quotations about humanity
Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
Love in the Time of Cholera
The tapestry of the universe is vast and complex, with infinite patterns. While threads of tragedy may form the primary weave, humanity with its undaunted optimism still manages to embroider small designs of happiness and love.
BRIAN HERBERT & KEVIN J. ANDERSON
The Butlerian Jihad
Perhaps we are the most selfish, oddest, and cunningest medley of beings of our size in the universe. However to complete the scale of being, it seems to have been requisite that the link of being called man must have been, and since under the Divine government, we have a positive existence, we cannot ultimately fail of being better than not to have been.
ETHAN ALLEN
Essay on the Universal Plenitude of Being and on the Nature and Immortality of the Human Soul and Its Agency
Are we not unwittingly expressing the unconscious yearning of the fractions to merge once more in the sweet kinship of the unit, of the ninths and the nine-hundred-and-ninety-ninths of humanity to merge their differences in the mighty generalisation Man, of man to merge his finite existence in the mysterious infinite, the undivided, indivisible One, to 'be made one,' as theology phrases it, 'with God'? How the complex life of our time longs to return to its first happy state of simplicity, we feel on every hand.
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
"Fractional Humanity", Prose Fancies
Humanity walks ever on a thin crust over terrific abysses.
ARNOLD BENNETT
The Old Wives' Tale
I think that my art, my poetry, prose and music come from these cracks in my being, these ley lines where spirit is said to reside. I have come out of the horror of that experience having lost my faith in the inherent goodness of humanity, yet curiously appreciating even more the effort it takes to be good.
CHRIS ABANI
Kalakuta Republic
Our humanity were a poor thing but for the Divinity that stirs within us.
FRANCIS BACON
attributed, Day's Collacon
To suffer with the other and for others; to suffer for the sake of truth and justice; to suffer out of love and in order to become a person who truly loves--these are fundamental elements of humanity, and to abandon them would destroy man himself.
POPE BENEDICT XVI
Encyclical Letter, Spe Salvi, November 30, 2007
I no longer feel any allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despise being one myself.
SUZANNE COLLINS
Mockingjay
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.
ALBERT EINSTEIN
The human race is just getting started.... The cerebral cortex is only a hundred thousand years old. It's still a baby, sucking teat and eating Cheerios. We might get better, maybe even wise, if we can last another thousand years.
ELLEN GILCHRIST
A Dangerous Age
One can follow any religion, one can follow any practice or path, but one must be humane.
HAIDAKHAN BABAJI
The Teachings of Babaji, January 22, 1983
I wanted to rub the human race in its own vomit, and force it to look in the mirror.
J. G. BALLARD
Crash
Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself.
REBECCA WEST
The Court and the Castle
The most identifying trait of humanity is our ability to be inhumane to one another.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Thomas
Humanity is, in regard to the other social affections, what the first lay of colors is in respect to a picture. It is a ground on which are painted the different kinds of love, friendship, and engagement. As the ancients held those places sacred, which were blasted with lightning, we ought to pay a tender to those persons who are visited with affliction. A general civility is due to all mankind; but an extraordinary humanity and a peculiar delicacy of good breeding is owing to the distressed, that we may not add to their affliction by any seeming neglect.
RUSKIN
attributed, Day's Collacon
Man isn't a noble savage, he's an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved--that about sums it up. I'm interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it's a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.
STANLEY KUBRICK
New York Times Film Review, January 30, 1972
An army is a strange composite masterpiece, which strength results from an enormous sum total of utter weaknesses. Thus only can we explain a war waged by humanity against humanity in spite of humanity.
VICTOR HUGO
Les Misérables
It wants not merely microscopic but telescopic power to know humanity in its essence; a power to discern its grandeur as well as its littleness, the infinity of its relations as well as the meanness of its pursuits. The human soul is a great deep. We must take into view the nebulous possibilities that are brooding and waiting there, and notice the buds and films of light that reveal themselves even in the darkest spaces.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent? He's weak. He's unsure of himself. He's a coward. Clark Kent is Superman's critique on the whole human race.
QUENTIN TARANTINO
Kill Bill: Volume 2