Quotes About Mankind

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

There's in people simply an urge to destroy, an urge to kill, to murder and rage, and until all mankind, without exception, undergoes a great change, wars will be waged, everything that has been built up, cultivated, and grown will be destroyed and disfigured, after which mankind will have to begin all over again

The great ideals of the past failed not by being outlived (which must mean over-lived), but by not being lived enough. Mankind has not passed through the Middle Ages. Rather mankind has retreated from the Middle Ages in reaction and rout. The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.

All the entertainment and talk of history is nothing almost but fighting and killing: and the honour and renown that is bestowed on conquerors (who for the most part are but the great butchers of mankind) farther mislead growing youth, who by this means come to think slaughter the laudable business of mankind, and the most heroic of virtues.

When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind.

After all, for mankind as a whole there are no exports. We did not start developing by obtaining foreign exchange from Mars or the moon. Mankind is a closed society.

If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?

The conflict that exists today is no more than an old-style struggle for power, once again presented to mankind in semireligious trappings. The difference is that, this time, the development of atomic power has imbued the struggle with a ghostly character; for both parties know and admit that, should the quarrel deteriorate into actual war, mankind is doomed.

I believe in God--in spite of God! I believe in Mankind--in spite of Mankind! I believe in the Future--in spite of the Past!

I believe in the theory of evolution, but I believe as well in the allegorical truth of creation theory. In other words, I believe that evolution, including the principle of natural selection, is one of the tools used by God to create mankind. Mankind is then a participant in the creation of the universe itself, so that we have a closed loop. I believe that there is a level on which science and religious metaphor are mutually compatible.

Which class is happiest, the rich, the middle class or the poor? A very successful executive of a large organization touches upon this vital subject in a long letter to all his salesmen. He uses as his text a passage from Robinson Crusoe which included this: ""My Father bid me observe it, and I should always find that the calamities of life were shared among the upper and lower part of mankind; but that the middle station had the fewest disasters, and were not exposed to so many vicissitudes as the higher or lower part of mankind.

Perhaps the highest goodness attainable is a life of service to all mankind. Such an ideal is supported in nearly every page in the Gospels-the parables, the sermons, and the countless acts of service by our Lord Himself. The ideal is not limited to any particular kind of service, nor a given quantity of service. The ideal is accepting life itself as a trust to be used in the welfare of mankind. It is a life that is glad for the chance to be of any help, an attitude that 'service is the rent we pay for our own room on earth.' (Lord Halifax)

It is in meeting the great tests that mankind can most successfully rise to great heights. Out of danger and restless insecurity comes the force that pushes mankind to newer and loftier conquests.

Compassion does not only refine and civilize human nature, but has something in it more pleasing and agreeable, than what can be met with in such an indolent happiness, such an indifference to mankind, as that in which the stoics placed their wisdom. As love is the most delightful passion, pity is nothing else but love softened by a degree of sorrow: In short, it is a kind of pleasing anguish, anguish as well as generous sympathy, that knits mankind together, and blends them in the same common lot.

The revealed and mystic literature of mankind bears ample testimony to the fact that religious experience has been too enduring and dominant in the history of mankind to be rejected as mere illusion. There seems to be no reason, then, to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and reject its other levels as mystical and emotional.

The diversity of mankind is a basic postulate of our knowledge of human beings. But if mankind is diverse and individuated, then how can anyone propose equality as an ideal? Every year, scholars hold Conferences on Equality and call for greater equality, and no one challenges the basic tenet. But what justification can equality find in the nature of man? If each individual is unique, how else can he be made 'equal' to others than by destroying most of what is human in him and reducing human society to the mindless uniformity of the ant heap?

But since the Word of God is complete, serving as the ultimate "sign" needed to lead mankind to Christ, miracles are an exception rather than the rule. And when they occur, they are always for His glory.

Eroticism, hallucinogenic drugs, nuclear science, Gaudi's Gothic architecture, my love of gold - there is a common denominator in all of it: God is present in everything. The same magic is at the heart of all things, and all roads lead to the same revelation: we are children of God, and the entire universe tends towards the perfection of mankind.

Language the most forcible proceeds from the man who is most sincere. The way to speak with power, or to write words that pierce mankind to the quick, is to speak and write honestly.

Mercy to animals means mercy to mankind.

When mankind goes back to treating people the way you want to be treated, things will settle, I don't see that happening. I treat people the way I want to be treated, which makes me odd.

I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.

No, my friend. We are lunatics from the hospital up the highway, psycho-ceramics, the cracked pots of mankind. Would you like me to decipher a Rorschach for you?

Nothing that you do in science is guaranteed to result in benefits for mankind. Any discovery, I believe, is morally neutral and it can be turned either to constructive ends or destructive ends. That's not the fault of science.

The proper study of mankind is man in his relation to his deity.

Dreams surely are difficult, confusing, and not everything in them is brought to pass for mankind. For fleeting dreams have two gates: one is fashioned of horn and one of ivory. Those which pass through the one of sawn ivory are deceptive, bringing tidings which come to nought, but those which issue from the one of polished horn bring true results when a mortal sees them.

In short, I conceive that great part of the miseries of mankind are brought upon them by the false estimates they have made of the value of things, and by their giving too much for their whistles.

I fancy mankind may come, in time, to write all aphoristically.

However far modern science and techniques have fallen short of their inherent possibilities, they have taught mankind at least one lesson; nothing is impossible.

We have to consider culture respectfully, but on the other hand, it's dangerous. When we begin talking about cultures, we begin forgetting about individuals. Every individual is unique. Mankind has common feelings and ideas, but we might have some other connections, too. For example, I might be very close to someone in New York in some way. Because of the music I like or how I like to watch soccer games, or because I like to read Russian classics.

We protest solemnly in the face of mankind, that we desire peace at any sacrifice, save that of honor.

I happen to think that American politics is one of the noblest arts of mankind; and I cannot do anything else but write about it.

The solution for mankind is of a spiritual nature. It is not a political or religious solution. It's the ability to love each other. That's the only solution I see.

Loyalty to the family must be merged into loyalty to the community, loyalty to the community into loyalty to the nation, and loyalty to the nation into loyalty to mankind. The citizen of the future must be a citizen of the world.

Hope is a merciless tormentor. It's the sound of trickling water to parched lips. The prospect of love to the unlovable. A miracle cure to the parents of a dying child. It holds up victory over the inevitable and beckons us to crawl further over slicing shards, all the while pulling back, remaining just out of reach. It makes agony out of mere pain by pretending a different outcome could have been. It laughs at mankind's embrace of it after millennia of disappointment.

[If you understood the natural rights of mankind,] [y]ou would be convinced that natural liberty is a gift of the beneficent Creator to the whole human race, and that civil liberty is founded in that, and cannot be wrested from any people without the most manifest violation of justice.

My urgent advice to you would be, not only always to think first of America, but always, also, to think first of humanity. You do not love humanity if you seek to divide humanity into jealous camps. Humanity can be welded together only by love, by sympathy, by justice, not by jealousy and hatred. I am sorry for the man who seeks to make personal capital out of the passions of his fellowmen. He has lost touch with the ideal of America. For America was created to unit mankind.

Universe is a giant wave and mankind needs a giant breakwater: The science! It is the best jetty we ever have!

If religious belief be indeed so necessary to mankind, as we are continually assured that it is, there is great reason to lament, that the intellectual grounds of it should require to be backed by moral bribery or subornation of the understanding.

If people destroy something replaceable made by mankind, they are called vandals; if they destroy something irreplaceable made by God, they are called developers.

If Euclid's point, though incapable of being drawn by any human agency, has an imperishable value, my picture has its own for mankind to live.

Mankind, when left to themselves, are unfit for their own government.

Want compassion is not to be numbered among the general faults of mankind. The black ingredient which fouls our disposition is envy. Hence our eyes, it is to be feared, are seldom turned up to those who are manifestly greater, better, wiser, or happier than ourselves, without some degree of malignity, we commonly look downward on the mean and miserable with sufficient benevolence and pity.

It is useful that while mankind are imperfect there should be different opinions, so is it that there should be different experiments of living; that free scope should be given to varieties of character, short of injury to others.

There is no loftier mission than to approach the Divinity nearer than other men, and to disseminate the divine rays among mankind.

All nonstate threats to life, liberty, and property appear to be relatively petty and therefore can be dealt with. Only states can pose truly massive threats, and sooner or later the horrors with which they menace mankind invariably come to pass.

I do not understand a mind which sees a gracious beneficence in spending money to slay and maim human beings in almost unimaginable numbers and deprecates the expenditure of a smaller sum to patch up the ills of mankind.

Only by understanding the wisdom of natural foods and their effects on the body, shall we attain mastery of disease and pain, which shall enable us to relieve the burden of mankind.