quotations about humanity
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
But if I'm it, the last of my kind, the last page of human history, like hell I'm going to let the story end this way. I may be the last one, but I am the one still standing. I am the one turning to face the faceless hunter in the woods on an abandoned highway. I am the one not running but facing. Because if I am the last one, then I am humanity. And if this is humanity's last war, then I am the battlefield.
RICK YANCEY
The 5th Wave
It is easier to love humanity as a whole than to love one's neighbor.
ERIC HOFFER
The Ordeal of Change
We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own.
CHINUA ACHEBE
The Education of a British-Protected Child
The history of man is essentially zoological; it becomes human late in the day, and then only in the beautiful souls, the souls alive to justice, goodness, enthusiasm, and devotion. The angel shows itself rarely and with difficulty through the highly-organized brute.
HENRI-FREDERIC AMIEL
Journal Intime
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
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
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
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
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
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
Humanity, like armies in the field, advances at the speed of the slowest.
GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ
Love in the Time of Cholera
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
Humanity is never more sphinxlike than when it is expressing itself.
REBECCA WEST
The Court and the Castle
Humanity toward a subdued foe is as noble as the valor displayed in encountering him.
G. D. PRENTICE
attributed, Day's Collacon
The most identifying trait of humanity is our ability to be inhumane to one another.
DEAN KOONTZ
Odd Thomas
Human nature is like a bad clock; it might go right now and then, or be made to strike the hour, but its inward frame is to go wrong.
THOMAS ADAM
Private Thoughts on Religion
Humanity walks ever on a thin crust over terrific abysses.
ARNOLD BENNETT
The Old Wives' Tale
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
I no longer feel any allegiance to these monsters called human beings, despise being one myself.
SUZANNE COLLINS
Mockingjay