We are the first species capable of self-annihilation.

Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.

My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.

I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.

Mankind must put an end to war before war puts an end to mankind.

I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students.

Be nice to the whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.

While the rest of the world has been improving technology, Ghana has been improving the quality of man’s humanity to man.

When the human race neglects its weaker members, when the family neglects its weakest one – it’s the first blow in a suicidal movement. I see the neglect in cities around the country, in poor white children in West Virginia and Virginia and Kentucky – in the big cities, too, for that matter.

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.

A person’s a person, no matter how small.

Religion, born of the earth’s need for the disclosing of a god, is related to and co-extensive with not the individual man, but the whole of mankind.

A large part of mankind is angry not with the sins, but with the sinners.

Man is not a machine that can be remodelled for quite other purposes as occasion demands, in the hope that it will go on functioning as regularly as before but in a quite different way. He carries his whole history with him; in his very structure is written the history of mankind.

Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.

Man is subject to innumerable pains and sorrows by the very condition of humanity, and yet, as if nature had not sown evils enough in life, we are continually adding grief to grief and aggravating the common calamity by our cruel treatment of one another.

The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation’s history. I mean in this century’s history. But we all lived in this century. I didn’t live in this century.

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players: they have their exits and their entrances; and one man in his time plays many parts, his acts being seven ages.

I see children, all children, as humanity’s most precious resource, because it will be to them that the care of the planet will always be left.

To err is human; to forgive, divine.

Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.

A person is a person because he recognizes others as persons.

When people get taken over by the ego to such an extent, there is nothing else in their mind except the ego. They can no longer feel or sense their humanity – what they share with other human beings, or even with other life forms on the planet. They are so identified with concepts in their minds that other human beings become concepts as well.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

Everything I do, I hope, is that I represent something, and I represent the right things to my children and give them the right sense of what they’re capable of and the world as it should be seen.

We are all alike, on the inside.

Happiness is just another of the tricks that our genetic system plays on us to carry out its only role, which is the survival of the species.

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.

The peoples of this world must unite or they will perish.

These poems, with all their crudities, doubts, and confusions, are written for the love of Man and in praise of God, and I’d be a damn‘ fool if they weren’t.

Our human compassion binds us the one to the other – not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.

I consider the fact that thousands of children die each day from starvation and a lack of medicine a crisis for humanity and a problem we must collectively attempt to solve.

We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man.

A society made up of individuals who were all capable of original thought would probably be unendurable.

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

War may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We will not learn how to live together in peace by killing each other’s children.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

I have no faith in human perfectability. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active – not more happy – nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.

Great talents are the most lovely and often the most dangerous fruits on the tree of humanity. They hang upon the most slender twigs that are easily snapped off.

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn’t take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.

All of us are guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.

I can not believe that war is the best solution. No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.

I refuse to allow any man-made differences to separate me from any other human beings.

Such is the feebleness of humanity, such is its perversity, that doubtless it is better for it to be subject to all possible superstitions, as long as they are not murderous, than to live without religion.

A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.

The world, we are told, was made especially for man – a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God’s universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves.

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

We can continue to learn generation after generation and now is time to begin to learn how to love in a non-discriminatory way because we are intelligent enough, but we are not loving enough as a species.

Science is a beautiful gift to humanity; we should not distort it.

Remember, it is not about voting for the perfect candidate – there is no such thing. Presidents are human.

If one by one we counted people out For the least sin, it wouldn’t take us long To get so we had no one left to live with. For to be social is to be forgiving.

Our mind is capable of passing beyond the dividing line we have drawn for it. Beyond the pairs of opposites of which the world consists, other, new insights begin.

A true man hates no one.

The proper study of Mankind is Man.

I believe we are still so innocent. The species are still so innocent that a person who is apt to be murdered believes that the murderer, just before he puts the final wrench on his throat, will have enough compassion to give him one sweet cup of water.

Man is unable to see himself entirely unrelated to mankind, neither is he able to see mankind unrelated to life, nor life unrelated to the universe.

Show me the person you honor, for I know better by that the kind of person you are. For you show me what your idea of humanity is.

My first wish is to see this plague of mankind, war, banished from the earth.