Human Beings Quotes
-
Self-justification - that is, claiming one's innocence and thus in the final analysis blaming God - is an inheritance we have received from Adam and Eve. Even the worst criminals have this urge to exonerate themselves.
They claim innocence in the face of the most heinous crimes. Prison chaplains write that there is no place like prison to find so many self-righteous people, maintaining that they are actually innocent. They think they have been imprisoned unjustly.
We human beings have an excuse for everything and thus we see no reason why we should repent and turn from our ways. If we think we are in the right, that we have good reason to justify ourselves and say that we are not guilty, why should we repent?
Basilea Schlink
-
I am not an image. I am a human being.
Kevin Spacey
-
I have found little 'good' about human beings. In my experience, most of them are trash.
Sigmund Freud
-
When a man vowed to nonviolence as the law governing human beings dares to refer to war, he can only do it so as to strain every nerve to avoid it.
Mahatma Gandhi
-
"Mr. Thornton," said Margaret, shaking all over with her passion, "go down this instant, if you are not a coward. Go down and face them like a man. Save these poor strangers, whom you have decoyed here. Speak to your workmen as if they were human beings. Speak to them kindly. Don't let the soldiers come in and cut down poor-creatures who are driven mad. I see one there who is. If you have any courage or noble quality in you, go out and speak to them, man to man."
Elizabeth Gaskell
-
You can never be fully human unless you've discovered the humanity in other human beings. Don't close your eyes to the injustices of your own country by trying to solve the injustices of another country. That's an evasion of Christian responsibility.
Beyers Naude
-
Progress in human affairs, whether in science or in history or in society, has come mainly through the bold readiness of human beings not to confine themselves to seeking piecemeal improvements in the way things are done, but to present fundamental challenges in the name of reason to the current way of doing things and to the avowed or hidden assumptions on which it rests.
Edward Hallett Carr
-
Human beings aren't rational animals; we're rationalizing animals who want to appear reasonable to ourselves.
Elliot Aronson
-
Weapons are the tools of violence;all decent men detest them.Weapons are the tools of fear;a decent man will avoid themexcept in the direst necessityand, if compelled, will use themonly with the utmost restraint.Peace is his highest value.If the peace has been shattered,how can he be content?His enemies are not demons,but human beings like himself.He doesn't wish them personal harm.Nor does he rejoice in victory.How could he rejoice in victoryand delight in the slaughter of men?He enters a battle gravely,with sorrow and with great compassion,as if he were attending a funeral.
Lao Tzu
-
Every intense relationship between human beings is full of traps, and if you want it to endure you have to learn to avoid them. I did so then, and finally it seemed that I had only come up against yet another proof of how splendid and shadowy our friendship was, how long and complicated Lila’s suffering had been, how it still endured and would endure forever.
Elena Ferrante
-
The fact that we are human beings is infinitely more important than all the peculiarities that distinguish human beings from one another.
Simone de Beauvoir
-
Alfred Nobel believed that the destructiveness of dynamite would put an end to war. He deeply believed that the tragic reality of mass carnage would achieve results which all the preaching of peace and goodwill had so far failed to achieve. His prophecy now must gain fulfillment. Recoiling from the abyss of nuclear extermination, the human family will finally abandon war. May we learn from barbaric and bloody deeds of the twentieth century and bestow the gift of peace to the next millennium. Perhaps in that way we shall redeem some measure of respect from generations yet to come. Having achieved peace, in the sonorous phrase of Martin Luther King, Jr. spoken here twenty-one years ago, human beings will then "rise to the majestic heights of moral maturity".
Bernard Lown
-
Alone, human beings can feel hunger. Alone, we can feel cold. Alone, we can feel pain. To feel poor, however, is something we do only in comparison to others.
Eric Greitens
-
Like any creative human being, I would like a bit more control so that it would be a little easier for me when the director says, 'One tear, right now,' that one tear would pop out.
Marilyn Monroe
-
As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.
Barbara Brown Taylor
-
A large portion of human beings live not so much in themselves as in what they desire to be. They create what is called an ideal character, in an ideal form, whose perfections compensate in some degree for the imperfections of their own.
Edwin Percy Whipple
