Motivational Quotes

Humankind

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

- Fuller, Buckminster

Best Quotes about Humankind

Mankind are animals that makes bargains, no other animal does this.

Smith, Adam

No man really knows about other human beings. The best he can do is to suppose that they are like himself.

Steinbeck, John

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

Disraeli, Benjamin

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

Machiavelli, Niccolo

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated his ability.

Wilde, Oscar

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

Janeway, Elizabeth

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.

Lippmann, Walter

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

Cervantes, Miguel De

10.

If man had created man, he would be ashamed of his performance.

Twain, Mark

11.

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

Caddy, Eileen

12.

In our civilization, men are afraid that they will not be men enough and women are afraid that they might be considered only women.

Reik, Theodor

13.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

14.

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

Kent, Sir Arthur

15.

Let us ask ourselves; What kind of people do we think we are?

Reagan, Ronald

16.

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.

Freud, Sigmund

17.

Man is an ape with possibilities.

Andrews, Roy Chapman

18.

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

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem De

19.

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.

Hamilton, Edith

20.

One has but to observe a community of beavers at work in a stream to understand the loss in his sagacity, balance, co-operation, competence, and purpose which Man has suffered since he rose up on his hind legs. He began to chatter and he developed Reason, Thought, and Imagination, qualities which would get the smartest group of rabbits or orioles in the world into inextricable trouble overnight.

Thurber, James

21.

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.

Dahlberg, Edward

22.

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

Lichtenberg, Georg C.

23.

If you think that every bad thing that has been done on the face of the earth has been done by man, you're right -- but so has every good thing.

24.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

25.

An effective human being is a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.

Rolf, Ida P.

26.

Man is harder than iron, stronger than stone and more fragile than a rose.

Proverb, Turkish

27.

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.

Aurelius, Marcus

28.

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

Einstein, Albert

29.

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.

Curtis, Cyrus H. K

30.

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.

Lawrence, D. H.

31.

The true grandeur of humanity is in moral elevation, sustained, enlightened and decorated by the intellect of man.

Sumner, Charles

32.

I am human and let nothing human be alien to me.

Terence

33.

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.

Gandhi, Mahatma

34.

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

Lewis, C. S.

35.

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.

Baudrillard, Jean

36.

I am not an Athenian, nor a Greek, but a citizen of the world.

Socrates

37.

We are all cells in the same body of humanity.

Pilgrim, Peace

38.

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.

Hugo, Victor

39.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Mencken, H. L.

40.

If, presume not to God to scan; The proper study of Mankind is Man. Plac'd on this isthmus of a middle state, a being darkly wise, and rudely great.

Pope, Alexander

41.

Human beings, for all their pretensions, have a remarkable propensity for lending themselves to classification somewhere within neatly labeled categories. Even the outrageous exceptions may be classified as outrageous exceptions!

Reichmann, W.J.

42.

I would suggest that barbarism be considered as a permanent and universal human characteristic which becomes more or less pronounced according to the play of circumstances.

Weil, Simone

43.

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.

Casals, Pablo

44.

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

Murdoch, Iris

45.

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.

Kipling, Rudyard

46.

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

Cummings, E.E. (Edward. E.)

47.

The age of chivalry has gone; the age of humanity has come.

Sumner, Charles

48.

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

Foucault, Michel

49.

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.