quotations about humanity
Absorption in the minutiae of an individual existence is the only refuge from the apocalyptic madhouse staged by maniacal saviors of humanity.
ERIC HOFFER
Reflections on the Human Condition
Humanity is less, far less than the individual, because the individual may sometimes be capable of truth, and humanity is a tree of lies.
D. H. LAWRENCE
Women in Love
You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.
MAHATMA GANDHI
Gandhi: His Life and Message for the World (Fischer)
On personal integrity hangs humanity's fate.
R. BUCKMINSTER FULLER
Critical Path
Humanity is a parade of fools, and I am at the front of it, twirling a baton.
DEAN KOONTZ
Brother Odd
One of the penalties of being a human being is other human beings.
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
Hide and Seek
The more I deal in it, the surer I am that human nature is all of the same critter, but that there's a heap of choice in the cuts.
GEORGE HORACE LORIMER
Old Gorgon Graham
The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can't believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes.
STEPHEN HAWKING
Reality on the Rocks: Beyond Our Ken, 1995
We are not the only avatars of humanity. Once our computing machines achieved self-consciousness, they became part of this design.
DAN SIMMONS
Endymion
Humanity is a continuous chain, one link fastened to another, and following it, not as having in itself wholly independent action, but as being put into motion by the link that preceded it; it is the majestic march of the locomotive and its train along the railway of time; carriage after carriage passes, one generation succeeding another, but each drawn on by its last predecessor, the coupling-chain binding one to another into a continuous whole.
ROBERT BROWN
A Lecture on the Social Unity of Humanity
It is solely by believing himself a creature but little lower than the cherubim that man has by interminable small degrees become, upon the whole, distinctly superior to the chimpanzee.
HILAIRE BELLOC
Modern Essays
Who will save us from this remorseless law of eternal subdivision? To make one complete man out of all this vast collection of snips and snippets of humanity. To piece all the trades, professions, and fads together, like a puzzle, till one saw the honest face of a genuine man round and whole once more. To take these dry bones of the Valley of Commerce, and powerfully breathe into them the unifying breath of life, that once more they stand up, not as fractional bones of the wrist or the ankle of manhood, but mighty, full-blooded men as of old. Ah! we must wait for a new creation for that.
RICHARD LE GALLIENNE
"Fractional Humanity", Prose Fancies
Humanity is so constituted that the basest criminal represents you and me, as well as the most glorious saint that walks on high. We are reflected in all other men; all other men are embodied in us.
E. H. CHAPIN
Living Words
And us? Just another belch in the darkness. Sound but not word, noise without meaning.
IAIN M. BANKS
Consider Phlebas
Human beings are infinitely fallible, completely unreliable. Science is not. Science is absolute. Under strict principles, if you do A and B, then C will occur. This rarely happens if you inject the inefficiences of humanity into the process.
DAVID BALDACCI
The Winner
I have investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of them. I have found that humanity is not incidentally engaged, but eternally and systematically engaged, in throwing gold into the gutter and diamonds into the sea.
G. K. CHESTERTON
introduction, The Defendant
Humanity was drawn to turmoil and self-destruction as inevitably as the earth was drawn to complete its annual revolution of the sun.
DEAN KOONTZ
Dark Rivers of the Heart
Only by being a man or woman for others does one become fully human.
PEDRO ARRUPE
"Men for Others"
Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.
IMMANUEL KANT
Idea for a General History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose
No human being can come into this world without increasing or diminishing the sum total of human happiness, not only of the present, but of every subsequent age of humanity.
E. BURRITT
attributed, Day's Collacon