What Is It To Be Human Quotes

... I doubt the capacity of the human animal for being dignified in ceremony.

Disastrous would have been the result if a fire or a death had suddenly demanded something heroic of human nature, but tragedies come in the hungry hours.

It is impossible for human beings, constituted as they are, both to fight and to have ideals.

My notion's to think of the human beings first and let the abstract ideas take care of themselves.

We live in the most amazing period in human history. We can have unlimited energy, unlimited food, provide education for everyone, clean water, all the things that have held mankind back.

It seems that fiction no longer produces work that makes one feel the human condition deeply.

I used to always fight for human rights. I still fight for Leonard Peltier, who's spent 35 years in jail for a crime he didn't commit.

No references to the need to fight terror can be an argument for restricting human rights.

Men appear to prefer ruining one another's fortunes, and cutting each other's throats about a few paltry villages, to extending the grand means of human happiness.

I've been barbecued, stewed, screwed, tattooed, and fried by people claiming to be my friends. The human race has gone backward, not forward, since the days we were apes swinging through the trees.

Human beings are, necessarily, actors who...can be divided...into the sane who know they are acting and the mad who do not.

What was it in the human heart that made you despise a man because he loved you?

Action movies to me are dramas with recognizable human beings that are in extraordinary situations.

Angels possess greater powers than do human beings.

The time has come to stop beating our heads against stone walls under the illusion that we have been appointed policeman to the human race.

I mean, you know, you're not going to change the human animal. And the human animal really doesn't get a lot smarter.

We've seen what can be accomplished when we use 50% of our human capacity. If you visualize what 100% can do, you'll join me as an unbridled optimist about America's future.

For the first time in human history the psychology that is a prerequisite for intimacy has become the psychology that is a prerequisite for species survival.

I'm a great lover of human beings.

There is no character in the comedy of human life more difficult to play well than that of an old bachelor.

I'm only a human being.

We're living, it seems, in the culmination of a long warfare - warfare against human beings, other creatures and the Earth itself.

I understand that we should never lose our right to be offended, so I accept it. But for me it was always a study of human behavior because if we just demonize it, it becomes unreal.

[Internet] is amazing as much as human beings can be amazing, and it's debased and depraved and vile as human beings can be.

I think it is a quest of literature throughout the ages to describe the human condition.

Human progress having reached a high level through respect for the liberty and dignity of men, it has become desirable to re-affirm these evident truths

I never took a human life, I only sold the fellow the gun to take it with.

Well, the disarmament conference is off to a flying start. There is nothing to prevent their succeeding now but human nature.

A short story is a shard, a sliver, a vignette. It's a biopsy on the human condition but it doesn't have this capacity to think autonomously for itself.

We are what we seem to be.

Every wolf's and lion's howl Raises from Hell a human soul.

Would you like to do something good for the future of the human race; well, start killing some of its powerful members.

The true language of commerce is the natural conversation between human beings.

Lights of the world, and stars of human race.

By artist I mean of course everyone who has tried to create something which was not here before him, with no other tools and material than the uncommer-ciable ones of the human spirit.

It must be terrible to have to live among people and not like human nature.

The magnetic force is animate, or imitates a soul; in many respects it surpasses the human soul while it is united to an organic body.

It generally troubles them [the reformers] not a whit that their remedy implies a complete reconstruction of society, or even a reconstitution of human nature.

In its present terms, the global system values property over human life.

At a time of such hope and optimism in the Middle East, we cannot let the Libyan government violate every principle of international law and human rights with impunity.

Human life may be regarded as a succession of frontispieces. The way to be satisfied is never to look back.

Vulgar prejudices are those which arise out of accident, ignorance, or authority; natural prejudices are those which arise out of the constitution of the human mind itself.

We are the climactic generation of human cultural evolution, and in the microcosm of our lives the macrocosm of the evolution of the human race is playing itself out.

Capital punishment...treats members of the human race...as objects to be toyed with and discarded.

When you stifle human potential, when you don't invest in new ideas, it doesn't just cut off the people who are affected; it hurts us all.

If you look at how many thousands and thousands of pages, Web pages, are being added to the Internet every day, it's the fastest growing organism in human history for communications.

Are you appalled at existing conditions? Don't waste your energy trying to change conditions from without! Change the Human Heart from within.

We are proud of a human nature that could be so passionately extreme, but we shrink from advising others to follow the example.

'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.

The highest flights of charity, devotion, trust, patience, bravery to which the wings of human nature have spread themselves, have been flown for religious ideals.