Quotes about Humanity

In this world, few people look with the eyes of compassion, and so we are cruel and merciless toward each other. The weak are always oppressed by the strong.

Men cannot be our enemies--even men called Vietcong! If we kill men, what brothers will we have left? With whom shall we live then?

I have been offered the noble opportunity to join my voice with that of the Crucified as He cries out, 'Father, forgive them.

Every human being must be viewed according to what it is good for. For not one of us, no, not one, is perfect. And were we to love none who had imperfection, this world would be a desert for our love.

Experience demands that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

New York, like London, seems to be a cloacina [toilet] of all the depravities of human nature.

The measure of society is how it treats the weakest members.

Shall we refuse to the unhappy fugitives from distress that hospitality which the savages of the wilderness extended to our fathers arriving in this land? Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on this globe?

If you serve humanity, you serve humanity's God.

Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us. We cannot endure the infamy and guilt of resigning succeeding generations to that wretchedness which inevitably awaits them if we basely entail hereditary bondage on them.

Christianity is not stoicism. The Cross does not sanctify us by destroying human feeling. Detachment is not insensibility. Too many ascetics fail to become great saints precisely because their rules and ascetic practices have merely deadened their humanity instead of setting it free to develop richly, in all its capacities, under the influence of grace.

It is not possible to be intimate with nore than very few, because there are only very few in the world with whom we have practically everything in common. There is, however, one universal basis for friendship with all men: we are all loved by God, and I should desire them all to love Him with all their power. ... the truth remains that our destiny is to love one another as Christ has loved us.