Quotes about Humanity

No man can be an exile if he remembers that all the world is one city.

We can be human only together. A person is a person to other persons. We so desperately long for all of us to learn that we are meant for one another. We are meant for complementarity.

We shall be free only together, black and white. We shall survive only together, black and white. We can be human only together, black and white.

Love is the only thing that counts. Love is what keeps the star and the human beings and the world turning around. Love is the force that binds the whole universe together.

The human spirit. The heroic in man. The aspiration and the fulfillment, both. Uplifted in its quest--and uplifting by its own essence. Seeking God--and finding itself. Showing that there is no higher reach beyond its own form....

I know what I want up to the age of two hundred. Know what you want in life and go after it. I worship individuals for their highest possibilities as individuals, and I loathe humanity, for its failure to live up to these possibilities.

Reason is your means of survival — so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to think or not to think..'.

His life was crowded , public and impersonal as a city square. The friend of humanity had no single private friend. People came to him; he came close to no one. He accepted all. His affection was golden, smooth and even, like a great expanse of sand; there was no wind of discrimination to raise dunes; the sands lay still and the sun stood high. ---Toohey.

People, he thought, were as hungry for a sight of joy as he had always been—for a moment's relief from that gray load of suffering which seemed so inexplicable and unnecessary. He had never been able to understand why men should be unhappy.

He could not condemn them without understanding; and he could not understand. Did he like them? No, he thought; he had wanted to like them, which was not the same. He had wanted it in the name of some unstated potentiality which he had once expected to see in any human being. He felt nothing for them now, nothing but the merciless zero of indifference, not even the regret of a loss.

If one feels compassion for the victims of a concentration camp, one cannot feel it for the torturers. If one does feel compassion for the torturers, it is an act of moral treason toward the victims.

What is kinder—to believe the best of people and burden them with a nobility beyond their endurance—or to see them as they are, and accept it because it makes them comfortable?