Quotes about humanity
page 88

“When the evolutionary process shifts from biology to software technology the body becomes the old hardware environment. The human body is now a probe, a laboratory for experiments.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1970s, Culture Is Our Business (1970), p. 180

“We face a hostile ideology; global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose and insidous in method. Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully there is call for not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of questions but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle with liberty the stake. Only thus shall we remain despite every provocation on our charted course towards permanent peace and human betterment.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American general and politician, 34th president of the United States (in office from 1953 to 1961)

1960s, Farewell address (1961)

Hostility, Peace, Question

“A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth's diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.”

William Wordsworth book Lyrical Ballads

A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal (1799).
Lyrical Ballads (1798–1800)

Fear, Feeling, Tree

“The Lieutenant Governor of Bengal was to the fullest extent responsible for not having made any preparation against the famine…The doctrines of political economy had been worshipped as a sort of "fetish" by officials who, because they believed that in the long run supply and demand would square themselves, seemed to have utterly forgotten that human life was short, and that men could not subsist without food beyond a few days. They mechanically left the laws of political economy to work themselves out while hundreds of thousands of human beings were perishing from famine.”

Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1830–1903) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1867/aug/02/motion-for-an-address in the House of Commons (2 August 1867) on the Orissa famine of 1866 1860s

Life, Men, Law, Food

“The continuance of India within the British Empire is essential to the Empire's existence and is consequently a paramount interest both of the United Kingdom and of the Dominions…for strategic purposes there is no half-way house between an India fully within the Empire and an India totally outside it…Should it once be admitted or proved that Indians cannot govern themselves except by leaving the Empire – in other words, that the necessary goal of political development for the most important section of His Majesty's non-European subjects is independence and not Dominion status – then the logically inevitable outcome will be the eventual and probably the rapid loss to the Empire of all its other non-European parts. It would extinguish the hope of a lasting union between "white" and "coloured" which the conception of a common subjectship to the King-Emperor affords and to which the development of the Empire hitherto has given the prospect of leading…In discussion of the wealth of India it is usual to forget the principal item, which is four hundred millions of human beings, for the most part belonging to races neither unintelligent nor slothful…[British policy should be to] create the preconditions of democracy and self-government by as soon as possible making India socially and economically a modern state.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Memorandum on Indian Policy (16 May 1946), from Simon Heffer, Like the Roman. The Life of Enoch Powell (Phoenix, 1999), pp. 104-105.
1940s

Hope, Way, Democracy, Loss

“The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself.”

Archibald Macleish (1892–1982) American poet and Librarian of Congress

"In Praise of Dissent", New York Times (16 December 1956)

Life, Thinking

“The love of humanity is a pathological state of a sexual origin which often appears at the age of puberty in nervous and clever people. The excess of phosphorus in the system must get out somewhere. As for hatred of a tyrant, that is a more human sentiment which has full play in time of war, when force and the mob are one. Emperors must be mad fools to decide on declaring wars which substitute an armed nation for their Praetorian Guards. That idiocy accomplished, despotism of course produces revolution until terrorism leads to the inevitable reaction.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Les silences du colonel Bramble (The Silence of Colonel Bramble)

Love, War, People, Age

“An untold time ago, there was a well-founded perception that the human race would end and that something else must take its place.
Why must something else take its place?
I cannot tell you that. There is no solid rationale for it, but the belief seemed to be that there must be a dominant race upon this planet. Before men were the dinosaurs and before the dinosaurs there were the trilobites…”

Clifford D. Simak Highway of Eternity

Highway of Eternity (1986)

Men, Time

“The human heart is a cup of love, where some find life and zest, and some drunkenness and death.”

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

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

Love, Life, Death, Heart

“From whence are these "rights of individuals" derived, and why should we care? Unless we presume the existence of some greater power that determines what is good, isn't it arbitrary to posit that human survival is more important than private property rights, an equally artificially construed concept? Isn't it arbitrary to assume that some sort of equality is preferable to a system where, say, the poor are assumed to have bad karma? If these 'rights of individuals' are derived only from shared humanity, then do 'individuals' (a thoroughly meaningless term, by the way), begin to lose them when they act inhumanely? And isn't it totally arbitrary to grant rights to humans rather than other creatures anyway?”

Cornel West (1953) African-American philosopher and political/civil rights activist

Lecture in New Haven, On Constructed Rights (28 February 2013)

Way

“To the mind of superficial men the future of different races has already brought disaster and ruin upon the country. The poor negro has been charged with all our woes. In the haste of these men they forget that our trouble was not ethnological, but moral, that it was not difference of complexion, but difference of conviction. It was not the Ethiopian as a man, but the Ethiopian as a slave and a coveted article of merchandise, that gave us trouble. I close these remarks as I began. If our action shall be in accordance with the principles of justice, liberty, and perfect human equality, no eloquence can adequately portray the greatness and grandeur of the future of the republic. We shall spread the network of our science and our civilization over all who seek their shelter, whether from Asia, Africa, or the isles of the sea. We shall mold them all, each after his kind, into Americans. Indian and Celt, Negro and Saxon, Latin and Teuton, Mongolian and Caucasian, Jew and gentile, all shall here bow to the same law, speak the same language, support the same government, enjoy the same liberty, vibrate with the same national enthusiasm, and seek the same national ends.”

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

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

Men, Justice, Law, Support

“Is [assassination] only justified if the target is a reactionary, anti-democratic, anti-human rights obscurantist like bin Laden?”

Enda Kenny (1951) Irish Fine Gael politician and Taoiseach

Joe Higgins questions Kenny on support from the Taoiseach, Tanaiste and presidents of the European Commission and European Council for use of assassination. I know you are a good Christian man who has your job to do in here from a political point of view. Many of his victims in the twin towers in New York were of Irish descent or directly Irish. Kenny apologising to Higgins after slandering him. Irish Independent http://www.independent.ie/national-news/ok-you-are-not-a-bin-laden-fan-taoiseach-tells-joe-higgins-2637835.html 2010s

“Our failure to discern a universal good does not record any lack of insight or ingenuity, but merely demonstrates that nature contains no moral messages framed in human terms. Morality is a subject for philosophers, theologians, students of the humanities, indeed for all thinking people. The answers will not be read passively from nature; they do not, and cannot, arise from the data of science. The factual state of the world does not teach us how we, with our powers for good and evil, should alter or preserve it in the most ethical manner.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

"Nonmoral Nature", pp. 42–43
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

People, World, Failure, Nature

“I am not a criminal. I have nothing to be ashamed of. We are workers, mothers, human beings. We should be able to be proud of who we are.”

Elvira Arellano (1975) Mexican illegal immigrant and activist

Hispanic Magazine (August 2007)

“No one has been a more consistent opponent of Communism than I have for the last twenty-five years. I will unsay no word that I have spoken about it. But all this fades away before the spectacle which is now unfolding. … I see the Russian soldiers standing on the threshold of their native land, guarding the fields which their fathers have tilled from time immemorial. I see them guarding their homes where mothers and wives pray—ah, yes, for there are times when all pray—for the safety of their loved ones, for the return of the bread-winner, of their champion, of their protector. I see the ten thousand villages of Russia where the means of existence is wrung so hardly from the soil, but where there are still primordial human joys, where maidens laugh and children play.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Radio broadcast (22 June 1941) on the day Germany invaded the Soviet Union, quoted in Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston S. Churchill, 1939–1941 (London: Heinemann, 1983), p. 1120
The Second World War (1939–1945)

Love, Children, Home, Communication

“Human reason has discovered many amazing things in nature and will discover still more, and will thereby increase its power over nature.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908)

Nature

“It was the period of my mental progress which I have now reached that I formed the friendship which has been the honour and chief blessing of my existence, as well as the source of a great part of all that I have attempted to do, or hope to effect hereafter, for human improvement. My first introduction to the lady who, after a friendship of twenty years, consented to become my wife, was in 1830, when I was in my twenty-fifth and she in her twenty-third year.”

John Stuart Mill book Autobiography

Source: Autobiography (1873)
Source: https://archive.org/details/autobiography01mill/page/184/mode/1up p. 184

Friendship, Hope, Parting

“When I went vegetarian at age eleven, it was a remarkably easy transition. A boy at my school was attempting to kill creatures in the pond. When I tried to stop him, he said, “You eat animals,” like that meant I had no right to try and save something that could end up on my plate later. The hypocrisy of my actions became crystal clear in that moment. I decided, no more meat. … When I first started working for two organizations supporting anti-factory farming, vegan outreach and humane education, my choice to go vegan became that much clearer. I realized veganism is the only diet that can change the world. … You can expect a healthier body, and the feeling of pride that goes hand-in-hand with living according to your values. That’s something that many people aspire to, but few people achieve.”

Alicia Silverstone (1976) American actress

"How to Transition from Vegetarianism to Veganism", in The Kind Life (9 April 2013) http://thekindlife.com/blog/2013/04/how-to-transition-from-vegetarian-to-vegan/

People, Age, World, Education

“Stupidity is a factor to be reckoned with in human affairs. The true leader always expects to encounter it, and prepares to endure it patiently so long as it is normal stupidity. He knows that his ideas will be distorted, his orders carelessly executed; and that there will be jealousy among his assistants. He takes these inevitable phenomena into account, and instead of attempting to find men without faults, who are non-existent, he tries to make use of the best men at his disposal - as they are, and not as they ought to be.”

André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer

Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Leadership

Men, Stupidity, Jealousy, Idea

“Gandhi rejects the Adam Smith notion of human nature as motivated by self-interest and brute needs and returns us to our spiritual dimension with its impulses for nonviolence, justice and equality.
He exposes the fallacy of the claim that everyone can be rich and successful provided they work hard. He points to the millions who work themselves to the bone and still remain hungry.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

2000s, The Sacred Warrior (2000)

Justice, Motivation, Nature, Success

“What is at play here is a horror of flesh: a rubberised capitalist repugnance for the meat and intimacy of human sexuality.”

Laurie Penny book Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism

Source: Meat Market: Female Flesh Under Capitalism (2010), Chapter One

“Most mathematicians are by nature Platonists who cheerfully, unreflectingly and habitually employ such loaded phrases as 'We assume there exists…' or 'Therefore there exists…' an entity with such and such characteristics. Challenged by the realist they would probably reply that since the truths of mathematics are absolute, universal and eternal it is hard indeed to deny them an existence independent of human intelligence.”

George Frederick James Temple (1901–1992) British mathematician

100 Years of Mathematics: a Personal Viewpoint (1981)

Truth, Intelligence, Mathematics, Nature

“Know that for the human mind there are certain objects of perception which are within the scope of its nature and capacity; on the other hand, there are, amongst things which actually exist, certain objects which the mind can in no way and by no means grasp: the gates of perception are closed against it. Further, there are things of which the mind understands one part, but remains ignorant of the other; and when man is able to comprehend certain things, it does not follow that he must be able to comprehend everything.”

Maimónides book The Guide for the Perplexed

Source: Guide for the Perplexed (c. 1190), Part I, p.106 (1881) Tr. Friedlander

Way, Understanding, Nature, Parting

“The most likely reason for the adoption of a relatively small number of discrete intervals as the tonal material for music is that discretization or categorization is a typical, if not universal, strategy used by animals in order to reduce information overload and facilitate processing when subjected to the high-information-conetent signals and/or high information rates from a highly developed sensory system (e. g., Estes, 1972; Terhardt, 1991). An obvious example is the processing of speech information by humans, wherein each language selects a relatively small portion of the available timbral-differences that can be produced by the vocal tract as information-carrying units (phonemes) in the language. A related reason for discrete scales, and another obvious analogy with speech perception, lies in the social aspect of music. Music first developed as, and still largely remains, a social phenomenon associated with religious or other rituals that, like language, necessitated an easily remembered common framework.”

Edward Burns (1968) American actor and director

Burns, Edward M. (1999). "Intervals, Scales, and Tuning", 'The Psychology of Music second edition, p. 218. Deutsch, Diana, ed. San Diego: Academic Press. ISBN 0122135644

Music, Universe, Animals

“After we have become familiar with the new idea, however, after it has become part of our general stock of theoretical concepts, our expectations are brought more into balance with its actual uses, and its excessive popularity is ended. A few zealots persist in the old key-to-the-universe view of it; but less driven thinkers settle down after a while to the problems the idea has really generated. They try to apply it and extend it where it applies and where it is capable of extension; and they desist where it does not apply or cannot be extended. It becomes, if it was, in truth, a seminal idea in the first place, a permanent and enduring part of our intellectual armory. But it no longer has the grandiose, all-promising scope, the infinite versatility of apparent application, it once had. The second law of thermodynamics, or the principle of natural selection, or the notion of unconscious motivation, or the organization of the means of production does not explain everything, not even everything human, but it still explains something; and our attention shifts to isolating just what that something is, to disentangling ourselves from a lot of pseudoscience to which, in the first flush of its celebrity, it has also given rise.”

Clifford Geertz book The Interpretation of Cultures

Source: The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), p. 3-4

Truth, Law, Motivation, Idea

“All who are weary and heavy laden; all who suffer under injustice; all who suffer from the outrages of the existing bourgeois society; all who have in them the feeling of the worth of humanity, look to us, turn hopefully to us, as the only party that can bring rescue and deliverance. And if we, the opponents of this unjust world of violence, suddenly reach out the hand of brotherhood to it, conclude alliances with its representatives, invite our comrades to go hand in hand with the enemy whose misdeeds have driven the masses into our camp, what confusion must result in their minds! … It must be that for the hundreds and thousands, for the millions that have sought salvation under our banner, it was all a colossal mistake for them to come to us. If we are not different from the others, then we are not the right ones – the Savior is yet to come; and the Social Democracy was a false Messiah, no better than the other false ones! Just in this fact lies our strength, that we are not like the others, and that we are not only not like the others, and that we are not simply different from the others, but that we are their deadly enemy, who have sworn to storm and demolish the Bastile of Capitalism, whose defenders all those others are. Therefore we are only strong when we are alone. This is not to say that we are to individualise or to isolate ourselves. We have never lacked for company, and we never shall so long as the fight lasts. On the essentially true but literally false phrase about a “single reactionary mass,” the Social Democracy has never believed since it passed from the realm of theory to that of practice. We know that the individual members and divisions of the “single reactionary mass” are in conflict with each other, and we have always used these conflicts for our purposes. We have used opponents against opponents, but have never allowed them to use us.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

World, Feeling, Democracy, Strong

“For much of the 20th century, the blank slate view was the dominant view in the social sciences. With the popularization of sociobiology in the 1970s, however, evolutionary approaches to human behavior became the locus of an academic culture war between biologically minded thinkers and advocates of the traditional social science model.”

Steve Stewart-Williams (1971)

Source: The Ape that Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences? (2013), p. 141

War, Behavior, Science

“Divine agnosticism, the sort I'm advocating, affirms the existence of God but then acknowledges our human inability to fully grasp his infinite nature.”

Skye Jethani

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

God, Nature

“There are four great events in history, the siege of Troy, the life and crucifixion of Christ, the exile of Krishna in Brindaban and the colloquy on the field of Kurukshetra. The siege of Troy created Hellas, the exile in Brindaban created devotional religion, (for before there was only meditation and worship), Christ from his cross humanized Europe, the colloquy at Kurukshetra will yet liberate humanity.”

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

On the Bhagavad Gita quoted in "Introduction to the Bhagavad Gita" (1993) by by Paul Molinari http://www.collaboration.org/97/nov/text/9_gita.html

Life, Religion, History, Christ

“And there went some good old-fashioned wishful thinking, Sleepy. We were talking about human beings. If there is any way to be contrary, unreasonable and obnoxious, human beings are sure to find and pursue it. With verve and enthusiasm at whatever might be the most inconvenient time.”

Glen Cook book Water Sleeps

Source: Water Sleeps (1999), Chapter 85 (p. 308)

Way, Fashion, Thinking, Time

“Gay rights are human rights.”

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

Quoted in The Week, 10 December 2011, p. 10
Secretary of State (2009–2013)

“That [her lessons with Kandinsky] was a new artistic experience; Kandinsky was quite unlike the other teachers, and explained things thoroughly and penetratingly and regarded me as a human being with conscious aspirations, capable of setting myself targets to aim for. It was new to me and impressed me.”

Gabriele Münter (1877–1962) German painter

as quoted by de:Wolf-Dieter Dube, in Expressionism; Praeger Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 121
undated quotes

Teachers

“There is no rivalry, no competition to get employment among slaves, as among free laborers. Nor is there a war between master and slave… His feeling for his slave never permits him to stint him in old age. The slaves are all well fed, well clad, have plenty of fuel, and are happy. They have no dread of the future—no fear of want. A state of dependence is the only condition in which reciprocal affection can exist among human beings—the only situation in which the war of competition ceases, and peace, amity and good will arise. A state of independence always begets more or less of jealous rivalry and hostility. A man loves his children because they are weak, helpless and dependent; he loves his wife for similar reasons.”

George Fitzhugh (1806–1881) American activist

Source: Sociology For The South: Or The Failure Of A Free Society (1854), pp. 246-247

Love, Hostility, War, Happiness

“I'm reading Kristin Lavransdatter again - it's one of the greatest poetic books, and the most powerful portrayal of medieval Christendom I know…. I must admit that it makes me cry every time - because it's so real, so true, reaching to the depths of human nature, touching one to the quick.”

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

Broken Lights Letters 1951-59.

Books, Nature, Time, Reading

“The chroniclers of the early Turkish rulers of India take pride in affirming that Qutbuddin Aibak was a killer of lakhs of infidels. Leave aside enthusiastic killers like Alauddin Khalji and Muhammad bin Tughlaq, even the "kind-hearted" Firoz Tughlaq killed more than a lakh Bengalis when he invaded their country. Timur Lang or Tamerlane says he killed a hundred thousand infidel prisoners of war in Delhi. He built victory pillars from severed heads at many places. These were acts of sultans. The nobles were not lagging behind. One Shaikh Daud Kambu is said to have killed 20,000 with his dagger. The Bahmani sultans of Gulbarga and Bidar considered it meritorious to kill a hundred thousand Hindu men, women and children every year….. The rite of Jauhar killed the women, the tradition of not deserting the field of battle made Rajputs and others die fighting in large numbers. When Malwa was attacked (1305), its Raja is said to have possessed 40,000 horse and 100,000 foot.43 After the battle, "so far as human eye could see, the ground was muddy with blood"…. Under Muhammad Tughlaq, wars and rebellions knew no end. His expeditions to Bengal, Sindh and the Deccan, as well as ruthless suppression of twenty-two rebellions, meant only depopulation in the thirteenth and first half of the fourteenth century. For one thing, in spite of constant efforts no addition of territory could be made by Turkish rulers from 1210 to 1296; for another the Turkish rulers were more ruthless in war and less merciful in peace. Hence the extirpating massacres of Balban, and the repeated attacks by others on regions already devastated but not completely subdued….. Mulla Daud of Bidar vividly describes the war between Muhammad Shah Bahmani and the Vijayanagar King in 1366 in which "Farishtah computes the victims on the Hindu side alone as numbering no less than half a million." Muhammad also devastated the Karnatak region with vengeance….. Under Akbar and Jahangir "five or six hundred thousand human beings were killed," says emperor Jahangir. The figures given by these killers and their chroniclers may be a few thousand less or a few thousand more, but what bred this ambition of cutting down human beings without compunction was the Muslim theory, practice and spirit of Jihad, as spelled out in Muslim scriptures and rules of administration.”

K. S. Lal book Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India

Ch 3
Theory and Practice of Muslim State in India (1999)

Women, Men, War, Children

“So, a talking parrot, three hundred people flying through the sky in a big tin can called a 747, a human being growing inside another person, and men walking on the moon don't contradict logic?”

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)

Men, People, Personality, Flying

“The failure of the social sciences to think through and to integrate their several responsibilities for the common problem of relating the analysis of parts to the analysis of the whole constitutes one of the major lags crippling their utility as human tools of knowledge.”

Robert Staughton Lynd (1892–1970) American sociologist

R.S. Lynd (1939) Knowledge of What? p. 15, cited in Karl William Kapp (1976), The nature and significance of institutional economics http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1467-6435.1976.tb01971.x/abstract. in: Kyklos, Vol 29/2, Jan 1976, p. 209

Failure, Knowledge, Problem, Thinking

“The contrivances of nature surpass the contrivances of art, in the complexity, subtlety, and curiosity of the mechanism; and still more, if possible, do they go beyond them in number and variety; yet in a multitude of cases, are not less evidently mechanical, not less evidently contrivances, not less evidently accommodated to their end, or suited to their office than are the most perfect production of human ingenuity.”

William Paley (1743–1805) Christian apologist, natural theologian, utilitarian

Natural Theology (1802)

Art, Nature, Perfection

“What is the basis of our population at the moment — one million Roma, 700 000 Turks, 2,5 million retirees. This is what GERB is facing. And what about you — a million-and-a-half who ran away?… The human material that we are left with as voters and as a pool for recruiting staff — it is really not that big. It is easy to say: 'we rely on you.”

Boyko Borissov (1959) Bulgarian politician

Speaking to Bulgarian expatriates in Chicago, as quoted in "Mayor of Sofia insinuates that Roma, Turks and retirees are 'bad human material'" in The Telegraph (6 February 2009) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/bulgaria/4531391/Mayor-of-Sofia-brands-Roma-Turks-and-retirees-bad-human-material.html

“Extending the reach of political freedom is essential to prevailing in the great struggle of our time, but it is not enough. Many in this chamber have answered the call to help their brothers and sisters in need by working to alleviate hopelessness. These efforts to improve the human condition honor the highest ideals of this institution. They also advance our security interests. The extremists find their most fertile recruiting grounds in societies trapped in chaos and despair, places where people see no prospect of a better life. In the shadows of hopelessness, radicalism thrives. And eventually, that radicalism can boil over into violence and cross borders and take innocent lives across the world.”

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

2000s, 2008, Address to the United Nations General Assembly (September 2008)

Life, People, World, Sister

“Erasers remind us there is no faultless human.”

Javad Alizadeh (1953) cartoonist, journalist and humorist

Quoted in Humor & Caricature (August 1995), p. 3

“In human history it seems that the idea of using a pictograph in the new function of representing sound may have occurred only three times: once in Mesopotamia, perhaps by the Sumerians, once in China, apparently by the Chinese themselves, and once in Central America, by the Mayas. (Conceivably it was invented only once, but there is no evidence that the Chinese or the Mayas acquired the idea from elsewhere.) The idea that was independently conceived by these three peoples was taken over, as were at times even the symbols themselves, though often in a highly modified form, by others who made adaptations to fit a host of totally different languages. One of the major adaptations, generally attributed to the Greeks, was the narrowing of sound representation from syllabic representation to phonemic representation (Gelb 1963; Trager 1974), after an earlier stage of mixed pictographic and syllabic writing (Chadwick 1967).”

John DeFrancis book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy

The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984, p. 139) http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/ideographic_myth.html The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy (1984)

People, History, Idea, Time

“For greatness after all, in spite of its name, appears to be not so much a certain size as a certain quality in human lives. It may be present in lives whose range is very small.”

Phillips Brooks (1835–1893) American clergyman and author

Sermons (1879), p. 14.

Appearance

“Humans should not worship other humans at all, but if they must do so it is better that the worshipped ones do not occupy any positions of political power.”

Christopher Hitchens (1949–2011) British American author and journalist

1990s, The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain's Favourite Fetish

“The future of humanity is uncertain, even in the most prosperous countries, and the quality of life deteriorates; and yet I believe that what is being discovered about the infinitely large and infinitely small is sufficient to absolve this end of the century and millennium. What a very few are acquiring in knowledge of the physical world will perhaps cause this period not to be judged as a pure return of barbarism.”

Primo Levi book Other People's Trades

"News from the Sky"
Other People's Trades (1985)

Life, World, Knowledge, Future

“To understand oneself in existence is the Christian principle, except that this self has received much richer and much more profound qualifications that are even more difficult to understand together with existing. The believer is a subjective thinker, and the difference, is only between the simple person and the simple wise person. Here again the oneself is not humanity in general, subjectivity in general, and other such things, whereas everything becomes easy inasmuch as the difficulty is removed and the whole matter is shifted over into the shadow play of abstraction.”

Sören Kierkegaard book Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments

Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, Vol. I, Hong p. 353
1840s, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846)

Understanding, Personality

“In other words, there are in administration things analogous to, if not identical with, the mechanical tracts or deterministic sequence, of physics. If, for example, it is decided by government to accomplish the purpose of providing compensation at given rates for men and women employed in industry who sustain injuries in connection with their occupations, the administrator can, like the engineer, estimate in advance the probable cost of such a design, indicate the types of officers and employees necessary to administer the design, and the administrative procedures appropriate to the whole process from beginning to end. And, as in the case of the hydro-electric engineer, the administrator, later sees the results of his operations and can compare them with his advance estimates. There are more variables and incalculables in human affairs than in hydroelectric affairs, but even so administration achieves pre-determined results with an approximation which is often amazing for its exactness. If administrative designs and estimates were not realized in practice with a high degree of exactness, both industry and government would collapse.”

Charles A. Beard (1874–1948) American historian

Source: Philosophy, Science and Art of Public Administration (1939), p. 661

Women, Men

“What has been called Christianity has been a disturber of the public peace in all countries and at all times. Nothing has so alienated nations, nothing has so destroyed the natural justice of mankind, as what has been known as religion. The idea that all men must worship the same God, believe the same dogmas, has for thousands of years plucked with bloody hands the flower of pity from the human heart.”

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

"To the Indianapolis Clergy." The Iconoclast (Indianapolis, IN) (1883)

Men, God, Peace, Religion

“It was sad but completely understandable. Ten billion human beings without any cortical or limbic augmentation had simply acted to maximize their individual well-being. They hadn’t given much thought to long-term consequences, but how could they? They had no reliable mechanism by which they could think or act collectively. Blaming those people for the death of the ecosphere made as much sense as blaming water molecules for a tsunami.”

Robert Charles Wilson book Vortex

Source: Vortex (2011), Chapter 10 (pp. 126-127)

Death, People, Sadness, Understanding

“"What is a human being, then?"…
"A seed."
"A … seed?"
"An acorn that is unafraid to destroy itself in growing into a tree."”

David Zindell book The Broken God

Source: The Broken God (1992), p. 236

Tree

“As man is truly “humanised”, not by schools of cookery but by schools of thought, he will abandon the barbarous habit of his flesh-eating ancestors, and will make gradual progress towards a purer, simpler, more humane, and therefore more civilised diet-system.”

Henry Stephens Salt (1851–1939) British activist

The Humanities of Diet

School

“For it would now seem that the policy and vanity of the Court equally concurred in endeavouring to keep out of sight whatever can manifest our pre-eminence, which they undoubtedly feel, but have not yet learned to make the proper use of. It is, however, in vain to attempt arresting the progress of human knowledge. I am, indeed, very much mistaken if all the authority and address of the Tartar Government will be able much longer to stifle the energies of their Chinese subjects. Scarcely a year now passes without an insurrection in some of their provinces. it is true they are soon suppressed, but their frequency is a strong symptom of the fever within. The paroxysm is repelled, but the disease is not cured.”

George Macartney (1737–1806) British statesman, colonial administrator and diplomat

Our First Ambassador to China (Biography, 1908)

Disease, Feeling, Knowledge, Strong

“Translation:Our house is burning and we look elsewhere. Nature mutilated, overexploited is not able to recover and we refuse to admit it. From North to South, it suffers from ill-development, and we are indifferent. Earth and humanity are in great peril and we are accountable.”

Jacques Chirac book Our house is on fire and we look away

Notre maison brûle et nous regardons ailleurs. La nature, mutilée, surexploitée, ne parvient plus à se reconstituer et nous refusons de l'admettre. L'humanité souffre. Elle souffre de mal-développement, au nord comme au sud, et nous sommes indifférents. La terre et l'humanité sont en péril et nous en sommes tous responsables. Statement at the earth summit in Johannesburg Elysee.fr http://www.elysee.fr/elysee/francais/interventions/discours_et_declarations/2002/septembre/discours_de_m_jacques_chirac_president_de_la_republique_devant_l_assemblee_pleniere_du_sommet_mondial_du_developpement_durable.1217.html dated sept 2nd 2002

Nature, Suffering, Housing, Indifference

“The worst of all human miseries is not to know God, not to feel Him, not to desire Him, not to taste Him.”

John of St. Samson (1571–1636)

From, Light on Carmel: An Anthology from the Works of Brother John of Saint Samson, O.Carm.

God, Feeling

“Rousseau diagnosed a total degeneration, a complete fall of humanity from “Nature” in the society of the eighteenth century. All spontaneity had been denaturalized through convention, all naïveté had been replaced by finesse, all sincerity had been glossed over by facades of social intercourse, etc.”

Peter Sloterdijk (1947) German philosopher

Source: Kritik der zynischen Vernunft [Critique of Cynical Reason] (1983), p. 53

Nature, Sincerity

“MacKinnon is a totalitarian. She wants a risk-free, state controlled world. She believes rules and regulations will solve every human ill and straighten out all those irksome problems between the sexes that have been going on for five thousand years. As a lawyer, MacKinnon is deft and pragmatic. But as a political thinker, cultural historian or commentator on sex, she is incompetent. For a woman of her obvious intelligence, her frame of reference is shockingly small.”

Camille Paglia (1947) American writer

Source: Vamps and Tramps (1994), "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", p. 108

World, Sex, Intelligence, Problem

“If only I could have a dozen churchmen as wise and as well taught in all human knowledge as were Jerome and Augustine!”

Charlemagne (748–814) King of the Franks, King of Italy, and Holy Roman Emperor

Notker the Stammerer De Carolo Magno, Bk. 1, sect. 9; translation from Einhard and Notker the Stammerer (trans. Lewis Thorpe) Two Lives of Charlemagne (1969) p. 102.; O utinam haberem duodecim clericos ita doctos, omnique sapientia sic perfecte instructos, ut fuerunt Hieronimus et Augustinus. In conversation with his minister Alcuin, who replied, "Creator coeli et terrae similes illis plures non habuit, et tu vis habere duodecim (The Maker of heaven and earth Himself has very few scholars worth comparing with these men, and yet you expect to find a dozen!)".

Knowledge

“First of all, no one can accuse me, Ayad Jamal Aldin, of secatarianism, because I support a secular regime that fully separates religion and the state. […] I believe that my freedom as a Shia and as a religious person will never be complete unless I preserve the freedom of the Sunni, the Christian, the Jew, the Sabai and the Yazidi. We will not be able to preserve the freedom of the mosque unless we preserve the freedom of entertainment clubs. […] The curricula - both the modern ones, in some Arab and Islamic countries, and the books of jurisprudence and heritage - have many flaws that must be fixed once and for all. There are rulings about Ahl al-Dhimma - even if, Allah be praised, no current regime can enforce these rulings. However, just for the sake of amusement and diversion, I recommend that the viewers read the books of jurisprudence, and see how Ahl al-Dhimma are treated. I especially recommend this to people with a lust for Arab and Islamic history, who claim that our history is a source of pride, and that others were treated with kindness and love - especially Christians and Jews. Among these rulings, a Dhimmi must wear a belt, so he would be identifiable. Moreover, it is recommended that he be forced to the narrowest paths, and there are even jurisprudents who say that it is recommended to slap a Christian on the back of his neck so he would feel humiliated and degraded. This is how we harass him and then invite him to join Islam. I can swear that the Prophet Muhammad is innocent of such inhuman jurisprudence. I challenge anyone among the people with a lust for history to talk candidly to the West, to the advocates of human rights, and tell them that our heritage has such evils and flaws. We are a nation of blackout and darkness. We cannot live in the light of day. […] We do not hold ourselves accountable. This is why America came to demand that the Arabs be accountable. We must have more self-confidence and be accountable before others hold us accountable. We must discipline ourselves before the Americans and English discipline us. We must maintain human rights, which we have neglected for 1,300 or 1,400 years, to this day - until the arrival of the Americans, the Christians, the English, the Zionists, the Crusaders - call them what you will. They came to teach you, the followers of Muhammad, how to respect human rights.”

Iyad Jamal Al-Din (1961) Iraqi politician

Sayyed Ayad Jamal Aldin: Sayyed Ayad Jamal Aldin: The Arabs Want Tyrannical Regimes, in Line with Their Backward Culture, LBC TV, July 31, 2005 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_ZKffu6Wsg,

Love, People, Books, Religion

“In order to develop a new culture, work must acquire a new status. Human beings-as-commodities cease to exist, and a system is installed that establishes a quota for the fulfillment of one's social duty. The means of production belong to society, and the machine is merely the trench where duty is performed.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Man and Socialism in Cuba (1965)

“To uphold the world's words of the charter in the face of this challenge, every nation in this chamber has responsibilities. As sovereign states, we have an obligation to govern responsibly, and solve problems before they spill across borders. We have an obligation to prevent our territory from being used as a sanctuary for terrorism and proliferation and human trafficking and organized crime. We have an obligation to respect the rights and respond to the needs of our people.”

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

2000s, 2008, Address to the United Nations General Assembly (September 2008)

People, World, Problem

“Inferiority is not banal or incidental even when it happens to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin or circles under the eyes. it is not a superficial flaw in an otherwise perfect picture. It is not a minor irritation, nor it is it a trivial inconvenience, an occasional aggravation, or a regrettable but (frankly) harmless lapse in manners. It is not a "point of view" that some people with soft skins find "offensive." it is the deep and destructive devaluing of a person in life, a shredding of dignity and self-respect, an imposed exile from human worth an human recognition, the forced alienation of a person from even the possibility of whole ness or internal integrity.”

Andrea Dworkin book Intercourse

Source: Intercourse (1987), Chapter 9

Life, Women, People, Affliction

“[There is a] basic problem … of building a mathematical model of thought processes, and in particular of those aspects of thought which are concerned with information and decision processes. The perceptron is one type of model -- a set of memory devices connected in random fashion-- which has not yet achieved useful results but certainly seems to be a promising approach. The self-adaptive feedback control system which goes beyond the normal servo function of controlling its output, and in addition controls the parameters by which it controls its output is another which has already achieved pragmatic results in equipment control. It may be that the question of self-adaptation is a key to the whole question of how the human functions in a decisioning situation. For in many cases the ability of the human mind to adapt itself to a changing and complex environment is beyond our present aims in model construction.”

Robert E. Machol (1917–1998) American systems engineer

p ix-x
Information and Decision Processes (1960)

Mathematics, Fashion, Question, Problem

“UKIP’s main cause is taking on the establishment, and we’ve done it very well. We’ve turned the Conservative party more human than they used to be. They’re the party of big business and they don’t care very much about the people, but they’ve had to show they care about the people now. Similarly the Labour party are the party of the town hall bureaucrat, and their large pensions and large salaries. Now they’ve had to listen to the people.”

David Coburn (politician) (1959) British politician

Interview: What UKIP’s David Coburn wants for Kirkcaldy https://www.fifetoday.co.uk/news/politics/interview-what-ukip-s-david-coburn-wants-for-kirkcaldy-1-4449642 (May 18, 2017)

People, Business

“During cross-examination, prosecutor Hausner asked Eichmann if he considered himself guilty of the murder of millions of Jews. Eichmann replied: "Legally not, but in the human sense … yes, for I am guilty of having deported them". When Hausner produced as evidence a quote by Eichmann in 1945 stating: "I will leap into my grave laughing because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction", Eichmann countered the claim saying that he was referring only to "enemies of the Reich".”

Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) German Nazi SS-Obersturmbannführer

Great World Trials; The Adolph Eichmann Trial 1961 (1997) pages 332-337.

Feeling, Quotes, Sense

“There is (so to speak) "a mighty stream of tendency" to good in the human mind, upon which all objects float and are imperceptibly borne along; and though in the voyage of life we meet with strong rebuffs, with rocks and quicksands, yet there is a "a tide in the affairs of men," a heaving and a restless aspiration of the soul, by means of which, "with sails and tackle torn," the wreck and scattered fragments of our entire being drift into the port and haven of our desires!”

William Hazlitt (1778–1830) English writer

"Why Distant Objects Please" Table Talk: Essays On Men And Manners http://www.blupete.com/Literature/Essays/TableHazIV.htm (1821-1822)

Life, Men, Soul, Strong

“I conclude by listing several main points of this essay:
1. Human capital is of great importance in the modern economy.
2. Human capital has become of much greater significance during the past two decades.
3. Human capital is crucial to the international division of labor.
4. Much unmeasured learning goes on in companies and by adults.
5. People need to invest in themselves during their whole lives.
6. Distance learning will become of crucial importance to the teaching and learning process.
7. Human capital stimulates technological innovations and the high-tech sector.”

Gary S. Becker (1930–2014) American economist

"The Age of Human Capital", in Edward P. Lazear, Education in the Twenty-First Century (2002)

People, Learning, Past

“It is individuals who must be encouraged to undertake the unprecedented - and unprecedentedly profitable - effort to prevent the annihilation of the human race.”

L. Neil Smith (1946) American writer

"How Many Americans Does It Take to Change a Dim Bulb?" Presented to the Second Annual Freedom Summit, Phoenix, Arizona, 12 & 13 October 2002 http://www.lneilsmith.org/freedomsummit2.html.

Effort

“…every human being has an amount of genius in them.”

Brunello Cucinelli (1953) Italian entrepreneur and philanthropist

Source: Om Malik, Interview with Brunello Cucinelli http://pi.co/brunello-cucinelli-2/ 2015/04/27

“Neoliberalism is essentially a form of governing that sees democracy as an obstacle, at best, or as an illegitimate intervention into the rule of the market, at worst. For neoliberalism, rule by markets is understood as a form of governance that should be applied everywhere, not just to marketised goods, but to education, prisons, the organisation of state, and so on. So neoliberalism treats popular sovereignty, or decisions based on human agreement and deliberation, as inappropriate interference with the efficient market and the price mechanism.”

Wendy Brown (1955) American political theorist

Neoliberalism Has Eviscerated the Fabric of Social Life http://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/neoliberalism-has-eviscerated-the-fabric-of-social-life/, interview with Wendy Brown by Adam Ostolski, Green European Journal, March 2017

Education, Democracy, Decision

“Creating everlasting works is possible only being ducked in Verity; and gaining verity is possible only from the god. The one who given the ability for creation to, it is given the ability for immortality to. This ability is the substance not only of the human beings, but it can be seen in animals; birds and insects.”

Tivadar Csontváry Kosztka (1853–1919) painter from Hungary

The Authority

God, Bird, Animals

“I wished to show that Pythagoras, the first founder of the vegetable regimen, was at once a very great physicist and a very great physician; that there has been no one of a more cultured and discriminating humanity; that he was a man of wisdom and of experience; that his motive in commending and introducing the new mode of living was derived not from any extravagant superstition, but from the desire to improve the health and the manners of men.”

Antonio Cocchi (1695–1758) Italian physician and naturalist

The Pythagorean Diet: for the Use of the Medical Faculty

Wisdom, Men, Health, Motivation

“I acted like a human male. When I act like a human male it doesn't make me less human, it just makes me less female.”

Orson Scott Card (1951) American science fiction novelist

Homecoming saga, The Ships Of Earth (1994)

“I didn’t create poverty. This church didn’t create poverty. Poverty is not an issue, human suffering is not an issue at all, they were there before the creation of mankind.”

Peter Akinola (1944) Anglican Primate of the Church of Nigeria

Reported in the East African Standard January 2004, now only available online here http://www.thinkinganglicans.org.uk/archives/000985.html.

Suffering

“I am a man who is basically opposed to atrocities or ungentlemanly actions. In 1934, I promulgated a law against vivisection. You can see, therefore, that if I disapprove of the experimentation on animals, how could I possibly be in favor of torturing humans? The prosecution says that I had something to do with the freezing experiments which were performed in the concentration camps under the auspices of the air force. That is pure nonsense! I was much too busy to know about these medical experiments, and if anybody had asked me, I would have disapproved violently. It must have been Himmler who thought up these stupid experiments, although I think he shirked his responsibility by committing suicide. I am not too unhappy about it because I would not particularly enjoy sitting on the same bench with him. The same is true of that drunken Robert Ley, who did us a favor by hanging himself before the trial started. He was not going to be any advantage for us defendants when he took the stand.”

Hermann Göring (1893–1946) German politician and military leader

To Leon Goldensohn (24 May 1946)
The Nuremberg Interviews (2004)

Stupidity, Law, Business, Thinking

“No one of good character leaves behind a wasted life — whether they die in obscurity or renown. "Character," wrote the 19th Century evangelist, Dwight Moody, "is what you are in the dark." Your character is not tested on occasions of public scrutiny or acclaim. It is not tested in moments when the object of your actions is the regard of another. Your character is what you are to yourself, not what you pretend to be to yourself or others. Although human beings often attempt self-delusion, we cannot forever hide the truth about ourselves from ourselves. It will make itself known to us by means of our conscience despite our most strenuous effort to suppress it.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

1990s, Speech at Ohio Wesleyan University (1997)

Life, Truth, Effort

“If he could just stay there and gaze upon the land like a stone, whole centuries long, while grassy plains became forests and swamps turned into villages or tilled land. …He'd be recognized as human only when he stirred.”

Sten Nadolny book The Discovery of Slowness

The Discovery of Slowness (1983, 1987)

“Little by little we human beings are confronted with situations that give us more and more clues that we aren't perfect.”

Fred Rogers (1928–2003) American television personality

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood: Thoughts For All Ages http://pbskids.org/rogers/all_ages/thoughts1.htm

Perfection

“God will see to it that war always recurs as a drastic medicine for the human race.”

Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896) Historian, political writer

Politics, Volume I, p. 76.

God, War

“Historically, labor unions arose when people had gotten a taste of a different lifestyle and were willing to pay a lot more for their basic livelihood and had gotten into a fix they couldn't get out of – because they had accepted the unacceptable to begin with. Accepting something you have to form a labor union to fight after the fact only tells me that people were acting against their own best (or even good) interests for a long time. I don't see any rational, coherent explanation for this sort of behavior in humans, but it's all over the place.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: source access vs dynamism http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/9f52849f233672f4 (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

People, Behavior, Time, Fight

“A musician is like an ear for humanity, just as a painter is like an eye for humanity. The sounds somehow exist in a different sphere, the musician listens, and brings them out for the world. There's the mystery: that someone can hear something that is essentially soundless and make it into sound.”

John McLaughlin (1942) guitarist, founder of the Mahavishnu Orchestra

On his spiritual view of music.
New York Times interview (1972)

World

“The human heart is a meadow full of fireflies, a summer western sky of shimmering distant lightnings, a shore set round with flashing lighthouses, far-away voices calling that we cannot understand.”

Frank Crane (1861–1928) American Presbyterian minister

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

Understanding, Distant, Heart, Summer

“To talk of immaterial existences is to talk of nothings. To say that the human soul, angels, god, are immaterial, is to say they are nothings, or that there is no god, no angels, no soul. I cannot reason otherwise: but I believe I am supported in my creed of materialism by Locke, Tracy, and Stewart. At what age of the Christian church this heresy of immaterialism, this masked atheism, crept in, I do not know. But heresy it certainly is. […] I am satisfied, and sufficiently occupied with the things which are, without tormenting or troubling myself about those which may indeed be, but of which I have no evidence.”

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

Letter http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/jefferson_jadms.html to John Adams (15 August 1820) 1820s

God, Age, Angels, Soul

“There can be only one permanent revolution — a moral one; the regeneration of the inner man.
How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself.”

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910) Russian writer

"Three Methods Of Reform" in Pamphlets : Translated from the Russian (1900) as translated by Aylmer Maude, p. 29
As quoted in The Artist's Way at Work : Riding the Dragon (1999) by Mark A. Bryan with Julia Cameron and Catherine A. Allen, p. 160
Variant: Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

World, Feeling, Thinking, Change

“It is a hyperbole excusable in poetic language, but not scientifically valid, when he [Jesus] is identified with the ideal of humanity. The ideal is the unconditioned, the absolute, but every phenomenon in time and space is conditioned and limited, and cannot therefore coincide with the ideal. This hyperbole of pious faith may grow out of noble feelings, but for all that it remains essentially false, and is harmful when seriously regarded as dogma.”

Otto Pfleiderer (1839–1908) German Protestant theologian

Source: Evolution and Theology (1900), p. 19.

Faith, Feeling, Time, Falseness

“The American child is a highly intelligent human being — characteristically sensitive, humorous, open-minded, eager to learn, and has a strong sense of excitement, energy, and healthy curiosity about the world in which he lives. Lucky indeed is the grown-up who manages to carry these same characteristics into adult life. It usually makes for a happy and successful individual.”

Walt Disney (1901–1966) American film producer and businessman

Deeds Rather Than Words (1963)

Life, Happiness, World, Intelligence

“We have a booming global economy but we don't have a global society. Markets reduce everything, including human beings and nature, to commodities. Societies need more than this to prosper — such goals as political freedom and social justice.”

George Soros (1930) Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

Marshall William Fishwick in Popular Culture: Cavespace to Cyberspace (1999)
Misattributed

Justice, Nature, Freedom

“Against human opposition the machine usually emerges victorious, since individual patterns tend to be not random but a function of emotions and previous training and experience.”

Richard Arnold Epstein (1927) American physicist

Source: The Theory of Gambling and Statistical Logic (Revised Edition) 1977, Chapter Four, Coins, Wheels, And Oddments, p. 90

Victory, Training

“In the nine heavens are eight Paradises;
Where is the ninth one? In the human breast.
Only the blessed dwell in th' Paradises,
But blessedness dwells in the human breast.”

William R. Alger (1822–1905) American clergyman and poet

"The Ninth Paradise", p. 223.
Poetry of the Orient, 1865 edition

“Although the physical factors are distinguished from the biological they are not separable in specific organisms… Human organisms do not function except in conjunction with other human organisms.”

Chester Barnard book The Functions of the Executive

Source: The Functions of the Executive (1938), p. 11

“Every animal has his or her story, his or her thoughts, daydreams, and interests. All feel joy and love, pain and fear, as we now know beyond any shadow of a doubt. All deserve that the human animal afford them the respect of being cared for with great consideration for those interests or left in peace.”

Ingrid Newkirk (1949) British-American activist

"Every Week There is More Reason to Feel Empathy for Animals" https://www.huffingtonpost.com/ingrid-newkirk/every-week-there-is-more_b_216409.html, Huffington Post, 17 July 2009. 2009

Love, Pain, Fear, Peace

“It is perilous to make a chasm in human affections; not that they gape so long and wide—but so quickly close again!”

Nathaniel Hawthorne book Wakefield

"Wakefield" (1835) from Twice Told Tales (1837, 1851)

“E'en here the tear of pity springs,
And hearts are touched by human things.”

John Conington (1825–1869) British classical scholar

Source: Translations, The Aeneid of Virgil (1866), Book I, p. 23

Spring, Tear, Heart

“Art’s true purpose is to be human as opposed to some rarefied activity set away from real life. I think art should help you to navigate the real challenges of being a human being.”

Martin Firrell (1963) British artist and activist

Quoted in the documentary The Question Mark Inside broadcast in the UK by Sky Arts (30 October 2009).

Life, Art, Thinking, Help

““So as we’ve seen, not one faith has ever lived up to its promises. The world has never become a paradise, quite the opposite, in fact: think of the millions upon millions slaughtered, tortured, imprisoned for this great idea, this good news, this revolution. The visionary who works against human nature to impose his—or her—sweeping vision on the world is inevitably its worst enemy.
Now, who isn’t? Consider the work of certain individual mortals who set themselves simple tasks. They saw no need to raise armies; they saw no need for revolution or bloodshed; they worked instead for realistic goals with the tools they had. And they succeeded, and their works have been of lasting benefit to humanity.” He erased the board with relish and chalked a new set of names:.
“People like these have done more to relieve human misery than any prophet with a manifesto ever will.””

Kage Baker book In the Garden of Iden

Source: In the Garden of Iden (1997), Chapter 6 (p. 47)

People, World, Faith, Idea

“Immensely powerful though we are today, it's equally clear that we're going to be even more powerful tomorrow. And what's more there will be greater compulsion upon us to use our power as the number of human beings on Earth increases still further. Clearly we could devastate the world. [… ] As far as we know, the Earth is the only place in the universe where there is life. Its continued survival now rests in our hands.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Closing lines
The Living Planet (1984)

Life, World, Universe

“Human life can be lived like a poem.”

Lin Yutang book The Importance of Living

Source: The Importance of Living (1937), p. 32

Life

“Transnational Corporations must be legally accountable for the negative human rights impacts of their activities.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Statement by Alfred de Zayas, Independent Expert on the Promotion of a Democratic and Equitable International Order Ecuador Workshop 11-12 March 2014 http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=14340&LangID=E. 2014

“Our most terrifying fears and our innermost secret desires for extermination are reflected in this elegant and profound book, without any sort of leniency to attenuate the disgust and hopelessness we feel when faced with a humanity constantly atrophied by a series of values and practices that lead to chaos.”

Albert Caraco (1919–1971) French-Uruguayan philosopher

Albert Caraco, Rodrigo Santos Rivera. Breviario del caos Editorial Sexto Piso, 2006. Editorial text
Original: En este pequeño libro escrito con elegancia y profundidad vemos reflejados nuestros más terribles temores y nuestros más inconfesados deseos de exterminio, sin ningún tipo de lenitivo que pudiera atenuar el asco y la desesperanza frente a una humanidad cada vez más atrofiada por una serie de valores y prácticas que irremediablemente se dirigen al caos.

Secret, Books, Fear, Feeling

“Undoubtedly there are bourgeois who from a feeling of justice and humanity place themselves upon the side of the laborers and socialists, but these are only the exceptions; the mass of the bourgeoisie has class consciousness, a consciousness of being the ruling and exploiting class. Indeed, the mass of the bourgeoisie, just because they are a ruling class, have a much sharper and stronger class consciousness than the proletariat.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

Justice, Feeling

“There towers to the sky a monument of four million pairs of human fetters taken from the arms of slaves, and I read on its little headstone this, 'Sacred to the memory of Human Slavery'. For forty years of its infamous life the Democratic Party taught that it was divine; God's institution. They defended it, they stood around it, they followed it to its grave as a mourner. But here it lies, dead by the hand of Abraham Lincoln; dead by the power of the Republican Party, dead by the justice of Almighty God. Don't camp there, young man. That is no place in which to put your young life. Come out, and come over into this camp of liberty, of order, of law, of justice, of freedom, of all that is glorious under these night stars.”

James A. Garfield (1831–1881) American politician, 20th President of the United States (in office in 1881)

1870s, An Appeal to Young Men (1879)

Life, God, Justice, Law

Quotes about humanity page 88

Quotes about humanity
page 88