Peace, Faith

“Truth must of necessity be stranger than fiction … for fiction is the creation of the human mind, and therefore is congenial to it.”

G. K. Chesterton book The Club of Queer Trades

The Club of Queer Trades (1905) Ch. 4 "Speculation of the House Agent"

Truth

“All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Enoch Powell, Joseph Chamberlain (Thames and Hudson, 1977), p. 151
1970s

Happiness, Failure, Nature

“There are indications because of new inventions, that 10, 15, or 20 nations will have a nuclear capacity, including Red China, by the end of the Presidential office in 1964. This is extremely serious... I think the fate not only of our own civilization, but I think the fate of world and the future of the human race, is involved in preventing a nuclear war.”

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

Third Nixon-Kennedy Presidential Debate (13 October 1960)
1960

Fate, War, World, Thinking

“We talk about world peace. Peace needs to be in the heart of every human being because that is where it belongs. The world would not have half its problems if we understood what we need to understand within us. I come with no solution to the world's problems. I come with nothing new to tell you. Instead, I come to tell you one of the things you have known for the longest time. That which you are looking for, that which you love and admire, is within you.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Wembley Stadium, England, June 22, 1997
1990s

Love, World, Peace, Understanding

“Pictures have their skeleton, muscles, and skin like human beings. One may speak of the specific anatomy of the picture. A picture representing 'a naked person' must not be created by the laws of human anatomy, but only by those of compositional anatomy. First one builds an armature on which the picture is to be constructed.”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

Quote (1908), # 840, in The Diaries of Paul Klee, translation: Pierre B. Schneider, R. Y. Zachary and Max Knight; publisher, University of California Press, 1964
1903 - 1910

Law, Personality

“They are not identical. The aspects you are willing to ignore are more important than the aspects you are willing to accept. Robbery is not just another way of making a living, rape is not just another way of satisfying basic human needs, torture is not just another way of interrogation. And XML is not just another way of writing S-exps. There are some things in life that you do not do if you want to be a moral being and feel proud of what you have accomplished.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: S-exp vs XML, HTML, LaTeX (was: Why lisp is growing) http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/s-exp_vs_XML (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Life, Way, Feeling

“Volyova did not like planets at the best of times, and gas giants struck her as an unreasonable affront to human scale and frailty. In that respect, they were almost as bad as stars.”

Alastair Reynolds book Redemption Ark

Source: Redemption Ark (2002), Chapter 11 (p. 206)

Star, Time

“Fat' traverses the path from a chaotically dispersed, undirected energy form to a form. Then it appears in the famous fat corner.... now [a wedge of fat in the angle between seat and back of the wooden old Chair, Beuys used in the fat-sculpture, like 'Stuhl mit Fett' (Fet Chair), 1964] intersects the human body in the region that houses certain emotional forces”

Joseph Beuys (1921–1986) German visual artist

Beuys laughed, and so did everyone else of the public
In a public debate at the Kunstring (Artcircle) Folkwang in Essen, 1972; (Stachelhaus 1991, p. 71); as quoted in Joseph Beuys and the Celtic Wor(l)d: A Language of Healing, Victoria Walters, LIT Verlag Münster, 2012, p. 29
1970's

Appearance, Housing

“It is my purpose nowhere in these remarks to make personal reproaches; I entertain no ill-will toward any human being, nor any brute, that I know of, not even the skunk across the way to which I referred. Least of all would I reproach the South. I honor her courage and fidelity. Even in a bad, a wicked cause, she shows a united front. All her sons are faithful to the cause of human bondage, because it is their cause. But the North - the poor, timid, mercenary, driveling North - has no such united defenders of her cause, although it is the cause of human liberty. None of the bright lights of the nation shine upon her section. Even her own great men have turned her accusers. She is the victim of low ambition - an ambition which prefers self to country, personal aggrandizement to the high cause of human liberty. She is offered up a sacrifice to propitiate southern tyranny - to conciliate southern treason.”

Thaddeus Stevens (1792–1868) American politician

June 10, 1850 in a speech before Congress on the Fugitive Slave Act. Page 123, Vol. 1, Palmer http://web.archive.org/web/20131209113445/http://thaddeusstevenssociety.com/Quotes.html. In Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens 1850s

Men, Faith, Way, Courage

“We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.”

James Thurber (1894–1961) American cartoonist, author, journalist, playwright

Quoted in New York Times (21 February 1960).
Letters and interviews

Death

“Indeed, some revolutionaries brand as innocents, dreamers, or even reactionaries; those who would challenge this educational practice. But one does not liberate people by alienating them. Authentic liberation - the process of humanization - is not another deposit to be made in men.”

Paulo Freire (1921–1997) educator and philosopher

Source: Pedagogia do oprimido (Pedagogy of the Oppressed) (1968, English trans. 1970), Chapter 2

Men, People, Education

“[re the human heart] That little electric twitch: without it we're so much rotting meat.”

John Updike book Rabbit at Rest

Rabbit at Rest (1990)

Heart

“A pattern is a fully realized form original, or model accepted or proposed for imitation. With patterns, 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. 158

“The way in which our society does do honor to its indubitably great men … is a study in immunizing people against their virus. … They are the menagerie of Very Important People who exist only for ceremonial occasions. … The effectually prevents the two practical uses that we could make of them. We neither take seriously the simple, direct, fearless souls that they invariably are, whether humble or arrogant, to model ourselves after them because they make more sense as human beings; nor do we have recourse the them to help us when we have need of exceptional purity, magnanimity, profundity, or imagination.”

Paul Goodman book Growing Up Absurd

Source: Growing Up Absurd (1956), p. 152.

Men, People, Way, Soul

“Until such time that computers at least match human intelligence in every dimension, it will always remain possible for skeptics to say the glass is half empty. Every new achievement of AI can be dismissed by pointing out other goals that have not yet been accomplished. Indeed, this is the frustration of the AI practitioner: once an AI goal is achieved, it is no longer considered as falling within the realm of AI and become instead just a useful general technique. AI is thus often regarded as the set of problems that have not yet been solved.”

Ray Kurzweil (1948) Author, scientist, inventor, and futurist

Source: The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (2005), p. 441

Intelligence, Problem, Time

“I want to go, on a mountain top!
With a radio and good batteries
And play a joyous tune
And free the
human
race
from suffering”

Björk (1965) Icelandic singer-songwriter

saccharine
"Alarm Call", from Homogenic (1997)
Songs

Mountain, Suffering

“It is, in a great measure, by raising up and endowing great minds that God secures the advance of human affairs, and the accomplishment of His own plans on earth.”

Albert Barnes (1798–1870) American theologian

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 293.

God

“Whatever our purpose, we probably aren’t fulfilling it. We’re not functioning as we should.”
He shrugged at her. “How should we function?”
“Like human beings.” She said it righteously.
“Isn’t that what the human race is already doing? Functioning like human beings—squabbling with each other, killing each other, hating…?”
“That’s not human.”
“Oh, but it is. It’s very human.”
“Well, it’s not what human should be.”
“Now that’s a different story. You’re not talking about what people are, but what you want them to be.”
“Well, maybe we should be what we aren’t because what we are now isn’t good enough. Maybe we should be dismantled.”

David Gerrold book When HARLIE Was One

“I don’t think we have to worry too much about somebody up there doing it—we’re doing it ourselves.”
Section 8 (p. 39)
When HARLIE Was One (1972)

Hate, People, Thinking

“Before going any further may we take it that the object of art is to obtain a partial revelation of that which is beyond human senses and human faculties – of that, in fact, which is spiritual? And that the means which we employ to induce this revelation are those very senses and faculties themselves?”

Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) English composer

"The Letter and the Spirit", in the journal Music and Letters, vol. 1 (1920) p. 88.

Art, Sense

“[We are] the two great nations of broad-mindedness and wisdom that had pioneered human civilization. We will surely bring a cooperative and constructive partnership into the 21st century.”

Shankar Dayal Sharma (1918–1999) Indian politician

Eric Pace in:; Dayal Sharma, 81, Former President of India http://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/03/world/shankar-dayal-sharma-81-former-president-of-india.htmlShankar, The New York Times, 3 January 2000 At a banquet in China attended by President Jiang Zemin of China

Wisdom, Partnership

“The day has passed for patching up the capitalist system; it must go. And in the work of abolishing it the Catholic and the Protestant, the Catholic and the Jew, the Catholic and the Freethinker, the Catholic and the Buddhist, the Catholic and the Mahometan will co-operate together, knowing no rivalry but the rivalry of endeavour toward an end beneficial to all. For, as we have said elsewhere, socialism is neither Protestant nor Catholic, Christian nor Freethinker, Buddhist, Mahometan, nor Jew; it is only Human. We of the socialist working class realise that as we suffer together we must work together that we may enjoy together. We reject the firebrand of capitalist warfare and offer you the olive leaf of brotherhood and justice to and for all.”

James Connolly (1868–1916) Irish republican and socialist leader

Labour, Nationality and Religion, in response to Father Robert Kane's lectures denouncing socialism, Catholicism and Socialism http://lxoa.wordpress.com/2010/09/23/catholicism-and-socialism/

Justice, Suffering

“Any medical man who predicts exactly when a patient will die, or exactly how long he will live, is bound to make a fool of himself. The human factor is always incalculable. The weak have often unexpected powers of resistance, the strong sometimes succumb.”

Agatha Christie book After the Funeral

After the Funeral (1953)

Fools, Strong

“The doctrine that the world is made up of objects whose existence is independent of human consciousness turns out to be in conflict with quantum mechanics and with facts established by experiment.”

Bernard d'Espagnat (1921–2015) French physicist and philosopher

in The Quantum Theory and Reality, by [Bernard d'Espagnat, Scientific American, November, 1979, 158] http://www.sciam.com/media/pdf/197911_0158.pdf

World

“Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so.”

Doris Lessing (1919–2013) British novelist, poet, playwright, librettist, biographer and short story writer

As quoted in Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing (2006) by Larry Chang, p. 660

“If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.”

John Brunner The Shockwave Rider

Bk. 3, Ch. "Like They Say, It's Bounce Or Break"
The Shockwave Rider (1975)

Evil

“Like a human thought in quest
Of a future hour.”

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

(1838 2) (Vol 53) Subjects for Pictures - Ariadne Watching the Sea after the Departure of Theseus
The Monthly Magazine

Future

“We are the beneficiaries of a life of surpassing service. Wise in wisdom and gentle in gentleness, freedom has many sides and angles. Human slavery has been swept away. With security of personal rights has come security of property rights. The freedom of the human mind is recognized in the right to free speech and free press. The public schools have made education possible for all and ignorance a disgrace. In political affairs, the vote of the humblest has long counted for as much as the vote of the most exalted. We are working towards the day when, in our industrial life, equal honor shall fall to equal endeavor.”

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

1920s, Duty of Government (1920)

Life, Wisdom, Education, School

“It had been the winter of 1835-6 that the ship, Alert, in her voyage for hides on the remote and almost unknown coast of California, floated into the vast solitude of the bay of San Francisco. All around was the stillness of nature. One vessel, a Russian, lay at anchor there, but during our whole stay not a sail came or went. Our trade was with remote missions, which sent hides to us in launches manned by their Indians… Over a region far beyond our sight there was no other human habitations, expect that an enterprising Yankee, years in advance of his time, had put up, on the rising ground above the landing, a shanty of rough boards, where he carried on a very small retail trade between the hide ships and the Indians. On the evening of Saturday, the thirteenth of August, 1859 (I again sailed into) the entrance to San Francisco, (now) the great center of worldwide commerce.”

Richard Henry Dana Jr. (1815–1882) United States author and lawyer

Twenty-Four Years After (1869)

Nature, Solitude, Winter, Time

“Human beings always say they prefer peace, but it takes a saint to talk us into not assaulting our neighbors.”

John Barnes book Earth Made of Glass

Earth Made of Glass (1998)

Peace

“In the human figure as it approaches perfection… is contained the sure guide for the determination of all true principles of design. …it was because the ancient Greeks… realized this truth that they excelled all others in art.”

Ernest Flagg (1857–1947) American architect

Small Houses: Their Economic Design and Construction (1922)

Truth, Art, Perfection

“In recent years, Britain has withdrawn from the world. On Syria, on Europe, on Ukraine this government has been on the periphery: all victim of the same lack of long-term strategic thinking about British foreign policy and the absence of a moral compass. It is time for the left to revive its ethical foreign policy and carve out a new long-term narrative that puts human rights and the protection of civilians centre stage once again.”

Jo Cox (1974–2016) UK politician

A new progressive internationalism (17 June 2016)

World, Thinking, Time

“Here is one of the best bits of advice every given about the fine art of human relationships. "If there is any one secret of success," says Henry Ford, "it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own."”

Dale Carnegie How to Win Friends and Influence People

Source: How to Win Friends and Influence People (1936), p. 42 (in 2016 edition)

Secret, Art, Success, Personality

“Th. Jefferson returns his thanks to Dr. De La Motta for the eloquent discourse on the Consecration of the Synagogue of Savannah, which he has been so kind as to send him. It excites in him the gratifying reflection that his country has been the first to prove to the world two truths, the most salutary to human society, that man can govern himself, and that religious freedom is the most effectual anodyne against religious dissension: the maxim of civil government being reversed in that of religion, where its true form is "divided we stand, united, we fall."”

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

Thomas Jefferson to Jacob De La Motta, September 1, 1820. Manuscript Division, Papers of Thomas Jefferson. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/loc/madison.html For the background of the letter see "Thomas Jefferson's Letter on Religious Freedom" Dr. Kenneth Libo Ph.D and Michael Skakun from the Center for Jewish History, New York City, New York. http://sephardicoralhistory.org/education/essays.php?action=show&id=19 1820s

Truth, World, Religion, Freedom

Quotes about humanity page 82

Quotes about humanity
page 82