Quotes about humankind

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.

— Douglas Adams

The proper study of mankind is woman.

— Henry Brooks Adams

We all live under the same sky, but we don't all have the same horizon.

— Konrad Adenauer

Man is an ape with possibilities.

— Roy Chapman Andrews

Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man--yesterday in embryo, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hairsbreadth of time assigned to thee, live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it.

— Marcus Antonius

I love men, not for what unites them, but for what divides them, and I want to know most of all what gnaws at their hearts.

— Guillaume Apollinaire

Either a beast or a god.

— Aristotle

Man is by nature a political animal.

— Aristotle

Always observe how ephemeral and worthless human things are. Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end thy journey in content, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew.

— Marcus Aurelius

Our humanity is a poor thing, except for the divinity that stirs within us.

— Francis Bacon

There are two distinctive classes of people today, those who have personal computers, and those who have several thousand extra dollars apiece.

— Dave Barry

If we consider the superiority of the human species, the size of its brain, its powers of thinking, language and organization, we can say this: were there the slightest possibility that another rival or superior species might appear, on earth or elsewhere, man would use every means at his disposal to destroy it.

— Jean Baudrillard

Man must realize his own unimportance before he can appreciate his importance.

— R. M. Baumgardy

The real man is one who always finds excuses for others, but never excuses himself.

— Henry Ward Beecher

Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. [Genesis 3:5]

— Bible

Cruelty has a Human Heart, And jealousy a Human Face; Terror the Human Form Divine, And secrecy the Human Dress. The Human Dress is forged Iron, The Human Form a Fiery Forge, The Human Face a Furnace seal d, The Human Heart its hungry gorge.

— William Blake

As far as many statistical series that are related to activities of mankind are concerned, the date that divides human history into two equal parts is well within living memory. The world of today is as different from the world I was born in as that world was from Julius Caesar s. I was born in the middle of human history, to date, roughly. Almost as much has happened since I was born as happened before.

— Kenneth Ewart Boulding

Man is God's highest present development. He is the latest thing in God.

— Samuel Butler

Man is born passionate of body, but with an innate though secret tendency to the love of Good in his main-spring of Mind. But God help us all! It is at present a sad jar of atoms.

— Lord Byron

A human being is a single being. Unique and unrepeatable.

— Eileen Caddy

The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.

— Italo Calvino

There is no doubt: the study of man is just beginning, at the same time that his end is in sight.

— Elias Canetti

Man is emphatically a proselytizing creature.

— Thomas Carlyle

We ought to think that we are one of the leaves of a tree, and the tree is all humanity. We cannot live without the others, without the tree.

— Pablo Casals

It's funny. All you have to do is say something nobody understands and they'll do practically anything you want them to.

— Holden Caulfield

Everyone is as God made him, and often a great deal worse.

— Miguel De Cervantes

Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head.

— Gilbert K. Chesterton

Man will occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of the time he will pick himself up and continue on.

— Winston Churchill

If the human race wishes to have a prolonged and indefinite period of material prosperity, they have only got to behave in a peaceful and helpful way toward one another

— Winston Churchill

We are not human beings on a spiritual journey. We are spiritual beings on a human journey.

— Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

To the eyes of a god, mankind must appear as a species of bacteria which multiply and become progressively virulent whenever they find themselves in a congenial culture, and whose activity diminishes until they disappear completely as soon as proper measures are taken to sterilize them.

— Aleister Crowley

Humanity I love you because when you're hard up you pawn your intelligence to buy a drink

— E.E. (Edward. E.) Cummings

There are two kinds of men who never amount to much -- those who cannot do what they are told and those who can do nothing else.

— Cyrus H. K Curtis

[Three classes of people]: Those who see. Those who see when they are shown. Those who do not see.

— Leonardo Da Vinci

Though man is the only beast that can write, he has small reason to be proud of it. When he utters something that is wise it is nothing that the river horse does not know, and most of his creations are the result of accident.

— Edward Dahlberg

Consider your breed; you were not made to live like beasts, but to follow virtue and knowledge.

— Dante Alighieri

Man is head, chest and stomach. Each of these animals operates, more often than not, individually. I eat, I feel, I even, although rarely, think. This jungle crawls and teems, is hungry, roars, gets angry, devours itself, and its cacophonic concert does not even stop when you are asleep.

— Rene Daumal

The best security for civilization is the dwelling, and upon properly appointed and becoming dwellings depends, more than anything else, the improvement of mankind.

— Benjamin Disraeli

Man is not only a contributory creature, but a total creature; he does not only make one, but he is all; he is not a piece of the world, but the world itself; and next to the glory of God, the reason why there is a world.

— John Donne

The race of man, while sheep in credulity, are wolves for conformity.

— Carl Van Doren

Man only likes to count his troubles, but he does not count his joys.

— Fyodor Dostoevsky

A human being is part of the whole, called by us 'universe,' a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest -- a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

— Albert Einstein

Considered logically this concept is not identical with the totality of sense impressions referred to; but it is an arbitrary creation of the human (or animal) mind.

— Albert Einstein

We cannot despair of humanity, since we ourselves are human beings.

— Albert Einstein

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

Man, became man through work, who stepped out of the animal kingdom as transformer of the natural into the artificial, who became therefore the magician, man the creator of social reality, will always stay the great magician, will always be Prometheus bringing fire from heaven to earth, will always be Orpheus enthralling nature with his music. Not until humanity itself dies will art die.

— Ernst Fischer

As the archeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

— Michel Foucault

Of all the ways of defining man, the worst is the one which makes him out to be a rational animal.

— Anatole France

Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs, he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on him and they still give him much trouble at times.

— Sigmund Freud

I have found little that is good about human beings on the whole. In my experience most of them are trash, no matter whether they publicly subscribe to this or that ethical doctrine or to none at all. That is something that you cannot say aloud, or perhaps even think.

— Sigmund Freud

Wild animals never kill for sport. Man is the only one to whom the torture and death of his fellow creatures is amusing in itself.

— James A. Froude

The secret of a person's nature lies in their religion and what they really believes about the world and their place in it.

— James A. Froude

We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.

— Buckminster Fuller

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

— Mahatma Gandhi

As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world -- that is the myth of the atomic age -- as in being able to remake ourselves.

— Mahatma Gandhi

Man is more interesting than men. God made him and not them in his image. Each one is more precious than all.

— Andre Gide

Man... knows only when he is satisfied and when he suffers, and only his sufferings and his satisfactions instruct him concerning himself, teach him what to seek and what to avoid. For the rest, man is a confused creature; he knows not whence he comes or whither he goes, he knows little of the world, and above all, he knows little of himself.

— Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Mind and spirit together make up that which separates us from the rest of the animal world, that which enables a man to know the truth and that which enables him to die for the truth.

— Edith Hamilton

On earth there is nothing great but man; in man there is nothing great but mind.

— Sir William Hamilton

Mankind are earthen jugs with spirits in them.

— Nathaniel Hawthorne

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.

— Robert Heinlein

What constitutes a real, live human being is more of a mystery than ever these days, and men -- each one of whom is a valuable, unique experiment on the part of nature -- are shot down wholesale.

— Hermann Hesse

Man was nature's mistake --she neglected to finish him -- and she has never ceased paying for her mistake.

— Eric Hoffer

It is well to remember that the entire population of the universe, with one trifling exception, is composed of others.

— John Andrew Holmes

People can be divided into two classes: those who go ahead and do something, and those who sit still and inquire, why wasn't it done the other way?

— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.

— Victor Hugo

The Goddamn human race deserves itself, and as far as I'm concerned it can have it.

— Elizabeth Janeway

Being reproached for giving to an unworthy person, Aristotle said, I did not give it to the man, but to humanity.

— Johnson

I hate mankind, for I think of myself as one of the best of them, and I know how bad I am.

— Samuel Johnson

Out of timber so crooked as that from which man is made nothing entirely straight can be carved.

— Immanuel Kant

Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal.

— John F. Kennedy

The course of human history is determined, not by what happens in the skies, but by what takes place in our hearts.

— Sir Arthur Kent

Mankind must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

— King Jr. Martin Luther

But remember please, the Law by which we live, we are not built to comprehend a lie, we can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die.

— Rudyard Kipling

There is nothing on earth divine except humanity.

— Walter Savage Landor

The world of men is dreaming, it has gone mad in its sleep, and a snake is strangling it, but it can't wake up.

— D. H. Lawrence

The simplest single-celled organism oscillates to a number of different frequencies, at the atomic, molecular, sub-cellular, and cellular levels. Microscopic movies of these organisms are striking for the ceaseless, rhythmic pulsation that is revealed. In an organism as complex as a human being, the frequencies of oscillation and the interactions between those frequencies are multitudinous.

— George Leonard

Man who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!

— Doris Lessing

Humans are amphibians -- half spirit and half animal. As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time.

— C. S. Lewis

That man is the noblest creature may also be inferred from the fact that no other creature has yet contested this claim.

— Georg C. Lichtenberg

God must love the common man, he made so many of them.

— Abraham Lincoln

The decay of decency in the modern age, the rebellion against law and good faith, the treatment of human beings as things, as the mere instruments of power and ambition, is without a doubt the consequence of the decay of the belief in man as something more than an animal animated by highly conditioned reflexes and chemical reactions. For, unless man is something more than that, he has no rights that anyone is bound to respect, and there are no limitations upon his conduct which he is bound to obey.

— Walter Lippmann

Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy of gain.

— Niccolo Machiavelli

In recognizing the humanity of our fellow beings, we pay ourselves the highest tribute.

— Thurgood Marshall

What is the use of this fuss about morality when the issue only involves a horse? The first and most difficult teaching of civilization concerns man's behavior to his inferiors. Make humanity gentle or reasonable toward animals, and strife or injustice between human beings would speedily terminate.

— Dr Edward Mayhew

One of the oldest human needs is having someone wonder where you are when you don't come home at night.

— Margaret Mead

Let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God.

— Herman Melville

Have you ever watched a crab on the shore crawling backward in search of the Atlantic Ocean, and missing? That's the way the mind of man operates.

— H. L. Mencken

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

— H. L. Mencken

The basic fact about human existence is not that it is a tragedy, but that it is a bore. It is not so much a war as an endless standing in line.

— H. L. Mencken

The man who is forever disturbed about the condition of humanity either has no problems of his own or has refused to face them.

— Henry Miller

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

— Ludwig Von Mises

Man is stark mad; he cannot make a flea, and yet he will be making gods by the dozens.

— Michel Eyquem De Montaigne

After all there is but one race -- humanity.

— George Moore

We are, to put it mildly, in a mess, and there is a strong chance that we shall have exterminated ourselves by the end of the century. Our only consolation will have to be that, as a species, we have had an exciting term of office.

— Desmond Morris

Human affairs are not serious, but they have to be taken seriously.

— Iris Murdoch

I teach you the Superman. Man is something that should be overcome.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

I am a member of the rabble in good standing.

— Westbrook Pegler

We are all cells in the same body of humanity.

— Peace Pilgrim