Being Human Quotes

The ability to make love frivolously is the chief characteristic which distinguishes human beings from beasts.

Heywood Broun

Victory [over homophobia] may require five or maybe 20 years. Yet I have no doubt that "don't ask, don't tell" and same-sex adoption bans will be as unspeakable and inexplicable to my grandchildren as counting a slave as three-fifths of a human being.

Jacob M. Appel

This is one of the paradoxes of the democratic movement -- that it loves a crowd and fears the individuals who compose it -- that the religion of humanity should have no faith in human beings.

Walter Lippmann

Knowledge was inherent in all things. The world was a library and its books were the stones, leaves, grass, brooks and the birds and animals that shared, alike with us ,the storms and blessings of the earth. We learn to do what only the student of nature ever learns, and that is to feel beauty. We never rail at the storms, the furious winds ,the biting frosts and snows. To do so intensifies human futility, so whatever comes we should adjust ourselves by more effort and energy if necessary, but without complaint. Bright days and dark days are both expressions of the Great Mystery, and the Indian reveled in being close the the Great Holiness.

Chief Luther Standing Bear

Who knows what true loneliness is -- not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going mad.

Joseph Conrad

Spiritual superiority only sees the individual. But alas, ordinarily we human beings are sensual and, therefore, as soon as it is a gathering, the impression changes -- we see something abstract, the crowd, and we become different. But in the eyes of God, the infinite spirit, all the millions that have lived and now live do not make a crowd, He only sees each individual.

Soren Kierkegaard

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

Douglas Adams

You are a human being. You have rights inherent in that reality. You have dignity and worth that exists prior to law.

Lyn Beth Neylon

The price of hating other human beings is loving oneself less.

Eldridge Cleaver

I have no race prejudices nor caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. All I care to know is that a man is a human being, and that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens

When we choose to be parents, we accept another human being as part of ourselves, and a large part of our emotional selves will stay with that person as long as we live. From that time on, there will be another person on this earth whose orbit around us will affect us as surely as the moon affects the tides, and affect us in some ways more deeply than anyone else can. Our children are extensions of ourselves.

Fred Rogers

Christianity and Islamism have been on their trial for the last eighteen and twelve centuries. They have been ardent in proselytizing, yet they embrace only one-tenth and one-twentieth of the human race. Hj Abd would account for the tardy and unsatisfactory progress of what their votaries call "pure truths," by the innate imperfections of the same. Both propose a reward for mere belief, and a penalty for simple unbelief; rewards and punishments being, by the way, very disproportionate. Thus they reduce everything to the scale of a somewhat unrefined egotism; and their demoralizing effects become clearer to every progressive age.

Sir Richard Francis Burton

Human migration beyond Earth is our destiny, not as in something preordained, but in the sense of it being inevitable and necessary. The lot of humanity seems to be that of expanding consciousness into new territory.

Vanna Bonta

Human beings are “emotional amoral egoists”, driven above all by emotional self-interest. All of our thoughts, beliefs and motivations are neurochemically mediated, some predetermined for survival, others alterable.

Nayef Al-Rodhan

The greatest discovery of my generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitudes.

William Jame

Just being a human being, Ive realized that before every big problem you create for yourself, before every huge mess you have to clean up, there was a crucial moment where you couldve just said no.

Taylor Swift

Every valuable human being must be a radical and a rebel, for what he must aim at is to make things better than they are.

Niels Henrik David Bohr

Being rich is bad and inhumane. So condemn the rich.

Hugo Chavez

We shall not look at caste or religion, All human beings in this land whether they be those who preach the vedas or who belong to other castes are one.

Subramanya Bharathi

I was brought up to believe that human beings are good, which is why it shocks me to the core when I see human beings behaving badly.

Benazir Bhutto

A novel is balanced between a few true impressions and the multitude of false ones that make up most of what we call life. It tells us that for every human being there is a diversity of existences, that the single existence is itself an illusion in part, that these many existences signify something, tend to something, fulfill something; it promises us meaning, harmony, and even justice.

Saul Bellow

There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.

William James

I think we're going to the moon because it's in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It's by the nature of his deep inner soul ... we're required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.

Neil Alden Armstrong

Circumstances will determine what I term the survival value of humankinds moral compass. Being highly moral in an immoral environment will almost certainly be detrimental to ones survival and vice versa.

Al-Rodan, Nayef

The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of. This is a logical result of the way in which our democratic society is organized. Vast numbers of human beings must cooperate in this manner if they are to live together as a smoothly functioning society.

Edward Bernays

A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

Isaac Asimov

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.

e.e. cummings

Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.

R. D. Laing

Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary master plan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people's own failure as individuals.

Vaclav Havel

Socialism is the abolition of human self-alienation, the return of man as a real human being.

Erich Fromm

Opposition of one\'s desires is the sign of the highest level of wisdom in a human being.

al-Baqir, Muhammad

Every human being is born an heir to an inheritance to which he can succeed only in a process of learning.

Michael Joseph Oakeshott

Design is directed toward human beings. To design is to solve human problems by identifying them and executing the best solution.

Ivan Chermayeff

All human beings, whatever their cultural or historical background, suffer when they are intimidated, imprisoned or tortured.

Dalai Lama

Freedom is not worth having if it does not connote freedom to err. It passes my comprehension how human beings, be they ever so experienced and able, can delight in depriving other human beings of that precious right.

Mohandas K. Gandhi

Give to every human being every right that you claim for yourself.

Robert Ingersoll

The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.

William James

Faith is the highest passion in a human being. Many in every generation may not come that far, but none comes further.

Soren Kierkegaard

The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind.

Lee Iacocca

Beliefs have the power to create and the power to destroy. Human beings have the awesome ability to take any experience of their lives and create a meaning that disempowers them or one that can literally save their lives.

Tony Robbins

Sharing food with another human being is an intimate act that should not be indulged in lightly.

M. F. K. Fisher

As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.

John Stuart Mill

Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements (except dream cities) have problems.

Jane Jacobs

Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just.

Simone Weil

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good and not quite all the time.

George Orwell

All forms of tampering with human beings, getting at them, shaping them against their will to your own pattern, all thought control and conditioning is, therefore, a denial of that in men which makes them men and their values ultimate.

Isaiah Berlin

In the old days villains had moustaches and kicked the dog. Audiences are smarter today. They don't want their villain to be thrown at them with green limelight on his face. They want an ordinary human being with failings.

Alfred Hitchcock

I swore never to be silent whenever and wherever human beings endure suffering and humiliation. We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.

Elie Wiesel

To my mind, the life of a lamb is no less precious than that of a human being. I should be unwilling to take the life of a lamb for the sake of the human body.

Mahatma Gandhi

I am in favor of animal rights as well as human rights. That is the way of a whole human being.

Abraham Lincoln

The ecologization of politics requires us to acknowledge the priority of human values and makes ecology part of education at an early age, molding a new, modern approach to nature and, at the same time, giving back to man a sense of being part of nature. No moral improvement of society is possible without that

Mikhail Gorbachev

For the first time in the history of the world, every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.

Rachel Carson