Quotes on Humans

Elegance is usually confused with superficiality, fashion, lack of depth. This is a serious mistake: human beings need to have elegance in their actions and in their posture because this word is synonymous with good taste, amiability, equilibrium and harmony.

Each human being has the right to seek out joy, joy being understood as something which makes one content - not necessarily that which makes others content.

Every human being has inside them something more important than him or herself - his or her Gift.

I recalled how much time i had spent fighting for something i didn't even want. maybe because i had been too lazy to think of other avenues to follow. maybe because i had been afraid of what others would think. maybe because it was hard work to be different. perhaps, because a human being is condemned to repeat the steps taken by the previous generation until a certain number of people begin to behave in a different fashion. then the world changes, and we change with it.

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.

The eager and often inconsiderate appeals of reformers and revolutionists are indispensable to counterbalance the inertia and fossilism marking so large a part of human institutions.

The current perception I get from the evening news is that the world is dominated by human failure, crime, catastrophe, corruption, and tragedy. We are all tuning in to see how the human mind is evolving, but the media keeps hammering home the opposite, that the human mind is mired in darkness and folly.

It would be frightening to think that in all the Cosmos, which is so harmonious, so complete and equal to itself, that only human life is happening randomly, that only one's destiny lacks meaning.

The human father has to be confronted and recognized as human, as man who created a child and then, by his absence, left the child fatherless and then Godless.

Each contact with a human being is so rare, so precious, one should preserve it.

There are very few human beings who receive the truth, complete and staggering, by instant illumination. Most of them acquire it fragment by fragment, on a small scale, by successive developments, cellularly, like a laborious mosaic.

There is in general good reason to suppose that in several respects the gods could all benefit from instruction by us human beings. We humans are - more humane.

All human sin seems so much worse in its consequences than in its intentions.

It is only human supremacy, which is as unacceptable as racism and sexism, that makes us afraid of being more inclusive.

Great steps in human progress are made by things that don't work the way philosophy thought they should. If things always worked the way they should, you could write the history of the world from now on. But they don't, and it is those deviations from the normal that make human progress.

There is a spirit and a need and a man at the beginning of every great human advance. Every one of these must be right for that particular moment of history, or nothing happens.

Thousands of years ago, weren't we capable of building enormous structures like the pyramids? Weren't we capable of worshiping gods, weaving, making fire, finding lovers and wives, sending written messages? Of course we were. But although we've succeeded in replacing slaves with wage slaves, all the advances we've made have been in the field of science. Human beings are still asking the same questions as their ancestors. In short, they haven't evolved at all.

What would it mean if there were a theory that explained everything? And just what does "everything" actually mean, anyway? Would this new theory in physics explain, say the meaning of human poetry? Or how economics work? Or the stages of psychosexual development? Can this new physics explain the currents of ecosystems, or the dynamics of history, or why human wars are so terribly common?

For the real difference between humans and other animals is that humans alone have perception of good and evil, just and unjust, etc. It is the sharing of a common view in these matters that makes a household and a state.

By the end of this decade we will live under the first One World Government that has ever existed in the society of nations ... a government with absolute authority to decide the basic issues of human survival. One world government is inevitable.

Intellectually, human beings and animals may be different, but it's pretty obvious that animals have a rich emotional life and that they feel joy and pain. It's easy to forget the connection between a hamburger and the cow it came from. But I forced myself to acknowledge the fact that every time I ate a hamburger, a cow had ceased to breathe