Humanity at the centre of the primates, Homo sapiens, in humanity, is the end-product of a gradual work of creation, the successive sketches for which still surround us on every side.

The whole aspect of cinema and film festivals should be a moment to come together and celebrate art and humanity. It would be a shame if there was such a divide.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

Knowing that we are primates, I think, is a fascinating discovery, and a very interesting and rather cheering one.

Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.

Is evolution a theory, a system, or an hypothesis? It is much more: it is a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems must bow and which they must satisfy henceforward if they are to be thinkable and true.

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

I don’t like celebrity programmes – but I do like programmes about how ideas are formed and evolve.

To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.

I think New York has evolved in my work just the way the city has.

The root of this possibility of doing good – that we all have – is in creation.

You listen to Charlie Parker or John Coltrane before they found their voice, they sounded different. And when you listen to them after they found their voice on their instruments, they sound more confident and in control. Artists have that, too.

People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people – and that social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person.

It’s good to remember that in crises, natural crises, human beings forget for awhile their ignorances, their biases, their prejudices. For a little while, neighbors help neighbors and strangers help strangers.

The way people look at me these days – that’s the same way I looked at President Obama before I met him. We tend to forget that people who’ve attained a certain position are human.

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

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.

Every human being is under construction from conception to death.

Everywhere on Earth, at this moment, in the new spiritual atmosphere created by the appearance of the idea of evolution, there float, in a state of extreme mutual sensitivity, love of God and faith in the world: the two essential components of the Ultra-human.

I am for people. I can’t help it.

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.

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Out of 6 billion humans, the troublemakers are just a handful.

All art really does is keep you focused on questions of humanity, and it really is about how do we get on with our maker.

Some people would claim that things like love, joy and beauty belong to a different category from science and can’t be described in scientific terms, but I think they can now be explained by the theory of evolution.

Dance music is no longer a simple Donna Summer beat. It’s become a whole language that I find fascinating and exciting. Eventually, it will lose the dance tag and join the fore of rock.

Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.

Humanity is still advancing; and it will probably continue to advance for hundreds of thousands of years more, always on condition that we know how to keep the same line of advance as our ancestors towards ever greater consciousness and complexity.

I think audiences are quite comfortable watching something coming into being.

I’m sure a lot of people out there make mistakes.

Editing is now the easiest thing on earth to do, and all the things that evolved out of word processing – ‚Oh, let’s put that sentence there, let’s get rid of this‘ – have become commonplace in films and music too.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

People, even more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone.

A subject for a great poet would be God’s boredom after the seventh day of creation.

The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life.

There is that in the glance of a flower which may at times control the greatest of creation’s braggart lords.

We are not actually equal – humanity – if we are not allowed to freely love one another.

It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

Since God created the world, He also created reality.

In each individual the spirit is made flesh, in each one the whole of creation suffers, in each one a Savior is crucified.

The animals of the world exist for their own reasons. They were not made for humans any more than black people were made for white, or women created for men.

The thing that’s been really surprising about the evolution of Facebook is – I think then, and I think now – that if we didn’t do this, someone else would have done it.

Beauty is the bait which with delight allures man to enlarge his kind.

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

For the sake of peace and justice, let us move toward a world in which all people are at last free to determine their own destiny.

The earth was probably born by accident; but, in accordance with one of the most general laws of evolution, scarcely had this accident happened than it was immediately made use of and recast into something naturally directed.

To the press alone, chequered as it is with abuses, the world is indebted for all the triumphs which have been gained by reason and humanity over error and oppression.

I long for the time when all human history is taught as one history, because it really is.

From an evolutionary standpoint, human consciousness has not been around very long. A little light just went on after four and a half billion years. How often does that happen? Maybe it is quite rare.

Books are sharks… because sharks have been around for a very long time. There were sharks before there were dinosaurs, and the reason sharks are still in the ocean is that nothing is better at being a shark than a shark.

Since the beginning, it was just the same. The only difference, the crowds are bigger now.

Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

If God listened to the prayers of men, all men would quickly have perished: for they are forever praying for evil against one another.

Senator McCain is Israel’s most unconditional ally in Mossad’s machinations, something that even his worst adversaries would have been able to imagine. McCain participated alongside this secret service in the creation of the Islamic State, which has appropriated a considerable part of Iraq as well as a third of Syria, according to its affirmations.

Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.

We can, for example, be fairly confident that either there will be a world without war or there won’t be a world – at least, a world inhabited by creatures other than bacteria and beetles, with some scattering of others.

The important achievement of Apollo was demonstrating that humanity is not forever chained to this planet and our visions go rather further than that and our opportunities are unlimited.

But does that mean that war and violence are inevitable? I would argue not because we have also evolved this amazingly sophisticated intellect, and we are capable of controlling our innate behavior a lot of the time.

Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it.

The ‚Third World‘ is a term I don’t like very much because we’re all one world. I want people to know that the largest part of humanity is suffering.