Motivational Quotes

Humankind

The law of humanity ought to be composed of the past, the present, and the future, that we bear within us; whoever possesses but one of these terms, has but a fragment of the law of the moral world.

- Quinet, Edgar

Best Quotes about Humankind

There are two kinds of people in the world -- those you love, and those you don't understand.

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.

Freud, Sigmund

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

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

Twain, Mark

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

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

Dante Alighieri

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.

Mencken, H. L.

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.

Daumal, Rene

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

Proverb, Turkish

10.

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

11.

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

Kant, Immanuel

12.

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.

Fischer, Ernst

13.

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

Reagan, Ronald

14.

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.

15.

Man is a beautiful machine that works very badly.

Mencken, H. L.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

Be tolerant of the human race. Your whole family belongs to it -- and some of your spouse's family does too.

19.

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

20.

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

France, Anatole

21.

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

Calvino, Italo

22.

It is peculiar to mankind to transcend mankind.

Schlegel, Friedrich

23.

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

Janeway, Elizabeth

24.

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.

Leonard, George

25.

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

Beecher, Henry Ward

26.

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.

Boulding, Kenneth Ewart

27.

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

Marshall, Thurgood

28.

Man is a being in search of meaning.

Plato

29.

The history of mankind is the history of ideas.

Mises, Ludwig Von

30.

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

31.

There are realities we all share, regardless of our nationality, language, or individual tastes. As we need food, so do we need emotional nourishment: love, kindness, appreciation, and support from others. We need to understand our environment and our relationship to it. We need to fulfill certain inner hungers: the need for happiness, for peace of mind for wisdom.

Walters, J. Donald

32.

Human beings are the only animals of which I am thoroughly and cravenly afraid.

Shaw, George Bernard

33.

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

Churchill, Winston

34.

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

35.

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

Lincoln, Abraham

36.

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

Foucault, Michel

37.

Man is a creature made at the end of the week's work when God was tired.

Twain, Mark

38.

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.

Mayhew, Dr Edward

39.

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

Nietzsche, Friedrich

40.

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

41.

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

Wilde, Oscar

42.

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

43.

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

Adenauer, Konrad

44.

I am a member of the rabble in good standing.

Pegler, Westbrook

45.

It's great to be great, but it's greater to be human.

Rogers, Will

46.

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.

Hesse, Hermann

47.

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

Holmes, John Andrew

48.

The human race was always interesting and we know by its past that it will always continue so, monotonously.

Twain, Mark

49.

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.

Heinlein, Robert

50.

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

Cervantes, Miguel De