quotations about humanity
People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.
JAMES BALDWIN
No Name in the Street
Before one eye at least in the universe the feeble spring and the mighty river are one; He sees it all mapped out from its source in weakness to its end in power; we never rise high enough into the upper air of thought and humanity, to see like Him our human fellow-rivers in their feeble struggles through the rocks and stones in their path, but as they shall be hereafter, far away, perhaps a thousand years to come, down cataracts of death, and past long deserts of unknown worlds; but as they shall surely be at last, each flowing on, a majestic benediction through the universe, reflecting on his ever-swelling bosom the infinite glory of God.
FRANCES POWER COBBE
The City of Victory
Life is to be lived, not controlled; and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.
RALPH ELLISON
Invisible Man
Humanity
is the start of the race; I say
Humanity is the mould to break away from, the crust to
break through, the coal to break into fire,
The atom to be split.
ROBINSON JEFFERS
"Road Stallion"
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
I tend to regard the whole human race as just a lot of different subspecies of pest.
K. J. PARKER
Evil for Evil
Humanity has a strange fondness for following processions. Get four men following a banner down the street, and, if that banner is inscribed with rhymes of pleasant optimism, in an hour, all the town will be afoot, ready to march to whatever tune the leaders care to play.
JOHN DOS PASSOS
"A Humble Protest,", Harvard Monthly, 1916
Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.
ANAÏS NIN
The Diary of Anaïs Nin
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
Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seeds of rapacious licence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.
CHARLES DICKENS
A Tale of Two Cities
To improve humanity, we must know it as it is, and remove every shred of rag or fragment of plaister which hides its foulness and dishonour--not coldly and unmoved, but compassionately; and so by degrees we may raise it from the littleness, the turpitude, the radical corruption of contemporary life to the true dignity of men, as rational and moral beings.
JAMES PLATT
Platt's Essays
Limited in his nature, infinite in his desires, man is a fallen god who remembers the heavens.
ALPHONSE DE LAMARTINE
Second Meditations
Nothing human disgusts me unless it's unkind.
TENNESSEE WILLIAMS
The Night of the Iguana
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
The one idea which history exhibits as evermore developing itself into greater distinctness, is the idea of humanity; the noble endeavor to throw down all the barriers erected between men by prejudice and one-sided views; and by setting aside the distinctions of religion, country, and color, to treat the whole human race as one brotherhood, having one great object--the free development of our spiritual nature.
A. GEDDES
attributed, Day's Collacon
Ye Children of Man! whose life is a span,
Protracted with sorrow from day to day,
Naked and featherless, feeble and querulous,
Sickly, calamitous creatures of clay!
ARISTOPHANES
The Birds
The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular.
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
The Brothers Karamazov
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
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
We are all water from
different rivers
That's why it's so easy to to meet
We are all water in this vast,
vast ocean
Someday we'll evaporate
together.
JOHN LENNON
We Are All Water