Quotes on Humans

Can a growing human population still leave space for wildlife?

Climate change: Never before in history have human beings been called on to act collectively in defence of the Earth

In the end, the question is not, how do we use nature to serve our interests? It's how can we use humans to serve nature's interest?'

Discrimination and multiple deprivations of human rights are also frequently part of the problem, sentencing entire populations to poverty... It is surely a matter of outrage that over half a million women die annually from complications related to pregnancy and childbirth. This is nearly half the annual global death toll, and arguably, a direct reflection of the disempowerment of women in social, economic and political life.

No matter what part of the world we come from, we are all basically the same human beings. We all seek happiness and try to avoid suffering. We have the same basic human needs and concerns. All of us human beings want freedom and the right to determine our own destiny as individuals and as peoples. That is human nature.

The ultimate destiny of the human race is the greatest moral perfection, provided that it is achieved through human freedom, whereby alone man is capable of the greatest happiness.

From the Balkans to Africa, from Asia to the Middle East, we have witnessed the weakening or absence of effective governance leading to the ravaging of human rights and the abandonment of longstanding humanitarian principles. We need competent and responsible states to meet the needs of "we the peoples" for whom the UN was created. And the world's peoples will not be fully served unless peace, development and human rights, the three pillars of the UN, are advanced together with equal vigour.

It was never the people who complained of the universality of human rights, nor did the people consider human rights as a Western or Northern imposition. It was often their leaders who did so.

We believe that human rights transcend boundaries and must prevail over state sovereignty.

And we who have toiled for freedom's law, have we sought for freedom's soul? Have we learned at last that human right is not a part but the whole?

Establish democracy at home, based on human rights as superior to property rights. . . .

Either the Earth System would undergo major phase transitions as a result of unchecked human pressure on nature's capacities and resources or a "Great Transformation" towards global sustainability would be initiated in due course. Neither transitions nor transformations will be manageable without novel forms of global governance and markets.

I was blessed to look well and retain a youthful look but that was just genes. I was disappointed when critics started pointing out my wrinkles. I thought, you mean this is what it's gonna be about now? I'm not going to be permitted to be human?

It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe

Darwin's greatest achievement was to show that the appearance of purpose, planning, teleology (design), and intentionality in the origin and development of human and animal species was entirely an illusion. The illusion could be explained by evolutionary processes that contained no such purpose at all. But the spread of ideas through imitation required the whole apparatus of human consciousness and intentionality

The soul comes from without into the human body, as into a temporary abode, and it goes out of it anew… it passes into other habitations, for the soul is immortal.

All human beings go through a previous life... Who knows how many fleshly forms the heir of heaven occupies before he can be brought to understand the value of that silence and solitude of spiritual worlds?

In human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or biological sense.

I don't want to just revolve. I want to evolve. As a man, as a human, as a father, as a lover.

It is legitimate and necessary to ask oneself if this is not perhaps part of a new ideology of evil, perhaps more insidious and hidden, which attempts to pit human rights against the family and against man.

Humans hardly ever learn from the experience of others. They learn - when they do, which isn't often - on their own, the hard way.