To Be Human Quotes
It is always safe to assume that people are more subtle and less sensitive than they seem.
...the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.
When preaching is done right, it can change lives. When it's done badly, my failure goes beyond the merely human.
Millions of tears have fallen for black sons, brothers, lovers, and friends whose assailants took or maimed their lives and then simply went on their way.
Change is one of the scariest things in the world and yet it is also one of those variables of human existence that no one can avoid.
I am a universalist, passionately devoted to the cause of equality within the human family.
Every music - except dance music, which is for dancing, I suppose - is for the spirit of the human being, and not for the body.
What separates or unites people is not their language, their laws, their customs, their principles, but the way they hold their knife and fork.
The invention of the printing press was one of the most important events in human history.
The human soul is heavy, clumsy, held in the mud of the flesh. Its perceptions are still coarse and brutish. It can divine nothing clearly, nothing with certainty.
One man's gospel truth is another man's blasphemous lie. The dangerous thing about people is the way we'll try to kill anyone whose truth doesn't agree with ours.
We assume that all statements must be mild inversions of the truth, because it's too weird to imagine people who aren't casually lying, pretty much all the time.
It is only natural, of course, that each man should think his own opinions best: the crow loves his fledgling, and the ape his cub.
There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle.
Many artists and scholars have pointed out that ultimately art depends on human nature.
I like to think of myself as a fairly educated human being, but I'm a very uneducated actor when it comes to movies, directors, producers, actors for that matter.
Human life is created in God's image, and that makes it sacred.
How frightening, that one person could mean so much, so many things.
But in practical affairs, particularly in politics, men are needed who combine human experience and interest in human relations with a knowledge of science and technology.
The realities of the world seldom measure up to the sublime designs of human imagination.
No one should ever compromise the dignity of another human being.
Habituated from our Infancy to trample upon the Rights of Human Nature, every generous, every liberal Sentiment, if not extinguished, is enfeebled in our Minds.
When the wedding march sounds the resolute approach, the clock no longer ticks, it tolls the hour. The figures in the aisle are no longer individuals, they symbolize the human race.
What constrains or enables the capacity of human beings to work in groups is not so much the technology, but rather the capacity of the human brain to have and monitor social interactions.
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom.
Education is the leading of human souls to what is best, and making what is best out of them.
No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.
People want to hear about the extremes of human nature. They want things that are larger than their own lives, and more romantic, and not necessarily of their own experiences.
Man's chief enemy is his own unruly nature and the dark forces put up within him.
As you know, human history is full of evil deeds, and maybe we ought to think of them with tears, not fascination.
You take people, you put them on a journey, you give them peril, you find out who they really are.
Something whose connection with human experience we cannot grasp is bound to be frightening.
Since I am not actually a real human being, my emotional responses are generally limited to what I have learned to fake.
Morality, for all the conditioning to which the human mind has been and is subjected, is always a personal choice in the last analysis.
The human body is a magazine of inventions, the patent office, where are the models from which every hint is taken. All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses.
The idea that human beings can make history, that is something quite unique to the modern West.
After all my probing into the human brain, I should still be aware of mysteries and come up with them myself.
