c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.
— Michael Parenti, Against Empire
She felt so human that he could barely carry on a conversation.
— L.A. Weatherly, Angel
We who bore the mark might well be considered by the rest of the world as strange, even as insane and dangerous. We had awoken, or were awakening, and we were striving for an ever perfect state of wakefulness, whereas the ambition and quest for happiness of the others consisted of linking their opinions, ideals, and duties, their life and happiness, ever more closely with those of the herd. They, too, strove; they, too showed signs of strength and greatness. But as we saw it, whereas we marked men represented Nature's determination to create something new, individual, and forward-looking, the others lived in the determination to stay the same. For them mankind--which they loved as much as we did--was a fully formed entity that had to be preserved and protected. For us mankind was a distant future toward which we were all journeying, whose aspect no one knew, whose laws weren't written down anywhere.
— Hermann Hesse, Demian. Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend
I believe that before all else I am a reasonable human being, just as you are--or, at all events, that I must try and become one.
— Henrik Ibsen, The Doll's House: A Play
I never thought it would get this bad. I never thought the Reestablishment would take things so far. They're incinerating culture, the beauty of diversity. The new citizens of our world will be reduced to nothing but numbers, easily interchangeable, easily removable, easily destroyed for disobedience.We have lost our humanity.
— Tahereh Mafi, Shatter Me
Keep your language. Love its sounds, its modulation, its rhythm. But try to march together with men of different languages, remote from your own, who wish like you for a more just and human world.
— Hélder Câmara, Spiral Of Violence
Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality.
— C.S. Lewis
All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.
— William Shakespeare, As You Like It
Humanity is not perfect in any fashion; no more in the case of evil than in that of good. The criminal has his virtues, just as the honest man has his weaknesses.
— Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos de Laclos, Les Liaisons dangereuses
Don't you find it a beautiful clean thought, a world empty of people, just uninterrupted grass, and a hare sitting up?
— D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love
Great occasions do not make heroes or cowards; they simply unveil them to the eyes of men. Silently and perceptibly, as we wake or sleep, we grow strong or weak; and last some crisis shows what we have become. 
— Brooke Foss Westcott
Scholars discern motions in history & formulate these motions into rules that govern the rises & falls of civilizations. My belief runs contrary, however. To wit: history admits no rules; only outcomes.What precipitates outcomes? Vicious acts & virtuous acts.What precipitates acts? B
— David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
Humanity is lost because people have abandoned using their conscience as their compass.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
When we get out of the glass bottles of our ego,and when we escape like squirrels turning in thecages of our personalityand get into the forests again,we shall shiver with cold and frightbut things will happen to usso that we don't know ourselves.Cool, unlying life will rush in,and passion will make our bodies taut with power,we shall stamp our feet with new powerand old things will fall down,we shall laugh, and institutions will curl up likeburnt paper.
— D.H. Lawrence
I am not a machine. For what can a machine know of the smell of wet grass in the morning, or the sound of a crying baby? I am the feeling of the warm sun against my skin; I am the sensation of a cool wave breaking over me. I am the places I have never seen, yet imagine when my eyes are closed. I am the taste of another's breath, the color of her hair.You mock me for the shortness of my life span, but it is this very fear of dying which breathes life into me. I am the thinker who thinks of thought. I am curiosity, I am reason, I am love, and I am hatred. I am indifference. I am the son of a father, who in turn was a father’s son. I am the reason my mother laughed and the reason my mother cried. I am wonder and I am wondrous. Yes, the world may push your buttons as it passes through your circuitry. But the world does not pass through me. It lingers. I am in it and it is in me. I am the means by which the universe has come to know itself. I am the thing no machine can ever make. I am meaning.
— Bernard Beckett, Genesis
And just when you’d think [humans] were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they occasionally showed more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of.
— Terry Pratchett
Down there - he said - are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.
— Terry Pratchett, Guards! Guards!
That's the point. Every kind of animal thinks its own kind of animal is wonderful. So people getting married think they're wonderful, and that they're going to have a baby-- that's wonderful, when actually they're as ugly as rhinoceroses. Just because we think we're so wonderful doesn't mean we really are. We could be really terrible animals and just never admit it because it would hurt so much.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Hocus Pocus
It is painfully easy to define human beings. They are beings who, for no good reason at all, create their own unnecessary suffering.
— Sōseki Natsume, I am a Cat III
Inhumanity, n. One of the signal and characteristic qualities of humanity.
— Ambrose Bierce, The Unabridged Devil's Dictionary
He loved her, as you can only love someone who is an echo of yourself at your time of deepest sorrow.
— Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental. Yet just as human beings make their own history, they also make their cultures and ethnic identities. No one can deny the persisting continuities of long traditions, sustained habitations, national languages, and cultural geographies, but there seems no reason except fear and prejudice to keep insisting on their separation and distinctiveness, as if that was all human life was about. Survival in fact is about the connections between things; in Eliot’s phrase, reality cannot be deprived of the “other echoes [that] inhabit the garden.” It is more rewarding - and more difficult - to think concretely and sympathetically, contrapuntally, about others than only about “us.” But this also means not trying to rule others, not trying to classify them or put them in hierarchies, above all, not constantly reiterating how “our” culture or country is number one (or not number one, for that matter).
— Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism
You learn eventually that, while there are no villains, there are no heroes either. And until you make the final discovery that there are only human beings, who are therefore all the more fascinating, you are liable to miss something.
— Paul Gallico
Onto his stomach. Then knees. Then hands. His elbows quivered, his wrists threatened to buckle under his own weight. Self-centered, stubborn, sentimental, childish, vain. I am humanity. Cynical, naive, kind, cruel, soft as down, hard as tungsten steel.I am humanityHe crawled.I am humanity.He fell.I am humanity.He got up.
— Rick Yancey, The Infinite Sea
People will do amazing things to ensure their survival.
— Patricia Briggs, The Hob's Bargain
Contrary to popular belief and hope, people don't usually come running when they hear a scream. That's not how humans work. Humans look at other humans and say, 'Did you hear a scream?' because the first scream might have been you screaming inside your head, or a horse backfiring.
— Terry Pratchett, Unseen Academicals
What an ugly beast is the ape, and how like us.
— Marcus Tullius Cicero
Every soul is special. They’re all beautiful. They’re all far more significant than anyone on this rock realizes. I think when people are at their best, they’re acting in accordance with their soul. The ones who have gone bad don’t have bad souls. They’ve just given up on keeping in touch with them.
— Jim Butcher, Vignette
10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.
— Susan Sontag
The great gift of human beings is that we have the power of empathy, we can all sense a mysterious connection to each other.
— Meryl Streep
and now, all these years later, it seem to him that the most horrible fact of human existence was that broken hearts mended
— Stephen King, Wizard and Glass
Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
— Jonathan Franzen, Farther Away
Sometimes I want to be human for you.
— Sarah Rees Brennan, The Demon's Covenant
You're the man who stands on the street corner with a roll of toilet paper, and written on each square are the words, 'I love you.' And each passer-by, no matter who, gets a square all his or her own. I don't want my square of toilet p
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it'd find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human i
— David Foster Wallace
It takes great courage to open one's heart and mind to the tremendous injustice and suffering in our world.
— Vincent A. Gallagher, The True Cost of Low Prices: The Violence of Globalization
The human touch is that little snippet of physical affection that brings a bit of comfort, support, and kindness. It doesn’t take much from the one who gives it, but can make a huge difference in the one who receives it.
— Mya Robarts, The V Girl
The dogs brought it all back to, you know, to the human side.
— Luis Carlos Montalván, Until Tuesday: A Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him
I am evolving from being an animal,' he said. 'But it is going very, very slowly. Sometime I try to cry and laugh like other people, just to see if it feels like anything. Yet tears don't come. Laughter doesn't come.
— Blaine Harden, Escape from Camp 14: One Man's Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West
Humans are the reproductive organs of technology.
— Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants
The "norm" for humanity is love.Brutality is an aberration.We are not sinners by nature.We learn to be bad.We are taught to stray from our good paths.We are made to be crazy by other people who are also crazy and who draw for us a map of the world which is ugly, negative, fearful, and crazy.
— Jack D. Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals: The Wetiko Disease of Imperialism, Exploitation and Terrorism
To suffer is one thing; another thing is living with the photographed images of suffering, which does not necessarily strengthen conscience and the ability to be compassionate. It can also corrupt them. Once one has seen such images, one has started down the road of seeing more - and more. Images transfix. Images anesthetize.
— Susan Sontag, On Photography
The only difference between man and man all the world over is one of degree, and not of kind, even as there is between trees of the same species.Where in is the cause for anger, envy or discrimination?
— Mahatma Gandhi
It´s a good thing when a man is different from your image of him. Is shows he isn´t a type. If he were, it would be the end of him as a man. But if you can´t place him in a category, it means that at least a part of him is what a human being ought to be. He has risen above himself, he has a grain of immortality.
— Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
But then every man is ludicrous if you look at him from outside, without taking into account what’s going on in his heart and mind.
— Aldous Huxley, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan
So, if this were indeed my Final Hour, these would be my words to you. I would not claim to pass on any secret of life, for there is none, or any wisdom except the passionate plea of caring ... Try to feel, in your heart's core, the reality of others. This is the most painful thing in the world, probably, and the most necessary. In times of personal adversity, know that you are not alone. Know that although in the eternal scheme of things you are small, you are also unique and irreplaceable, as are all of your fellow humans everywhere in the world. Know that your commitment is above all to life itself.
— Margaret Laurence
Twisted and perverse are the ways of the human mind," Jane intoned. "Pinocchio was such a dolt to try to become a real boy. He was much better off with a wooden head.
— Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead
There's something in everyone only they know.
— Ben Harper
Lust is the source of all our actions, and humanity.
— Blaise Pascal, Pensées
In order to understand, observe, deduce, man must first be conscious of himself as alive.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
We talk of wild animals but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals
—  following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type.
It was a haunting feeling, the sort of sensation you get when you wonder whether you are two people, the other of which does things you can't explain, bad and terrible things.
— Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality
Human: That's stupid. Isn't there grass on both sides?
— Orson Scott Card
A man's every action is inevitably conditioned by what surrounds him and by his own body.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
If I hadn’t spent so much time studying Earthlings," said the Tralfamadorian, "I wouldn’t have any idea what was meant by 'free will.' I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe, and I have studied reports on one hundred more. Only on Earth is there any talk of free will.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slaughterhouse-Five
The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star.
— Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality. That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.
— J.K. Rowling, Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination
The fundamental delusion of humanity is to suppose that I am here and you are out there. -Yasutani Roshi, Zen master (1885-1973)
— Yasutani Roshi
To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity.
— C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain
We have so far to go to realize our human potential for compassion, altruism, and love.
— Jane Goodall, Harvest for Hope: A Guide to Mindful Eating
...humanity is a disease, a cancer on the body of the world.
— Scott Westerfeld, Pretties
We must all make do with the rags of love we find flapping on the scarecrow of humanity.
— Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them
— Henry David Thoreau, Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If cavemen had known how to laugh, history would have been different.
— Chuck Klosterman
One of my rules is never to look sideways at what other people are doing but instead, do what I feel is right.
— Annie Bryant, Worst Enemies/Best Friends
I am dying: it's a beautiful word. Like the long slow sigh of the cello: dying. But the sound of it is the only beautiful thing about it.
— Sonya Hartnett, Surrender
We are such small, stupid things. For most of my life I thought of nature as the stupid thing: Blind, animal, destructive. We, the humans, were clean and smart and in control: we had wrestled the rest of the world into submission, battered it down, pinned it to a glass slide and the pages of The Bool of Shhh.
— Lauren Oliver, Pandemonium
We are in the process of creating what deserves to be called the idiot culture. Not an idiot sub-culture, which every society has bubbling beneath the surface and which can provide harmless fun; but the culture itself. For the first time, the weird and the stupid and the coarse are becoming our cultural norm, even our cultural ideal.
— Carl Bernstein
It wasn't so long ago when all the so-called scientists said that humans were intelligent and that animals weren't, humans were the solitary unchallenged masters of the globe and probably the universe and the only question was whether we were handling our mastery well. (No. Next question.)
— Robin McKinley, Dragonhaven
I thought: this is how you make a human being. A human being is beautiful and sick. A human being glitters and starves.
— Catherynne M. Valente, Six-Gun Snow White
The people knew what had made them human. It was not their shortcomings, but their hearts.
— Vanna Bonta, Flight: A Quantum Fiction Novel
Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals. 
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
Those who understand the true nature of humanity are always loners
— Dean Cavanagh
He stood breathing, and the more he breathed the land in, the more he was filled up with all the details of the land. He was not empty. There was more than enough here to fill him. There would always be more than enough.
— Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
I remember one night at Muzdalifa with nothing but the sky overhead I lay awake amid sleeping Muslim brothers and I learned that pilgrims from every land--every color, and class, and rank; high officials and the beggar alike--all snored in the same language.
— Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
We are all brothers under the skin - and I, for one, would be willing to skin humanity to prove it.
— Ayn Rand
I believe in energies. Good energy has served me well. Being fair with others, compassionate towards them, remaining humble, and making a difference to someone are just a few of the things that I have seen create good energy. Beautiful things. Human things. I do my best to surround myself with these types of things, to generate an atmosphere thick with such energy. It has kept me safe in many situations. I have taken risks in the past, and managed to avoid harm by the protection of the good energy I have created around me. I believe that ugliness creates more ugliness. And no matter how touched by ugliness you are, you do not have to give in to it and start spreading it beyond yourself. I have seen this sickness and what it does to a person, and those around them.
— Ashly Lorenzana
But thus do I counsel you, my friends: distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None
Welcome to the human race. Nobody controls his own life, Ender. The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given you by good people, by people who love you.
— Orson Scott Card
One of the hardest things for boys to learn is that a teacher is human. One of the hardest things for a teacher to learn is not to try and tell them.
— Alan Bennett, The History Boys
One expects decent people to stand up for the good of all. Decent people shut their doors and hide behind them as decent people do. Massacres could never happen if it weren't for decent people.
— Jennifer Donnelly, Revolution
. . . Moon-Watcher felt the first faint twinges of a new and potent emotion. It was a vague and diffuse sense of envy--of dissatisfaction with his life. He had no idea of its cause, still less of its cure; but discontent had come into his soul, and he had taken one small step toward humanity.
— Arthur C. Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Whoever is not in his coffin and the dark grave, let him know he has enough.
— Walt Whitman
All that we can't say is all we need to hear.
— Ben Harper
In solitude we realize that nothing human is alien to us.
— Henri J.M. Nouwen
If a man makes me keep my distance, the comfort is, he keeps his at the same time.
— Jonathan Swift
The best place for discovering what a man is is the heart of the desert. Your plane has broken down, and you walk for hours, heading for the little fort at Nutchott. You wait for the mirages of thirst to gape before you. But you arrive and you find an old sergeant who has been isolated for months among the dunes, and he is so happy to be found that he weeps. And you weep, too. In the arching immensity of the night, each tells the story of his life, each offers the other the burden of memories in which the human bond is discovered. Here two men can meet, and they bestow gifts upon each other with the dignity of ambassadors.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, A Sense Of Life
If there is one sound the follows the march of humanity, it is the scream.
— David Gemmell
There are such repulsive faces in the world.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
You didn’t feed from her,” he said, and this was not a question.“Swill poison? Not my kind of fun, little brother.”One corner of Stefan’s mouth quirked up. He made no response to this, but simply looked at Damon with eyes that were... knowing. Damon bridled.“I told the truth!”“Going to take it up as a hobby?
— L.J. Smith, Nightfall
There are those wonderful moments of clarity in life when one is reminded how irreparably flawed we humans are. Once, when I was nineteen, on the subway in Boston I lost my balance slightly and bumped into an elderly woman. I quickly apologized and she replied, "Well, hold on to something, stupid." There it is. That's it. That's it in a nutshell. I don't want to sound negative, but I think every fetus should be shown a film of that incident, maybe projected up on the uterine wall, and then asked if it wants to come out. I am a strong believer in a woman's right to choose, but I also think that in the last trimester, the kid should be given every opportunity to back out.
— Paula Poundstone
People have always wanted to 'improve' human beings; for the most part, this has been called morality.
— Friedrich Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ/Ecce Homo/Twilight of the Idols/Other Writings
Caring is open-hearted, keeping us available to transmit love to a stranger through simple eye contact and without condition. This is not the opportunistic sizing-up of sexual cruising; instead, it’s the felt recognition of the divinity and humanity in another individual.
— Alexandra Katehakis, Mirror of Intimacy: Daily Reflections on Emotional and Erotic Intelligence
In all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.
— Carl Sagan
It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil.
— Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
If we wish to know about a man, we ask 'what is his story--his real, inmost story?'--for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us--through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives--we are each of us unique.
— Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales
We laugh at sheep because sheep just follow the one in front. We humans have out-sheeped the sheep, because at least the sheep need a sheep dog to keep them in line. Humans keep each other in line. And they do it by ridiculing or condemning anyone who commits the crime, and that’s what it’s become, of being different.
— David Icke
I'm a giant pimple on the face of humanity.
— Katie Alender, Bad Girls Don't Die
[T]he family is a school of compassion because it is here that we learn to live with other people. (68)
— Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life
If you truly want LOVE to enter your Heart, you HAVE to give a DAMN about what's going on around you!!
— AainaA-Ridtz
Sometimes I wonder if he were raised a Red and I a Gold if he wouldn't have ended up a better man than I am now, and I a worse man than he ever could be.For some reason I think I could have been capable of great evil.
— Pierce Brown, Golden Son
We're all mad, the whole damned race. We're wrapped in illusions, delusions, confusions about the penetrability of partitions, we're all mad and in solitary confinement.
— William Golding, Darkness Visible
To a wise and good man the whole earth is his fatherland.
— Democritus
Life is the most effective school ever created. Once upon a time they made children bow their heads and read books. It would take ages to get anything across." He taps his head. "But we have widgets and datapads now, and we Golds have the lower Colors to do our research. We need not study chemistry or physics. We have computers and others to do that. What we must study is humanity. In order to rule, ours must be the study of political, psychological, and behavioral science - how desperate human beings react to one another, how packs form, how armies function, how things fall apart and why. You could learn this nowhere else but here.
— Pierce Brown, Red Rising
Abby began to think that all the beauty and ugliness and turbulence one found scattered through nature, one could also find in people themselves, all collected there, all together in a single place. No matter what terror or loveliness the earth could produce- wind, seas- a person could produce the same, lived with the same, lived with all that mixed-up nature swirling inside, every bit. There was nothing as complex in the world- no flower or stone- as a single hello from a human being.
— Lorrie Moore
Though we longed not to be lonely, we also feared the pain it would take us to be brought out of our lonely states. And after that fear, could we be guaranteed that we would never be returned to a state of loneliness again? We could not.
— Edward Carey, Observatory Mansions
There should be no boundaries to human endeavor. (...) However bad life may seem (...) While there’s life, there is hope.
— Stephen Hawking
It is blasphemy to separate oneself from the earth and look down on it like a god. It is more than blasphemy; it is dangerous. We can never be gods, after all - but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.
— N.K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms
She wasn't happy, but then she wasn't unhappy. She wasn't anything. But I don't believe anyone is a nothing. There has to be something inside, if only to keep the skin from collapsing. This vacant eye, listless hand, this damask cheek dusted like a doughnut with plastic powder, had to have a memory or a dream.
— John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley: In Search of America
Loving humanity means as much, and as little, as loving raindrops, or loving the Milky Way. You say that you love humanity? Are you sure you aren’t treating yourself to easy self-congratulation, seeking approval, making certain you’re on the right side?
— Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
People need other people to feel things for them," she said. "It gets lonely to feel things all by yourself.
— Lauren Oliver, Liesl & Po
Perhaps the great renewal of the world will consist of this, that man and woman, freed of all confused feelings and desires, shall no longer seek each other as opposites, but simply as members of a family and neighbors, and will unite as human beings, in order to simply, earnestly, patiently, and jointly bear the heavy responsibility of sexuality that has been entrusted to them.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
Well, there are times when one would like to hang the whole human race and finish the farce.
— Mark Twain
I don't think it had ever occurred to me that man's supremacy is not primarily due to his brain, as most of the books would have one think. It is due to the brain's capacity to make use of the information conveyed to it by a narrow band of visible light rays. His civilization, all that he had achieved or might achieve, hung upon his ability to perceive that range of vibrations from red to violet. Without that, he was lost.
— John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids
All peoples and nations are of one family, the children of one Father, and should be to one another as brothers and sisters.
— Bahá'u'lláh
The fragility of love is what is most at stake here—humanity's most crucial three-word avowal is often uttered only to find itself suddenly embarrassing or orphaned or isolated or ill-timed—but strangely enough it can work better as a literal or reassuring statement than a transcendent or numinous or ecstatic one.
— Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
Because there is no nation so powerful it cannot be wounded, nor a people so small they cannot offer mighty comfort.
— Carmen Agra Deedy, 14 Cows for America
We are, on earth, two distinct races. Those who have need of others, whom others amuse, engage soothe, whom solitude harasses, pains, stupefies, like the movement of a terrible glacier or the traversing of the desert; and those, on the contrary, whom others weary, tire, bore, silently torture, whom isolation calms and bathes in the repose of independency, and plunges into the humors of their own thoughts. In fine, there is here a normal, physical phenomenon. Some are constituted to live a life outside of themselves, others, to live a life within themselves. As for me, my exterior associations are abruptly and painfully short-lived, and, as they reach their limits, I experience in my whole body and in my whole intelligence an intolerable uneasiness. 
— Guy de Maupassant
They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix.
— Lionel Shriver, We Need to Talk About Kevin
Get close enough to someone and his or her halo slips--not because they're bad, but because they're mortal.
— Patricia Raybon, My First White Friend: Confessions on Race, Love and Forgiveness
Question: You seem to advise me to be self-centered to the point ofegoism. Must I not yield even to my interest in other people?Maharaj: Your interest in others is egoistic, self-concerned, self-oriented. You are not interested in others as persons, but onlyas far as they enrich, or enoble your own image of yourself.And the ultimate in selfishness is to care only for the protection,preservation and multiplication of one's own body. By body Imean all that is related to your name and shape--- your family,tribe, country, race, etc. To be attached to one's name andshape is selfishness. A man who knows that he is neither bodynor mind cannot be selfish, for he has nothing to be selfish for.Or, you may say, he is equally 'selfish' on behalf of everybodyhe meets; everybody's welfare is his own. The feeling 'I am theworld, the world is myself' becomes quite natural; once it is es-tablished, there is just no way of being selfish. To be selfishmeans to covet, to acquire, accumulate on behalf of the partagainst the whole. I Am ThatNisargadatta Maharaj
— Nisargadatta Maharaj
Poetry, like jazz, is one of those dazzling diamonds of creative industry that help human beings make sense out of the comedies and tragedies that contextualize our lives.
— Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry
Love, hope, fear, faith - these make humanity; These are its sign and note and character
— Robert Browning, Browning's Paracelsus: Being the Text of Browning's Poem
Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive... If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds.
— Carl Sagan
Humanity is a comic role. 
— Novalis, Novalis: Philosophical Writings
The biggest threat against the survival of humanity is not brutality and unkindness, it is stupidity and selfishness.
— M.F. Moonzajer
I don't see what's so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin' upset 'cos they act like people.
— Terry Pratchett, Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
Bonnie who had never hurt a - a harmless thing for malice. Bonnie who was like a kitten making airy pounces at no prey at all. Bonnie with her hair that was called something strawberry but that looked simply as if it was on fire. Bonnie of the translucent skin with the delicate violet fjords and estuaries of veins all over her throat and inner arms. Bonnie who had lately taken to looking at him sideways with her large childlike eyes big and brown under lashes like stars...
— L.J. Smith, Nightfall
We must choose between the violence of adults and the smiles of children, between the ugliness of hate and the will to oppose it. Between inflicting suffering and humiliation on our fellow man and offering him the solidarity and hope he deserves. Or not.
— Elie Wiesel, Open Heart
How can we judge fairly of the characters and merits of men, of the wisdom or folly of actions, unless we have . . . an accurate knowledge of all particulars, so that we may live as it were in the times, and among the persons, of whom we read, see with their eyes, and reason and decide on their premises?
— William Wilberforce
This book was written so that we may take heed and remold our story. I am certain that when enough of us become aware of how we are being exploited by the economic engine that creates an insatiable appetite for the world's resources, and results in systems that foster slavery, we will no longer tolerate it. We will reassess our role in a world where a few swim in riches and the majority drown in poverty, pollution, and violence . We will commit ourselves to navigating a course toward compassion, democracy, and social justice for all.
— John Perkins, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
at the press conference for the film he impressed everyone with his complete sincerity and innocence. he said he had come to see the sea for the first time and marveled at how clean it was. someone told him that, in fact, it wasn't. 'when the world is emptied of human beings' he said, 'it will become so again
— Werner Herzog
We discover that we are at the same time very insignificant and very important, because each of our actions is preparing the humanity of tomorrow; it is a tiny contribution to the construction of the huge and glorious final humanity
— Jean Vanier, Community And Growth
More pathetic than the digital age is the people who love it. They buy right into the "newer is always better" ideology and they can't seem to grasp that the fun of VHS tapes, super 8 film, darkroom photography and vinyl records is far more worthwhile and human than the cold, high-tech atmosphere of everything being digitized. As the 21st century progresses, yeah, we'll have our Netflix and our cellular phones and our artificial intelligence and our implanted microchips - and future generations will have lost something valuable. Sadly, they won't even know what they've lost because we're taking it all away from them.
— Rebecca McNutt
The stark nakedness and simplicity of the conflict with which humanity is oppressed - that of getting angry with and wishing to hurt the very person who is most loved.
— John Bowlby
All of us have failed. One wishes to be punished. One is willing to assume all kinds of penance, but do you know, my daughter, that in love -- I scarcely dare say it -- but in love our very mistakes don't seem to be able to last long?
— Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Mankind is a single body and each nation a part of that body. We must never say "What does it matter to me if some part of the world is ailing?" If there is such an illness, we must concern ourselves with it as though we were having that illness.
— Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
If success or failure of this planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do... HOW WOULD I BE? WHAT WOULD I DO?
— R. Buckminster Fuller
Everybody sins, Francis. The terrible thing is that we love our sins. We love the thing that makes us evil.
— Robert Cormier, Heroes
The more inhuman we became the more we understood each other as humans.
— Cameron Conaway, Caged: Memoirs of a Cage-Fighting Poet
All life is rife with possibilities. Seeds have possibilities, but all their tomorrows are caught by the patterning of their life cycle. Animals have possibilities that are greater than that of a fir tree or a blade of grass. Still, though, for most animals, the pattern of instinct, the patterns of their lives, are very strong. Humanity has a far greater range of possibilities, especially the very young. Who will children grow up to be? Who will they marry, what will they believe, what will they create? Creation is a very powerful seed of possibility.
— Patricia Briggs, River Marked
There is only one way in which one can endure man's inhumanity to man and that is to try, in one's own life, to exemplify man's humanity to man.
— Alan Paton
It's an unnerving thought that we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously.
— Bill Bryson
The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.
— Oscar Wilde
Eliminate the concept of division by class, skills, race, income, and nationality. We are all equals with a common pulse to survive. Every human requires food and water. Every human has a dream and desire to be happy. Every human responds to love, suffering and pain. Every human bleeds the same color and occupies the same world. Let us recognize that we are all part of each other. We are all human. We are all one.
— Suzy Kassem
Motormouth: So this is love? Well, love is a gift and a lot of people forget that. So you two better brace yourselves for a whole lot of ugly coming your way on a never ending train of stupid.Penny: So you met my mom?
— Mark O'Donnell, Hairspray: The Complete Book and Lyrics of the Hit Broadway Musical
Just a bullet a bag and a dream that's all I had now look at what I got
— Saira Viola, Crack Apple And Pop!
I believe in people getting what's coming to them but don't hold grudges either. We all hurt people, fail & hopefully grow from adversity. Basically, eat shit & thrive
— Dane Cook
While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of mans humanity to a man.
— Maya Angelou
I am a human being, so nothing human is strange to me.
— Terence
What I've come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion, everyday acts of compassion. In South Africa they have a phrase called ubuntu. Ubuntu comes out of a philosophy that says, the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me. 
— Chris Abani
Humanity is not an aggregate of individuals, a community of thinkers, each of whom is guaranteed from the outset to be able to reach agreement with the others because all participate in the same thinking essence. Nor, of course, is it a single Being in which the multiplicity of individuals are dissolved and into which these individuals are destined to be reabsorbed. As a matter of principle, humanity is precarious: each person can only believe what he recognizes to be true internally and, at the same time, nobody thinks or makes up his mind without already being caught up in certain relationships with others, which leads him to opt for a particular set of opinions. Everyone is alone and yet nobody can do without other people, not just because they are useful (which is not in dispute here) but also when it comes to happiness.
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The World of Perception
The artist stands on the human being as a statue does on a pedestal. 
— Novalis, Novalis: Philosophical Writings
Everything's going to be okay', because that's what I wanted him to say and it's what he wanted to say and that's what you do when the curtain is falling — you give the line that the audience wants to hear.
— Rick Yancey
How inferior the human machine is, compared to man-made machines. They can be decoked, unscrewed, oiled and parts replaced. Decidedly, nature is not a very wonderful thing.
— Joris-Karl Huysmans
Now I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny, the way monogamy is funny, the waysomeone falling down in the street is funny.I entered a revolving door and emergedas a human being. When you think of meis my face electronically blurred?
— Jeffrey McDaniel
The battle we are fighting is not against a particular group. It is against human nature - or at least what it has become.
— Veronica Roth
We scarcely want to analyse what we feel to be so large and deeply human.
— Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader
She turned to examine Dr. Breed, looking at him with helpless reproach. She hated people who thought too much. At that moment, she struck me as an appropriate representative for almost all mankind.
— Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Cat's Cradle
That is one of the great secrets of life Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes.
— Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Only kind people seem really human.
— Marty Rubin
I regard monotheism as the greatest disaster ever to befall the human race. I see no good in Judaism, Christianity, or Islam -- good people, yes, but any religion based on a single, well, frenzied and virulent god, is not as useful to the human race as, say, Confucianism, which is not a religion but an ethical and educational system.
— Gore Vidal, At Home: Essays 1982-1988
Humans were peculiar. They were by turns squeamish and appallingly violent.
— Eileen Wilks, On the Prowl
One human could simply withhold its feelings and intentions from another human by failing to audibilize or it could audibilize things that were not real. The other human would be aware only of what it heard and would change its behavior in response to a nonexistent stimulus. They called it 'lying.
— Robert Buettner, Overkill
Man cries, his tears dry up and run out. So he becomes a devil, reduced to a monster.
— Kohta Hirano
How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all.
— Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Resignation is what kills people. Once they've rejected resignation, humans gain the privilege of making humanity their footpath.
— Kohta Hirano
I am a siren, and for my adoration of mankind, have been caught in fishing nets one time too many. And in those fishing nets I have learned too many unfavorable things about human intentions and the lack of trust and goodwill; I'm not going to allow myself to be caught, anymore. Sirens do well at singing the sirens' song and dragging vile people to their deaths, and for good reason!
— C. JoyBell C.
We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.
— Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Vol. 1: The Problem of Civilization
The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and only persons can work towards them.
— Ivan Illich
They live forever. But many of them are even more lonely and miserable than we are. Why do you think they bother with us? We teach them life's value.
— N.K. Jemisin, The Broken Kingdoms
From the crooked timber of humanity, a straight board cannot be hewn.
— Immanuel Kant
...what makes humanity beautiful is our free will, our individuality, our endless striving in spite of our imperfection.BY THE LIGHT OF THE MOONChapter 27 Page 214
— Dean Koontz, By the Light of the Moon
He had the blue kite in his hands
—  that was the first thing I saw. And I can't lie now and say my eyes didn't scan it for any rips.
We are parts of one universe, true enough. We stand within an almost infinite network of relationships. Yet each of us is a single point of consciousness, a unique event, a private, unrepeatable world. This is the essence of our aloneness.
— Nathaniel Branden
A great library contains the diary of the human race.
— George Mercer Dawson
Such actions are beyond praise: it is the perfume of such sweet and noble human sympathy that makes this wild beasts' cage a world habitable for men.
— Frank Harris, Oscar Wilde
For great changes in the human mind are terrible. As we realize them we realize the limitless possibilities of sinister deeds that lie hidden in every human being. A little child that loves a doll can become an old, crafty, secret murderer. How horrible! And perhaps it is still more horrible to think that, while the human envelope remains totally unchanged, every word of the letter within may become altered, and a message of peace fade into a sentence of death.
— Robert S. Hichens, the Return of the Soul and Other Stories
It is because Humanity has never known where it was going that it has been able to find its way.
— Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist
It's time for a new National Anthem. America is divided into two definite divisions. The easy thing to cop out with is sayin' black and white. You can see a black person. But now to get down to the nitty-gritty, it's getting' to be old and young - not the age, but the way of thinking. Old and new, actually... because there's so many even older people that took half their lives to reach a certain point that little kids understand now.
— Jimi Hendrix
Humans generally get out the gist of what they need to say right at the beginning, then spend forever qualifying, contradicting, burnishing or taking important things back. Yor rareley miss anything by cutting most people off after two sentences.
— Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land
For God’s sake, let us be mennot monkeys minding machinesor sitting with our tails curledwhile the machine amuses us, the radio or film or gramophone.Monkeys with a bland grin on our faces.
— D.H. Lawrence, Selected Letters
There is one advantage to realizing that you're never going to get it right: you do begin to stop expecting everyone else to get it right too, which makes for less frustration when other people turn out to be just as human as you are.
— Jeff Wilson, Buddhism of the Heart: Reflections on Shin Buddhism and Inner Togetherness
But for a moment Dirk had a sense of inifinite loss and sadness that somewhere among the frenzy of information noise that daily rattled the lives of men he thought he might have heard a few notes that denoted the movements of gods.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul