The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule.

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

Humanity, you never had it to begin with.

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

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

Fear makes us feel our humanity.

I am just one human being.

All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.

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

Of all virtues and dignities of the mind, goodness is the greatest, being the character of the Deity; and without it, man is a busy, mischievous, wretched thing.

When I look upon seamen, men of science and philosophers, man is the wisest of all beings; when I look upon priests and prophets nothing is as contemptible as man.

Once spirit was God, then it became man, and now it is even becoming mob.

We’re all just a bunch of sinners, but we do the best we can.

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.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

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.

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.

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together; that at length they may emerge, full-formed and majestic, into the delight of life, which they are thenceforth to rule.

The dinosaurs aren’t remembered for much more than their bones. When humanity’s gone, what do we give to this little planet that we’re on, and what could we do collectively, removing the pride?

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.

But who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries, has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it most?

Any fool can make a rule, and any fool will mind it.

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.

Our virtues and our failings are inseparable, like force and matter. When they separate, man is no more.

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

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

We’ve gotta become the Martians. I’m a Martian – I tell you to become Martians. And we’ve gotta go to Mars and civilize Mars and build a whole civilization on Mars and then move out, 300 years from now into the universe. And when we do that, we have a chance of living forever.

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

All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us that we are all more alike than we are unalike.

We are all dependent on one another, every soul of us on earth.

Wherever the art of medicine is loved, there is also a love of humanity.

I have this feeling that the world is not in balance. And people are afraid, but we’re also starting to be really brave.

Human kindness has never weakened the stamina or softened the fiber of a free people. A nation does not have to be cruel to be tough.

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.

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.

Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.

Man was made at the end of the week’s work, when God was tired.

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

For revolutionary Cubans, to cooperate with other poor and exploited peoples has always been a political principle and a duty towards humanity.

I got quite annoyed after the Haiti earthquake. A baby was taken from the wreckage and people said it was a miracle. It would have been a miracle had God stopped the earthquake. More wonderful was that a load of evolved monkeys got together to save the life of a child that wasn’t theirs.

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.

A true man hates no one.

Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.

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.

We are all alike, on the inside.

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.

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.

A man who was completely innocent, offered himself as a sacrifice for the good of others, including his enemies, and became the ransom of the world. It was a perfect act.

Neither a man nor a crowd nor a nation can be trusted to act humanely or to think sanely under the influence of a great fear.

If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.

I believe that God breathed life into every person and that every person is made in the image of God and you have accept them as they are, on their journey. I’m not here to preach hate or push people down.

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

If you prick us do we not bleed? If you tickle us do we not laugh? If you poison us do we not die? And if you wrong us shall we not revenge?

Do I dare set forth here the most important, the most useful rule of all education? It is not to save time, but to squander it.

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

There is but one law for all, namely that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity – the law of nature and of nations.

Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

I will far rather see the race of man extinct than that we should become less than beasts by making the noblest of God’s creation, woman, the object of our lust.

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