Quotes on Humans

The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them: that's the essence of inhumanity.

A human being becomes human not through the casual convergence of certain biological conditions, but through an act of will and love on the part of other people.

There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.

By making us stop for a moment, poetry gives us an opportunity to think about ourselves as human beings on this planet and what we mean to each other.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

Take the entire 4.5-billion-year history of the earth and scale it down to a single year, with January 1 being the origin of the earth and midnight on December 31 being the present. Until June, the only organisms were single-celled microbes, such as algae, bacteria, and amoebae. The first animal with a head did not appear until October. The first human appears on December 31. We, like all the animals and plants that have ever lived, are recent crashers at the party of life on earth.

Here I am as a human being...how can I express myself, totally and completely?

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

We need to renegotiate our contract with nature. Ecology is a unifying force that can diminish intolerance and expand our empathy towards others - both human and animal.

Geometry is knowledge that appears to be produced by human beings, yet whose meaning is totally independent of them.

Poverty is not created by poor people. It is produced by our failure to create institutions to support human capabilities.

Can any rational person believe that the Bible is anything but a human document? We now know pretty well where the various books came from, and about when they were written. We know that they were written by human beings who had no knowledge of science, little knowledge of life, and were influenced by the barbarous morality of primitive times, and were grossly ignorant of most things that men know today.

My movies more often are told through pictures, not words. But in this case, the pictures took second position to the incredible words of Abraham Lincoln and his presence [...] I was less interested in an outpouring of imagery than in letting the most human moment of this story evolve before us.

A liberal education rests on the assumption that nature and human nature do not change very much or very fast and that one therefore needs to understand the past.

We are all #humans and we all make #mistakes. We #hurt people even if we don't want to.

I am appalled that the term we use to talk about aging is 'anti'. Aging is human evolution in its pure form. Death, taxes and aging .... We are ALL going to age and soften and mellow and transition.

To be human you must bear witness to justice.

Etiquette requires us to admire the human race.

We should not be followers of traditions that go against human rights...we are human beings and we make traditions.

Aiki is not a technique to fight with or defeat an enemy. It is the way to reconcile the world and make human beings one family.

Stillness is our most intense mode of action. It is in our moments of deep quiet that is born every idea, emotion, and drive which we eventually honor with the name of action. We reach highest in meditation, and farthest in prayer. In stillness every human being is great.