Quotes about humanity
page 94

“To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body. As black Americans living in a small Kentucky town, the railroad tracks were a daily reminder of our marginality. Across those tracks were paved streets, stores we could not enter, restaurants we could not eat in, and people we could not look directly in the face. Across those tracks was a world we could work in as maids, as janitors, as prostitutes, as long as it was in a service capacity. We could enter that world but we could not live there. We had always to return to the margin, to cross the tracks, to shacks and abandoned houses on the edge of town. There were laws to ensure our return. To not return was to risk being punished. Living as we did-on the edge-we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and center. Our survival depended on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and center and an ongoing private acknowledgment that we were a necessary, vital part of that whole. This sense of wholeness, impressed upon our consciousness by the structure of our daily lives, provided us an oppositional world view-a mode of seeing unknown to most of our oppressors, that sustained us, aided us in our struggle to transcend poverty and despair, strengthened our sense of self and our solidarity. … Much feminist theory emerges from privileged women who live at the center, whose perspectives on reality rarely include knowledge and awareness of the lives of women and men who live in the margin. As a consequence, feminist theory lacks wholeness, lacks the broad analysis that could encompass a variety of human experiences. Although feminist theorists are aware of the need to develop ideas and analysis that encompass a larger number of experiences, that serve to unify rather than to polarize, such theory is complex and slow in formation. At its most visionary, it will emerge from individuals who have knowledge of both margin and center.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

p. xvii https://books.google.com/books?id=ClWvBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT8. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Preface

Women, Men, People, World

“Knowledge grows, but human beings remain much the same.Belief in progress is a relic of the Christian view of history as a universal narrative, and an intellectually rigorous atheism would start by questioning it.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

The Atheist Delusion (2008)

History, Question, Knowledge, Universe

“All the human beings I met were either sure that there would be no afterlife or else that they would get preferential treatment in the hereafter.”

Philip José Farmer (1918–2009) American science fiction writer

Source: The Riverworld series, To Your Scattered Bodies Go (1971), Chapter 4 (p. 17)

“This is what fascinates Shaw: this enormous force that ignores our human preferences, our logic and intellect. It fascinates him because to be suddenly gripped by it is to see that human beings are not the accidental products of a mechanical universe — that they are not 'alone'. As social animals, we live in a narrow but apparently logical world with a well-defined identity and position. But man is the satellite of a double-star; there is also an inner-world that seems to have a completely different set of laws from the rational universe. And in fact, if we judge this 'rational universe' by its own laws, we see that it is not self-complete and self-explanatory; space must end somewhere, time must have a stop; but the alternative propositions sound equally 'logical': space is infinite; time has neither beginning nor end. The answer to these paradoxes must be that the outer universe is not self-complete; it is only half a universe. The inner world is the other half. But at present we know very little about this inner world. It is only within the present century that its existence has been clearly recognized by psychology.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Bernard Shaw: A Reassessment (1969), p. 167

World, Law, Star, Universe

“There are those who contend that the best strategist is the commander most distantly removed from his troops. From where units exist merely as symbols on a map the strategist can perform in a vacuum and his judgment cannot be infected by compassion for his troops. If war were fought with push-button devices, one might make a science of command. But because war is as much a conflict of passion as it is of force, no commander can become a strategist until he knows his men. Far from being a handicap to command, compassion is the measure of it. For unless one values the lives of his soldiers and is tormented by their ordeals, he is unfit to command. He is unfit to appraise the cost of an objective in terms of human life. To spend lives, knowingly, deliberately- even cruelly- he has to steel his mind with the knowledge that to do less would only cost more in the end. For if he becomes tormented by the casualties he must endure, he is in danger of losing sight of his strategic objective. Where the objective is lost, he the war is prolonged and the cost becomes infinitely worse.”

Omar Bradley (1893–1981) United States Army field commander during World War II

Source: A Soldier's Story (1951), p. 310

Life, Men, War, Knowledge

“Giacomo Rizzolatti… calls these "mirror neurons" and suggests that they provide the first insight into imitation, identification, empathy, and possibly the ability to mime vocalization—the mental processes intrinsic to human interaction. Vilayanur Ramachandran has found evidence of comparable neurons in the premotor cortex of people. …one can see a whole new area of biology opening up… that can give us a sense of what makes us social, communicating beings. An ambitious undertaking of this sort might… teach us something about the factors that give rise to tribalism, which is so often associated with fear, hatred, and intolerance of outsiders.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

In Search of Memory (2006)

People, Fear, Communication, Sense

“I grew up with the colors of war -- the red colors of fire and blood, the brown tones of earth as it explodes in our faces and the piercing silver of an exploded missile, so bright that nothing can protect your eyes from it. I grew up with the sounds of war -- the staccato sounds of gunfire, the wrenching booms of explosions, ominous drones of jets flying overhead and the wailing warning sounds of sirens. These are the sounds you would expect, but they are also the sounds of dissonant concerts of a flock of birds screeching in the night, the high-pitched honest cries of children and the thunderous, unbearable silence. "War," a friend of mine said, "is not about sound at all. It is actually about silence, the silence of humanity."”

Zainab Salbi (1969) Iraqi American author, women's rights activist

Speech at TEDGlobal 2010

War, Children, Color, Bird

“To prevent the starving peasants from fleeing to the towns an internal passport system was introduced and unauthorized change of residence was made punishable with imprisonment. Peasants were not allowed passports at all, and were therefore tied to the soil as in the worst days of feudal serfdom: this state of things was not altered until the 1970s. The concentration camps filled with new hordes of prisoners sentenced to hard labour. The object of destroying the peasants’ independence and herding them into collective farms was to create a population of slaves, the benefit of whose labour would accrue to industry. The immediate effect was to reduce Soviet agriculture to a state of decline from which it has not yet recovered, despite innumerable measures of reorganization and reform. At the time of Stalin’ s death, almost a quarter of a century after mass collectivization was initiated, the output of grain per head of population was still below the 1913 level; yet throughout this period, despite misery and starvation, large quantities of farm produce were exported all over the world for the sake of Soviet industry. The terror and oppression of those years cannot be expressed merely by the figures for loss of human life, enormous as these are; perhaps the most vivid picture of what collectivization meant is in Vasily Grossman’ s posthumous novel Forever Flowing.”

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

pg. 39
Main Currents Of Marxism (1978), Three Volume edition, Volume III: The Breakdown

Life, Death, World, Change

“Stories are the architects of the human mind.”

David Baboulene (1960) UK author

The Story Book (2010)

“When a man sets out upon any course of inquiry, the object of his search may be either light or fruit — either knowledge for its own sake or knowledge for the sake of good things to which it leads. In various fields of study these two ideals play parts of varying importance. In the appeal made to our interest by nearly all the great modern sciences some stress is laid both upon the light-bearing and upon the fruit-bearing quality, but the proportions of the blend are different in different sciences. At one end of the scale stands the most general science of all, metaphysics, the science of reality. Of the student of that science it is, indeed, true that "he yet may bring some worthy thing for waiting souls to see"; but it must be light alone, it can hardly be fruit that he brings. Most nearly akin to the metaphysician is the student of the ultimate problems of physics. The corpuscular theory of matter is, hitherto, a bearer of light alone. Here, however, the other aspect is present in promise; for speculations about the structure of the atom may lead one day to the discovery of practical means for dissociating matter and for rendering available to human use the overwhelming resources of intra-atomic energy.”

Arthur Cecil Pigou (1877–1959) British economist

Source: The Economics of Welfare (1920), Ch. 1 : Welfare and Economic Welfare, § 1; First lines, p. 3

Soul, Search, Knowledge, Problem

“As we shall see in this book's chapters, traditional societies are far more diverse in many of their cultural practices than are modern industrial societies. […] Yet psychologists base most of their generalizations about human nature on studies of our own narrow and atypical slice of human diversity. […] That is, as social scientists Joseph Henrich, Steven Heine, and Ara Norenzayan express it, most of our understanding of human psychology is based on subjects who may be described by the acronym WEIRD: from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic societies. […] Hence if we wish to generalize about human nature, we need to broaden greatly our study sample from the usual WEIRD subjects […] to the whole range of traditional societies.”

Jared Diamond book The World Until Yesterday

Prologue, section "Why study traditional societies?"
The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn from Traditional Societies? (2012)

Books, Education, Understanding, Nature

“We know that these challenges can be overcome because history moves in the direction of justice. The evils of slavery were accepted and unchanged for centuries, yet eventually the human heart would not abide them. There is a voice of conscience and hope in every man and woman that will not be silenced, what Martin Luther King called a certain kind of fire that no water could put out. That flame could not be extinguished at the Birmingham jail. It could not be stamped out at Robben Island prison. It was seen in the darkness here at Goree Island, where no chain could bind the soul. This untamed fire of justice continues to burn in the affairs of man, and it lights the way before us. May God bless you all.”

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

2000s, 2003, Hope and Conscience Will Not Be Silenced (July 2003)

God, Justice, Hope, Way

“The contrast between man's ideological capacity to move at random through material and metaphysical spaces and his physical limitations, is Uneven lengths and uneven angle-degrees of the point-rudder result in a deviating course. the origin of all human tragedy. It is this contrast between power and prostration that implies the duality of human existence. Half winged-half imprisoned, this is man!”

Paul Klee (1879–1940) German Swiss painter

IIII.37, The Arrow. p. 54
1921 - 1930, Pedagogical Sketch Book, (1925)

“The great writers to whom the world owes what religious liberty it possesses, have mostly asserted freedom of conscience as an indefeasible right, and denied absolutely that a human being is accountable to others for his religious belief.”

John Stuart Mill book On Liberty

Source: On Liberty (1859), Ch. 1: Introductory

World, Freedom

““Most people have a price. And they have a price because of human emotions named fear and greed.”

Robert T. Kiyosaki (1947) American finance author , investor

Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money-That the Poor and the Middle Class Do Not!

People, Fear

“Men’s pay paid women to love and nurture, to connect and feel. To be nurturer-connectors. In contrast, men received their pay by being some form of killer-protector. By becoming a human doing (a captain or a coal miner), not a human being”

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

a person who feels happy or sad
Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say (2000)

Love, Women, Men, Sadness

“Humanity is a huge aggregate lie, and a huge lie is less than a small truth. Humanity is less, far less than the individual, because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies. And they say that love is the greatest thing; they persist in SAYING this, the foul liars, and just look at what they do! Look at all the millions of people who repeat every minute that love is the greatest, and charity is the greatest— and see what they are doing all the time. By their works ye shall know them, for dirty liars and cowards, who daren't stand by their own actions, much less by their own words.”

D.H. Lawrence book Women in Love

Source: Women in Love (1920), Ch. 11

Love, People, Truth, Lie

“I tell brides and grooms to have many children. To bear many children and raise them is God's blessing. It is unthinkable the human beings apply their own standard of judgement and arbitrarily abort precious lives given to them by God. All life born into this world embodies God's will. All life is noble and precious, so it must be cared for and protected.”

Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) Korean religious leader

2009, As a Peace Loving Global Citizen http://www.euro-tongil.org/TFbiography.pdf

Life, God, Children, World

“But this I thought was the meaning of life, that the individual shook off the habit of accepting the favors of difference, should that be tempting, steeled himself against its humiliation, should that weigh down on him, in order to find the universal, what is common to all human beings, to concern oneself only with that. Oh! How beautiful to lose oneself in this way. But then I thought again that in the having of this concern the meaning of life was to be concerned for oneself as if the particular individual were all there was. Oh! How beautiful thus to find oneself in the universal! If the universal is the rule then the individual is the paradigm [corrected from demand]; if the universal is the demand then the universal is the fulfillment; if the universal is everything, if the universal says everything, then the particular individual believes that the everything is said about him-him alone. So if the place and context here did not require signature, none would be needed, for again it is infinitely inconsequential who has said it (as though the favored one said it, the one who was wronged being in no position to say it, since after all they all have it in them to do it).”

Sören Kierkegaard (1813–1855) Danish philosopher and theologian, founder of Existentialism

S. Kierkegaard 1846 Journals, Hannay 1996, VII IB200, p. 252
1840s, The Journals of Søren Kierkegaard, 1840s

Life, Beauty, Way, Universe

“We are indeed human beings. We are merely not Homo sapiens. Homo sapiens is a species, something into which one is born. Humanity one chooses. Men who choose inhumanity are merely upright beasts.”

John C. Wright (1961) American novelist and technical writer

Source: Titans of Chaos (2007), Chapter 6, “Six Score Leagues Northwest of Paradise” Section 4 (p. 75)

Men

“Existential psychotherapy is the movement which, although standing on one side on the scientific analysis owed chiefly to the genius of Freud, also brings back into the picture the understanding of man on the deeper and broader level — man as the being who is human. It is based on the assumption that it is possible to have a science of man which does not fragmentize man and destroy his humanity at the same moment as it studies him. It unites science and ontology.”

Rollo May (1909–1994) US psychiatrist

Source: Existence (1958), p. 36; also published in The Discovery of Being : Writings in Existential Psychology (1983), Part II : The Cultural Background, Ch. 5 : Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Freud, p. 87

Understanding, Study, Science

“But if we can’t help our latent biases, we can help our behavior in response to those instinctive reactions, which is why we work to design systems and processes that overcome that very human part of us all. Although the research may be unsettling, it is what we do next that matters most.”

James Comey (1960) American lawyer and the seventh director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)

2010s, Hard Truths: Law Enforcement (2015)

Behavior, Help, Parting

“Interspecies differences may lead to concluding that substances that are innocuous or beneficial in humans are harmful, and that substances that have insidious effects on humans are harmless. For example, penicillin is extremely poisonous to guinea pigs. Had penicillin been subjected to the routine animal tests, as new drugs presently are, it would never have been tried on humans.”

Deborah Mayo American philosopher

Source: Against a Scientific Justification of Animal Experiments, p. 351

Animals

“Ziegler said, “You know the story in the Bible, the story of Abraham and Isaac?”
“Of course.”
“God instructs Abraham to offer his son as a sacrifice. Isaac makes it as far as the chopping block before God changes his mind.”
Yes. Jacob had always imagined God a little appalled at Abraham’s willingness to cooperate.
Ziegler said, “What’s the moral of the story?”
“Faith.”
“Hardly,” Ziegler said. “Faith has nothing to do with it. Abraham never doubted the existence of God—how could he? The evidence was ample. His virtue wasn’t faith, it was fealty. He was so simplemindedly loyal that he would commit even this awful, terrible act. He was the perfect foot soldier. The ideal pawn. Abraham’s lesson: fealty is rewarded. Not morality. The fable makes morality contingent. Don’t go around killing innocent people, that is, unless you're absolutely certain God want you to. It’s a lunatic’s credo.
“Isaac, on the other hand, learns something much more interesting. He learns that neither God nor his own father can be trusted. Maybe it makes him a better man than Abraham. Suppose Isaac grows up and fathers a child of his own, and God approaches him and makes the same demand. One imagines Isaac saying, ’No. You can take him if you must, but I won’t slaughter my son for you.’ He’s not the good and faithful servant his father was. But he is, perhaps, a more wholesome human being.””

Robert Charles Wilson (1953) author

The Fields of Abraham (pp. 21-22)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

God, People, Faith, Imagination

“When we are in partnership and have stopped clutching each other's throats, when we have stopped enslaving each other, we will stand together, hands clasped, and be friends. We will be comrades, we will be brothers, and we will begin the march to the grandest civilization the human race has ever known.”

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

The Issue (1908)

Partnership

“The human sciences have to assume at least an equal responsibility in establishing the foundations of knowledge.”

Michael Halliday (1925–2018) Australian linguist

Michael Halliday (1987) cited in: Margaret Laing, Keith Williamson (1994) Speaking in Our Tongues. p. 99.
1970s and later

Knowledge, Science

“The human species, according to the best theory I can form of it, is composed of two distinct races, the men who borrow and the men who lend.”

Charles Lamb book Essays of Elia

The Two Races of Men.
Essays of Elia (1823)

Men

“Man has two sets of needs: his need as an animal to avoid pain and his need as a human to grow psychologically.”

Frederick Herzberg (1923–2000) American psychologist

Source: Work and the nature of man, 1966, p. 71

Pain, Animals

“Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it’s a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. "Atheistic humanism" became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumamism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction. Post-Christian European culture is already post-cultural and, with its surging Muslim populations, will soon be post-European.”

Mark Steyn book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It

Source: America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It (2006), Ch. 5, p. 98

Time, Future

“Growing has no connection with audience.
Audience has no connection with identity.
Identity has no connection with a universe.
A universe has no connection with human nature.”

Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) American art collector and experimental writer of novels, poetry and plays

The Geographical History of America (1936)

Nature, Universe

“This seems to me to be more a day for a searching of the human soul perhaps than for any kind of scientific celebration.”

Bill Downs (1914–1978) American journalist

In discussing the Ivy Mike thermonuclear tests in an appearance on See It Now, November 2, 1952

Soul, Search

“The current ideology of religious harmony emphasizes similarity—different religions are harmonious because they say the same thing; The older doctrine of multiple paths lays stress on their diversity—these paths are valid because they serve genuine different needs and answer to different natures. In short, they serve humanity not by being the same but by being different.”

Ram Swarup (1920–1998) Indian historian

Ramakrishna Mission. (1986). Ramakrishna Mission: In search of a new identity.

Religion, Nature

““Something tells me that this isn’t going to be as simple as it looks.”
“What is?” Wald said, raising his eyebrows.
“Nothing, of course. But hope springs eternal in the human spleen.””

James Blish book The Quincunx of Time

Source: The Quincunx of Time (1973), Chapter 7, “A Few Cosmic Jokes” (p. 77)

Hope, Spring

“And here I hold that a liberal and brotherly welcome to all who are likely to come to the United States is the only wise policy which this nation can adopt. It has been thoughtfully observed that every nation, owing to its peculiar character and composition, has a definite mission in the world. What that mission is, and what policy is best adapted to assist in its fulfillment, is the business of its people and its statesmen to know, and knowing, to make a noble use of this knowledge. I need not stop here to name or describe the missions of other or more ancient nationalities. Our seems plain and unmistakable. Our geographical position, our relation to the outside world, our fundamental principles of government, world-embracing in their scope and character, our vast resources, requiring all manner of labor to develop them, and our already existing composite population, all conspire to one grand end, and that is, to make us the perfect national illustration of the unity and dignity of the human family that the world has ever seen. In whatever else other nations may have been great and grand, our greatness and grandeur will be found in the faithful application of the principle of perfect civil equality to the people of all races and of all creeds. We are not only bound to this position by our organic structure and by our revolutionary antecedents, but by the genius of our people. Gathered here from all quarters of the globe, by a common aspiration for national liberty as against caste, divine right govern and privileged classes, it would be unwise to be found fighting against ourselves and among ourselves, it would be unadvised to attempt to set up any one race above another, or one religion above another, or prescribe any on account of race, color or creed.”

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

1860s, Our Composite Nationality (1869)

People, World, Family, Faith

“We contrast the urban and the natural, but that’s a contemporary myth. We’re animals, after all; our cities are organic products, fully as “natural” (whatever that word really means) as a termite hill or a rabbit warren. But how much more interesting: how much more complex, dressed in the intricacies and exfoliations of human culture, simple patterns iterated into infinite variation. And full of secrets, secrets beyond counting.”

Robert Charles Wilson (1953) author

The Inner Inner City (p. 74)
The Perseids and Other Stories (2000)

Secret, Nature, Animals

“I don't necessarily see the elements that I invoke on the cover and in the songs as being in binary opposition. I know certain binary tensions emerge between these elements, but a lot of times they're more like archetypal elements; these free-standing, huge forces. Mortality, standing alone, as a thing; as opposed to, "Over here's life; over here's death. Here's bad luck, but here's blessing and redemption. Here's water; here's fire." Certainly those things come up again and again in the songs, but it's not intentional, and probably has more to do with the fact that those things emerge in real life, without any effort on our part whatsoever, than they are derived from any classical tradition. I think classicism in general might reflect more closely the natural order of human life, while postmodernism is somehow removed from the natural order, more cerebral and sterile, removed from real life on some level. So what seems like classicism in some of these songs might be just what I view as an accurate reflection of real life on this planet.”

Joanna Newsom (1982) American musician

Interview with Pitchfork (2006)

Life, Death, Bad luck, Nature

“A constitution is framed for ages to come, and is designed to approach immortality as nearly as human institutions can approach it.”

John Marshall (1755–1835) fourth Chief Justice of the United States

Cohens v. Virginia, 19 U.S. (6 Wheaton) 264, 387 (1821)

Age

“And if the immortality of the soul had been unable to find vindication in rational empiricism, neither is it satisfied with pantheism. To say that everything is God, and that when we die, we return to God, or more accurately, continue in Him, avails our longing nothing; for if this indeed be so, then we were in God before we were born, and if we die we return to where we were before being born, then the human soul, the individual consciousness, is perishable. And since we know very well that God, the personal and conscious God of Christian monotheism, is simply the provider, and above all the guarantor, of our immortality, pantheism is said, and rightly said to be merely atheism disguised; and in my opinion, undisguised.”

Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), V : The Rationalist Dissolution

God, Soul, Personality

“When we speak of general war, we don't mean real progress on the road of freedom, the real, moral, and social advancement of man, achieved by force. This may be the intention, but how rarely is it the result of general war! We mean this:—That the face of nature is stained with human gore—we mean that taxation is increased and industry diminished—we know that it means that burdens unreasonable and untold are entailed on late posterity—we know that it means that demoralization is let loose, that families are broken up, that lusts become unbridled in every country to which that war is extended.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech at Manchester (12 October 1853), quoted in The Times (13 October 1853), p. 7.
1850s

War, Family, Nature, Freedom

“If the multitude does not understand or understands only with difficulty several laws that are immediately necessary to its life, how can it be imagined by someone that it -which in a democracy must be led through itself-could understand the most difficult natural laws; or that it would know intuitively the most subtle and imperceptible norms of human leadership, norms that project beyond itself, its life, its life's necessities, or which do not apply directly to it but to a more superior entity, the nation?”

Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938) Romanian politician

For My Legionaries: The Iron Guard (1936), Politics

Life, Law, Democracy, Imagination

“From a religious point of view the triadic classification of being as nature, spirit, and God has no validity. There is only the dyad: nature, which includes the human spirit, and God. The only way man can break the bonds of nature is by cleaving to God; by acting in compliance with the divine will rather than in accordance with the human will.”

Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903–1994) israeli intellectual

"Judaism, Human Values and the Jewish State" (1995)

God, Way, Nature

“Men and women were created to be jointly the guarantee of the future of the humanity — not only a physical guarantee, but also a moral one.”

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

2003

Women, Men, Future

“There is no need for a shrine. Start building something small. […] It is to be one square tsubo. This structure of one square tsubo is not for human habitation. […] Additions can be made depending on your minds.”

Nakayama Miki (1798–1887) Founder of Tenrikyo

The Life of Oyasama, Foundress of Tenrikyo, p. 42–3
The Life of Oyasama

Dependency

“It is an arithmetic, moreover, which cannot be denied even though we nearly all try to deny it. The arithmetic is simply this: Any positive rate of growth whatever eventually carries a human population to an unacceptable magnitude, no matter how small the rate of growth may be unless the rate of population growth can be reduced to zero before the population reaches an unacceptable magnitude. There is a famous theorem in economics, one which I call the dismal theorem, which states that if the only thing which can check the growth of population is starvation and misery, then the population will grow until it is sufficiently miserable and starving to check its growth. There is a second, even worse theorem which I call the utterly dismal theorem. It says that if the only thing which can check the growth of population is starvation and misery, then the ultimate result of any technological improvement is to enable a larger number of people to live in misery than before and hence to increase the total sum of human misery.”

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

Source: 1960s, The meaning of the twentieth century: the great transition, 1964, p. 126

People

“Come now: Do we really think that the gods are everywhere called by the same names by which they are addressed by us? But the gods have as many names as there are languages among humans. For it is not with the gods as with you: you are Velleius wherever you go, but Vulcan is not Vulcan in Italy and in Africa and in Spain.”
Age et his vocabulis esse deos facimus quibus a nobis nominantur? At primum, quot hominum linguae, tot nomina deorum. Non enim, ut tu Velleius, quocumque veneris, sic idem in Italia, idem in Africa, idem in Hispania.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (-106–-43 BC) Roman philosopher and statesman

Book I, section 84
De Natura Deorum – On the Nature of the Gods (45 BC)

God, Thinking

“I can understand the ignorant masses loving to soak themselves in drink—oh, yes, it's very shocking that they should, of course—very shocking to us who live in cozy homes, with all the graces and pleasures of life around us, that the dwellers in damp cellars and windy attics should creep from their dens of misery into the warmth and glare of the public-house bar, and seek to float for a brief space away from their dull world upon a Lethe stream of gin. But think, before you hold up your hands in horror at their ill-living, what "life" for these wretched creatures really means. Picture the squalid misery of their brutish existence, dragged on from year to year in the narrow, noisome room where, huddled like vermin in sewers, they welter, and sicken, and sleep; where dirt-grimed children scream and fight and sluttish, shrill-voiced women cuff, and curse, and nag; where the street outside teems with roaring filth and the house around is a bedlam of riot and stench. Think what a sapless stick this fair flower of life must be to them, devoid of mind and soul. The horse in his stall scents the sweet hay and munches the ripe corn contentedly. The watch-dog in his kennel blinks at the grateful sun, dreams of a glorious chase over the dewy fields, and wakes with a yelp of gladness to greet a caressing hand. But the clod-like life of these human logs never knows one ray of light. From the hour when they crawl from their comfortless bed to the hour when they lounge back into it again they never live one moment of real life. Recreation, amusement, companionship, they know not the meaning of. Joy, sorrow, laughter, tears, love, friendship, longing, despair, are idle words to them. From the day when their baby eyes first look out upon their sordid world to the day when, with an oath, they close them forever and their bones are shoveled out of sight, they never warm to one touch of human sympathy, never thrill to a single thought, never start to a single hope. In the name of the God of mercy; let them pour the maddening liquor down their throats and feel for one brief moment that they live!”

Jerome K. Jerome book Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)

Love, Life, Women, God

“It’s vital as we postulate and work toward exploration and human settlement beyond Earth. I like to think of the possibilities of sustaining humanity’s continuum, with preserved recorded history way beyond the life of our Sun.”

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

Source: Zero Gravity interview (2006), Ch. 5

Life, Way, History, Thinking

“In the heart of the sphere of everything that keeps changing, there one thing that never changes—life. Life is the one thing that stays with me until the very end. Today, people may like me. Tomorrow, they may not. But my life is still there. It is not subject to good and bad. Human beings are the thinkers—homo sapiens—the ones with the brains. We can think about things, and in our thoughts, everything keeps changing. In our moods, everything keeps changing. Yet, in our beings, there is the heart, and the heart does not change because it is consistent with only one thing. Our needs on the outside change all the time, but the heart's need never changes. It is consistently the same, and always will be.”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Hong Kong, China May 6, 1990
1990s

Life, People, Mood, Thinking

“The history of mathematics is important also as a valuable contribution to the history of civilization. Human progress is closely identified with scientific thought. Mathematical and physical researches are a reliable record of intellectual progress.”

Florian Cajori book A History of Mathematics

Source: A History of Mathematics (1893), p. 4; Cited in: Moritz (1914, 90); Study and research in mathematics

History, Mathematics

“The notion that human interaction could spontaneously and autonomously achieve a stable, orderly, self-sustaining form of equilibrium in the absence of government intervention—what François Quesnay and the first school of économistes dubbed un ordre naturel in the late 1750s—has facilitated a conception of the market as a self-regulating system that could only prosper by purging itself of the prejudicial meddling of governments and politics. In the face of this new conception of an orderly market, governance would be relegated outside that autonomous space, charged with the responsibility of policing and punishing those who deviate—those who do not see the natural laws or, in more technical jargon, who bypass the market.”

Bernard Harcourt (1963) American academic

Source: The Illusion of Free Markets: Punishment and the Myth of Natural Order (2011), p. 241

School, Law, Nature

“Within me, and in others, what I seek to know is the darkness and the glory of all humanity. My vulnerability leads me to Truth, which is the ultimate defense.”

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

Degrees: Thought Capsules and Micro Tales (1989)

Truth

“A community of vices is a closer and more direct bond between human beings than a community of virtues.”

Francis Marion Crawford (1854–1909) Novelist, short story writer, essayist (1854-1909)

The Novel: What It Is (1893)

Communication

“If within the last century art conceived as an autonomous activity has come to be invested with an unprecedented stature—the nearest thing to a sacramental human activity acknowledged by secular society—it is because one of the tasks art has assumed is making forays into and taking up positions on the frontiers of consciousness (often very dangerous to the artist as a person) and reporting back what’s there.”

Susan Sontag book Styles of Radical Will

“The Pornographic Imagination,” p. 45
Styles of Radical Will (1966)

Art, Personality

“The language of science—and especially of a science of man—is, necessarily, anti-individualistic, and hence a threat to human freedom and dignity.”

Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) Hungarian psychiatrist

Source: Anti-Freud (1990), p. 44.

Freedom, Science

“Maslow explained that, some time in the late thirties, he had been struck by the thought that modern psychology is based on the study of sick people. But since there are more healthy people around than sick people, how can this psychology give a fair idea of the workings of the human mind? It struck him that it might be worthwhile to devote some time to the study of healthy people.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: New Pathways In Psychology: Maslow and the Post-Freudian Revolution (1972), p. 15

People, Idea, Study, Time

“Stow informs us, that the young Londoners, on holidays, after the evening prayer, were permitted to exercise themselves with their wasters and bucklers before their masters' doors…The bear-gardens were the usual places appropriated by the masters of defence for public trials of skill. These exhibitions were outrageous to humanity, and only fitted for the amusement of ferocious minds; it is therefore astonishing that they should have been frequented by females; for, who could imagine that the slicing of the flesh from a man's cheek, the scarifying of his arms, or laying the calves of his legs upon his heels, were spectacles calculated to delight the fair sex, or sufficiently attractive to command their presence.”

Joseph Strutt (1749–1802) British engraver, artist, antiquary and writer

pg. 262
The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), Fencing

Sex, Exercises, Imagination, Holiday

“And so in City after City, street-barricades are piled, and truculent, more or less murderous insurrection begins; populace after populace rises, King after King capitulates or absconds; and from end to end of Europe Democracy has blazed up explosive, much higher, more irresistible and less resisted than ever before; testifying too sadly on what a bottomless volcano, or universal powder-mine of most inflammable mutinous chaotic elements, separated from us by a thin earth-rind, Society with all its arrangements and acquirements everywhere, in the present epoch, rests! The kind of persons who excite or give signal to such revolutions—students, young men of letters, advocates, editors, hot inexperienced enthusiasts, or fierce and justly bankrupt desperadoes, acting everywhere on the discontent of the millions and blowing it into flame,—might give rise to reflections as to the character of our epoch. Never till now did young men, and almost children, take such a command in human affairs.”

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

1850s, Latter-Day Pamphlets (1850), The Present Time (February 1, 1850)

Men, Children, Democracy, Universe

“Those who claim to care about the wellbeing of human beings and the preservation of our environment should become vegetarians for that reason alone. They would thereby increase the amount of grain available to feed people elsewhere, reduce pollution, save water and energy, and cease contributing to the clearing of forests; moreover, since a vegetarian diet is cheaper than one based on meat dishes, they would have more money available to devote to famine relief, population control, or whatever social or political cause they thought most urgent. … when nonvegetarians say that “human problems come first” I cannot help wondering what exactly it is that they are doing for human beings that compels them to continue to support the wasteful, ruthless exploitation of farm animals.”

Peter Singer book Animal Liberation

Source: Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for our Treatment of Animals (1975), Ch. 6: Speciesism Today

Money, People, Support, Problem

“To make that long, last donkey-ride between the pikeman and the stake, to hear the shouting and the chant of hypocrites, to be a spectacle for animals in human masks!”

Morris West (1916–1999) Australian writer

The Heretic (1968)

Animals

“The greatest and most valuable resources we have for making crucial decision are knowledge and the amazing brainpower God gave human beings when he created us. That's certainly true for deciding our best response to any risk we ever face.”

Ben Carson (1951) 17th and current United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; American neurosurgeon

Source: Take The Risk (2008), p. 64

God, Knowledge, Decision

“A mellow understanding of life and of human nature is, and always has been, the Chinese ideal of character, and from that understanding other qualities are derived, such as pacifism, contentment, calm and strength of endurance which distinguish the Chinese character.”

Lin Yutang (1895–1976) Chinese writer

Source: My Country and My People (1935), p. 43

Life, Understanding, Nature

“A government, to afford the needful protection and exercise proper care for the welfare of a people, must have homogeneity in its constituents. It is this necessity which has divided the human race into separate nations, and finally has defeated the grandest efforts which conquerors have made to give unlimited extent to their domain.”

Jefferson Davis book The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government

The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government

People, Exercises, Effort

“Moreover, the human condition, if that is what it is, has been getting steadily worse in the Corporate State; more and more life-denying just as life should be opening up.”

Charles A. Reich book The Greening of America

Source: The Greening of America (1970), Chapter IX : The New Generation, p. 220

Life

“Perhaps we have more in common by virtue of our common humanity than we have differences by virtue of our religions.”

Mark Heard (1951–1992) American musician and record producer

Life in the Industry: A Musician's Diary

Religion

“Let us teach our children, and all Americans, to rise above brutality and bigotry and to be champions of liberty, human dignity, and equality.”

George W. Bush Proclamation 7404

Proclamation 7404 (February 2001)
2000s, 2001

Children

“And who would deny the intellect and will of girls? That would be questioning their full humanity. On the average, abstract and mere intellectual activity is not suitable for them; they want to understand reality completely, and they want to comprehend not merely with the intellect but also with the heart.”

Edith Stein (1891–1942) Jewish-German nun, theologian and philosopher

Essays on Woman (1996), Problems of Women's Education (1932)

Girl, Understanding, Question, Reality

“I liked Truffaut a lot, I've felt a lot of admiration for his way to address the audience, and his storytelling…. La nuit américaine is adorable, and another film I like to see is L'enfant sauvage, with its fine humanism.”

Ingmar Bergman (1918–2007) Swedish filmmaker

On the works of filmmaker Francois Truffaut
Variant translation: I liked Truffaut enormously, I admired him. His way of relating with an audience, of telling a story, is both fascinating and tremendously appealing. It's not my style of storytelling, but it works wonderfully well in relation to the film medium.
Jan Aghed interview (2002)

Way

“In any proposed external communication from God, the channels of human faculty are never to be got rid of; so, if they do not in their own native quality constitute divine vouchers, they must operate as barriers to any communication with God. Of God, who is essentially supersensible, there can be no such thing as a presentation directly to our senses; and all belief that sensible facts mean his real presence must rest at last on inferential judgments of our reason, while these will be nothing but self-continuing circles, worthless for evidence, unless our reason is granted to have in itself the real revelation of what accords with the Divine mind. An absolutely direct utterance of God in the external world, evident strictly in itself, is thus upon close examination unintelligible and unthinkable. Yet this is what is implied in a consistent doctrine of Authority.”

George Holmes Howison (1834–1916) American philosopher

Source: The Limits of Evolution, and Other Essays, Illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Ideaalism (1905), The Right Relation of Reason to Religion, p.240-1

God, World, Communication, Sense

“Give a human face to drug users and understand why they need narcotics is the only chance that we have to win the war on drugs. … Give a human face to terrorists and understand why they resort to violence is the only chance that we have to win the war on terror.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness (2nd Edition), 2015

War, Understanding, Chance

“Good science and good art are always about a condition of awe … I don’t think there is any other function for the poet or the scientist in the human tribe but the astonishment of the soul.”

Derek Walcott (1930–2017) Saint Lucian–Trinidadian poet and playwright

Uncommon Genius: How Great Ideas are Born (Penguin, 1990), pp. 176

Art, Soul, Thinking, Science

“The House of Commons has lifted our affairs above the mechanical sphere into the human sphere. It thrives on criticism, it is perfectly impervious to newspaper abuse or taunts from any quarter, and it is capable of digesting almost anything or almost any body of gentlemen, whatever be the views with which they arrive. There is no situation to which it cannot address itself with vigour and ingenuity. It is the citadel of British liberty; it is the foundation of our laws; its traditions and its privileges are as lively today as when it broke the arbitrary power of the Crown and substituted that Constitutional Monarchy under which we have enjoyed so many blessings.”

Winston S. Churchill book The Second World War

Speech in the House of Commons, October 28, 1943 "House of Commons Rebuilding" http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1943/oct/28/house-of-commons-rebuilding#column_405. The Second World War (1939–1945)

Law, Housing

“General ideas are no proof of the strength, but rather of the insufficiency of the human intellect.”

Alexis De Tocqueville book Democracy in America

Book One, Chapter III.
Democracy in America, Volume II (1840), Book One

Idea

“Of the so-called global theories the one initially stated and defined by Bertalanffy in 1947 under the title of "general systems theory" has taken hold… Since then he has refined, modified and applied his concepts, established a society for general systems theory and published a General Systems Yearbook. Many social scientists but only a handful of psychiatrists studied, understood or applied systems theory. Suddenly, under the leadership of Dr. William Gray of Boston, a threshold was reached so that at the 122nd annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association in 1966 two sessions were held at which this theory was discussed and regular meetings for psychiatrists were ensured for future participation in and development of this "Unified Theory of Human Behavior."”

Roy R. Grinker, Sr. (1900–1993) American psychiatrist and neurologist

If there be a third revolution (i.e. after the psychoanalytic and behavioristic), it is in the development of a general theory.
Grinker, Helen MacGill Hughes (ed.) (1967) Towards a Unified Theory of Human Behaviour. 2e ed. New York, Basic Books. p. ix; cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) General System Theory. p. 7

Behavior, Study, Future

“It is an erroneous assumption of limited minds that great ones such as Jesus, Krishna, and other divine incarnations are gone from the earth when they are no longer visible to human sight. This is not so… Jesus Christ is very much alive and active today. In Spirit and occasionally taking on a flesh-and-blood form, he is working unseen by the masses for the regeneration of the world. With his all-embracing love, Jesus is not content merely to enjoy his blissful consciousness in Heaven. He is deeply concerned for mankind and wishes to give his followers the means to attain the divine freedom of entry into God's Infinite Kingdom….”

Paramahansa Yogananda (1893–1952) Yogi, a guru of Kriya Yoga and founder of Self-Realization Fellowship

The Second Coming of Christ: The Resurrection of the Christ Within You, (2004) by Yogananda

Love, God, World, Freedom

“It is of the greatest importance that the administration of justice should not only be free from spot or blame, but that it should be, so far as human infirmity could allow it to become, as free from all suspicion.”

Sir John Bayley, 1st Baronet (1763–1841) British judge

With Lord Ellenborough, C.J., 2 Chit. Bep. 134.
Trial of Hunt and others (King v. Hunt) (1820)

Justice

“"Peace Train" is a song I wrote, the message of which continues to breeze thunderously through the hearts of millions. There is a powerful need for people to feel that gust of hope rise up again. As a member of humanity and as a Muslim, this is my contribution to the call for a peaceful solution.”

Cat Stevens (1948) British singer-songwriter

"Yusuf Islam Takes Stance for Peace" by Ali Asadullah at IslamOnline http://www.islamonline.net/servlet/Satellite?c=Article_C&pagename=Zone-English-ArtCulture%2FACELayout&cid=1158658359693

People, Peace, Hope, Feeling

“It was morality that burned the books of the ancient sages, and morality that halted the free inquiry of the Golden Age and substituted for it the credulous imbecility of the Age of Faith. It was a fixed moral code and a fixed theology which robbed the human race of a thousand years by wasting them upon alchemy, heretic-burning, witchcraft and sacerdotalism.”

H.L. Mencken book The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche

The Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1908/1913)
1900s

Books, Age, Faith

“I'm dedicating my little story to you; doubtless you will be among the very few who will ever read it. It seems war stories aren't very well received at this point. I'm told they're out-dated, untimely and as might be expected - make some unpleasant reading. And, as you have no doubt already perceived, human beings don't like to remember unpleasant things. They gird themselves with the armor of wishful thinking, protect themselves with a shield of impenetrable optimism, and, with a few exceptions, seem to accomplish their "forgetting" quite admirably. But you, my children, I don't want you to be among those who choose to forget. I want you to read my stories and a lot of others like them. I want you to fill your heads with Remarque and Tolstoy and Ernie Pyle. I want you to know what shrapnel, and "88's" and mortar shells and mustard gas mean. I want you to feel, no matter how vicariously, a semblance of the feeling of a torn limb, a burnt patch of flesh, the crippling, numbing sensation of fear, the hopeless emptiness of fatigue. All these things are complimentary to the province of war and they should be taught and demonstrated in classrooms along with the more heroic aspects of uniforms, and flags, and honor and patriotism. I have no idea what your generation will be like. In mine we were to enjoy "Peace in our time". A very well meaning gentleman waved his umbrella and shouted those very words… less than a year before the whole world went to war. But this gentleman was suffering the worldly disease of insufferable optimism. He and his fellow humans kept polishing the rose colored glasses when actually they should have taken them off. They were sacrificing reason and reality for a brief and temporal peace of mind, the same peace of mind that many of my contemporaries derive by steadfastly refraining from remembering the war that came before.”

Rod Serling (1924–1975) American screenwriter

Excerpt from a dedication to an unpublished short story, "First Squad, First Platoon"; from Serling to his as yet unborn children.
Other

War, Children, World, Fear

“While growing your management skill…you set out to learn more about business. To grow yourself as a leader is a human thing. For that you must set out to learn more about humans, and yourself.”

Kent Thiry (1956) Business; CEO of DaVita

Vanderbilt Commencement Address (2011)

Business, Learning

“There are not two kinds of human being, savage and civilized. There is only the human animal, forever at war with itself.”

John Gray (1948) British philosopher

An Old Chaos: Frozen Horses and Deserts of Brick (p. 25)
The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths (2013)

War, Animals

“The freedom of the seemingly false opinion and our tolerance of it and our willingness to meet with it in the open help test the validity of truth while keeping alive the critical sense which is the main spring of all advancement of human thought and is the vital point, the very soul, of all human progress.”

Boris Sidis The Source and Aim of Human Progress

The Source and Aim of Human Progress (1919)

Truth, Soul, Spring, Sense

“The human mind is not capable of grasping the Universe. We are like a little child entering a huge library. The walls are covered to the ceilings with books in many different tongues. The child knows that someone must have written these books. It does not know who or how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. But the child notes a definite plan in the arrangement of the books - a mysterious order which it does not comprehend, but only dimly suspects.”

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

Attributed without source to Einstein in Mieczyslaw Taube, Evolution of Matter and Energy on a Cosmic and Planetary Scale (1985), page 1
Disputed

Books, Understanding, Universe

“Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent. Indeed, it would not be far wrong to describe the best as the common enemy of all decent citizens. But there will be small hope of gaining adherents to this idea so long as government is thought of as an independent and somehow super-human organism, with powers, rights, and privileges transcending those of any other human aggregation.”

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

68
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

Hope, Idea, Failure

“Don't come into the music industry. It's almost inevitable that you'll psychologically be quite screwed up. Fame isn't a natural, human, behavioural thing. You get alienated. You're not really surrounded by truth.”

Katie Melua (1984) British singer-songwriter

[Bernard Perusse, A private path to fame, http://www.canada.com/cityguides/montreal/story.html?id=cb6fe4fc-01ef-4d0b-ad86-7ad091135e1b, The Gazette, canada.com, 2008-06-26]

Truth, Music, Nature

“It were doubtless to be wished, that the power of prohibiting the importation of slaves had not been postponed until the year 1808, or rather that it had been suffered to have immediate operation. But it is not difficult to account, either for this restriction on the general government, or for the manner in which the whole clause is expressed. It ought to be considered as a great point gained in favor of humanity, that a period of twenty years may terminate forever, within these States, a traffic which has so long and so loudly upbraided the barbarism of modern policy; that within that period, it will receive a considerable discouragement from the federal government, and may be totally abolished, by a concurrence of the few States which continue the unnatural traffic, in the prohibitory example which has been given by so great a majority of the Union. Happy would it be for the unfortunate Africans, if an equal prospect lay before them of being redeemed from the oppressions of their European brethren!”

James Madison (1751–1836) 4th president of the United States (1809 to 1817)

Federalist No. 42 http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/wew/quotes/slavery.html 1780s, Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

Happiness, Suffering

“The character and conquest of the invincible champion are ever the same. A Lacedaemonian died while writing with his own blood on a rock — " Sparta has conquered!" But, O, there is an illustration higher and better than any derived from mere earthly annals. Jesus veiled His glory in the skies; shrouded divinity in mortality, and with godhead and humanity coalesced in His person, entered the lists with more than mortal strife against the powers of hell. He drank the bitter cup with sublimer resignation than the sages of earth ever knew; contended victoriously where finite champions must inevitably have been destroyed; fell, like the strong man, destroying His foes by His death; persevered on our behalf in all the fearful descent from the august throne of the Eternal to the stony floor of the cold and gloomy sepulchre; that Hope's sweet fountain might gush up for mankind in Golgotha, and Salvation plant her banner with immortal triumph at the portal of the conquered tomb.”

Elias Lyman Magoon (1810–1886) American minister

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 451.

Death, Fear, Hope, Hell

“Let us abandon the obsolete division of rights into artificial categories of first, second and third generation rights – with their intrinsic prejudices. Let us consider redefining human rights in functional terms. I am suggesting a functional paradigm of enabling rights (such as the rights to peace, food, health and homeland), inherent rights (such as equality and non-discrimination), procedural rights (such as access to information, freedom of expression and due process) and what I would call outcome rights, that is, the practical realization of human dignity in the form of the right to our identity, to achieve our potential and to be just who we are, free to enjoy our own culture and opinions. The absence of this outcome right to dignity and self-respect is reflected in much of the strife we see in the world today.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Alfred-Maurice de Zayas 2013 Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion of a democratic and equitable international order 67th session of the General Assembly http://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=12732&LangID=E. 2013

Health, World, Peace, Food

“From the humanistic point of view every human achievement is unforgettable and immortal in its essence, even if it is replaced by a "better" one.”

George Sarton (1884–1956) American historian of science

Preface.
A History of Science Vol.1 Ancient Science Through the Golden Age of Greece (1952)

“Marriage is the most important, the most sacred, contract that human beings can make. No matter whether we call it a contract, or a sacrament, or both, it remains precisely the same. And no matter whether this contract is entered into in the presence of magistrate or priest, it is exactly the same.”

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

Is Divorce Wrong? (1889)

Marriage

“They are cynical about human rights. They don’t like immigrants or the European Union. They want the state to be strong and “defence”, generally, to mean attack. They are, basically, the racist grandad who is going to spoil your Christmas. These are the people pollsters have labelled “authoritarian populists.””

Paul Mason (journalist) (1960) British journalist

How do we fight the loudmouth politics of authoritarian populism? (21 November 2016)

People, Strong, Christmas

“We shall banish want; we shall banish fear. The essence of National Socialism is human welfare…. National Socialism is the revolution of the common man. Rooted in a fuller life for every German from childhood to old age, National Socialism means a new day of abundance at home and a better world order abroad.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

As quoted in Men in Motion, Henry J. Taylor, Doubleday, Doran & Co., New York: NY, (1944) p. 59. Also quoted in As We Go Marching, John T. Flynn, New York: NY, Free Life Edition (1973) p. 154, first published 1944 https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/As%20We%20Go%20Marching_2.pdf Other remarks

Life, Age, World, Fear

“You know that we are now allowing free expression of satirical thoughts. As they say, democracy is a beautiful thing, but humanity couldn't come up with anything worse than that.”

Yurii Andrukhovych book The Moscoviad

The Moscoviad
Source: The Moscoviad. Yuri Andrukhovych. Spuyten Duyvil, New York City. ISBN1933132523, p. 130

Beauty, Democracy

“We would have fulfilled our duty to our blood and our people and to the freedom of the peoples, if we had exterminated the most cunning intellect of all the human intellects alive today. For that is what I said to Streicher, what I have always preached: we are fighting an enemy who, through many many thousands of years of schooling, is intellectually superior to us. Was it yesterday or the day before, or a year ago, I don't know, I heard or read: even before the Romans had their state, before Rome had even been founded, the Jews there were able to write. This is an understatement. They should have said, aeons before the Romans erected their state, aeons before the very founding of Rome itself, they were able to write. Look at the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Look at a race that today has recourse to, may I just say, six thousand years of written history, a race that has been making laws for let us say five thousand years or six thousand years - and I am not wrong, I believe, when I estimate a seventh millennium. The fact that the Christian church today makes use of this lawmaking is very depressing for me. But it tells me that this must be a race of the first order of magnitude, since lawmakers have always been great. And because of these realizations I fought against this enemy.”

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

Argentina Audiotapes (1957)

People, School, Law, History

“I feel a conscious attempt to be more and more related to society. That's what's important to me as a person. I'm not going to let other people make all the changes; and if you do that, you can't curt yourself of... I'm only against the most obvious things, like wars and stuff like that. I don't have any particular concept about an utopian way things should be. I have a prejudice or a bias, it is that there shouldn't be any particular way. Being a complex human organ, we are capable of a variety; we can do so much. The big fear is that we don't do enough with our senses, with our activities, with our areas of consideration; and these have got to get bigger year after year.”

Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) American artist

1960's, I never thought of it as much of an ability,' (1968)

War, People, Fear, Way

“And at once I saw with great clarity that human beings possess two bodies. One is the physical body, the other -- just as real, just as self-contained -- is the emotional body. Like the physical body, the emotional body reaches a certain level of growth, and then stops. But it stops rather sooner than the physical body. So most of us possess the emotional body of a retarded adolescent.”

Colin Wilson (1931–2013) author

Source: Access to Inner Worlds (1990), p. 23

“All the marvels of science and the gains of culture belong to the nation as a whole, and never again will man’s brain and human genius be used for oppression and exploitation.”

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

Third All-Russia Congress Of Soviets Of Workers, Soldiers’ And Peasants : Report On The Activities Of The Council Of People’s Commissars" (January 1918) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/jan/10.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 453-82. 1910s

Science

“It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart-the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Winston Churchill, Speech to House of Commons on 12th November 1940, 3 days after his death.
About

Love, World, Peace, Faith

“A bird's-eye view of centralised and disempowered societies will reveal a strictly rectilinear network of streets, farms, and property boundaries. It is as though we have patterned the earth to suit our survey instruments rather than to serve human or environmental needs. We cannot perhaps blame Euclid for this, but we can blame his followers. The straight-line patterns that result prevent most sensible landscape planning strategies and result in neither an aesthetically nor functionally satisfactory landscape or stretscape. Once established, then entered into a body of law, such inane (or insane) patterning is stubbornly defended. But it is created by, and can be dismantled by, people.”

Bill Mollison (1928–2016) Australian permaculturist

Source: Permaculture: A Designers' Manual (1988), chapter 4.21

People, Law, Bird

“The most interesting thing in nature is that two species exist, only two species, which are expansionist: mankind and insects. All other species are territorial. The insect is a devourer, an expander, it keeps on expanding so much and it doesn’t even care. And mankind is like that, as well… The two species which are going to end up fighting over the world are going to be insects and human beings.”

Guillermo del Toro (1964) Mexican film director

Lo que más interesante es en la naturaleza existen dos especies, unicamente dos especies que son expansionistas: el hombre y los insectos. Las demás especies son territoriales. El insecto es devorador, expansionista, hasta que se siegue expandiendo y no le importa. Y el hombre es así... las dos especies que van a acabar peleándose por el mundo van a ser insectos y hombres. Interview with Guillermo del Toro. http://www.filmoteca.com/sec4/guidtoro.htm

World, Nature, Fight

“I was a thoroughly hardened Homeward Bounder. There seemed nothing I didn't know.
Then I ran into Helen. My friendly neighbourhood enemy. There really was nothing like Helen on any world I'd ever been to. I sometimes didn't think she was human at all.”

Diana Wynne Jones book The Homeward Bounders

Source: The Homeward Bounders (1981), p. 70.

World, Thinking

Quotes about humanity page 94

Quotes about humanity
page 94