Quotes on Humanity

As I got to know the people of the Civil Rights Movement, I realized... _x000D_ I am the hopeful black woman who was denied her right to vote. _x000D_ I am the caring white supporter killed on the front lines of freedom. _x000D_ I am the unarmed black kid who maybe needed a hand, but instead was given a bullet. I am the two fallen police officers murdered in the line of duty. 'Selma' has awakened my humanity.

IN ALL MY FILMS, IT SEEMED IMPORTANT TO ME TO REMIND THE AUDIENCE TO THE FACT THAT THEY ARE NOT ALONE, LOST IN AN EMPTY UNIVERSE, BUT THAT THEY ARE CONNECTED BY INNUMERABLE THREADS WITH THEIR PAST AND PRESENT, THAT THROUGH CERTAIN MYSTICAL WAYS, EVERY HUMAN BEING REALIZES THE RAPPORT WITH THE WORLD AND THE LIFE OF HUMANITY.

Human diversity makes tolerance more than a virtue; it makes it a requirement for survival.

When all of a sudden you're successful and sought after overnight, you are instantly opened to a lot of sides of humanity that the average person is never going to see. And those can often be pretty disheartening, and it can make somebody pretty lonely.

All the world is made of faith, and trust, and pixie dust.

I had this feeling that, somehow, we ought to be teaching not just the history of particular nations or particular regions, but the history of humanity.

To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties. For he who renounces everything no indemnity is possible. Such a renunciation is incompatible with man's nature; to remove all liberty from his will is to remove all morality from his acts.

And that's why books are never going to die. It's impossible. It's the only time we really go into the mind of a stranger, and we find our common humanity doing this. So the book doesn't only belong to the writer, it belongs to the reader as well, and then together you make it what it is.

I think enormous harm is done by religion - not just in the name of religion, but actually by religion. ... Many people do simply awful things out of sincere religious belief, not using religion as a cover the way that Saddam Hussein may have done, but really because they believe that this is what God wants them to do, going all the way back to Abraham being willing to sacrifice Isaac because God told him to do that. Putting God ahead of humanity is a terrible thing.

We've been playing games since humanity had civilization - there is something primal about our desire and our ability to play games. It's so deep-seated that it can bypass latter-day cultural norms and biases.

My only job is to write in such a way that the reader gets a new handle on humanity.

Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.

Such is the state of every age, every sex, and every condition: all have their cares, either from nature or from folly; and whoever, therefore, finds himself inclined to envy another, should remember that he knows not the real condition which he desires to obtain, but is certain that by indulging a vicious passion, he must lessen that happiness which he thinks already too sparingly bestowed.

It's a form of human love to accept our complicated, messy humanity and not run away from it.

Compassionate action starts with seeing yourself when you start to make yourself right and when you start to make yourself wrong. At that point you could just contemplate the fact that there is a larger alternative to either of those, a more tender, shaky kind of place where you could live.

Or from Browning some "Pomegranate," which if cut deep down the middle Shows a heart within blood-tinctured, of a veined humanity.

Humanity, you never had it from the beginning." That was my motto.

It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one's own: in the face of one's victim, one sees oneself.

The discovery that heartbreak is indeed heartbreaking consoles us about our humanity.

We need to have empathy. When we lose empathy, we lose our humanity.

There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.