Humankind Quotes - Page 14

There is the possibility that humankind can outgrow its infantile tendencies, as I suggested in 'Childhood's End.' But it is amazing how childishly gullible humans are.

Arthur C. Clarke

Childhood, Gullible, Possibility

"God, Science, and Delusion: A Chat With Arthur C. Clarke". Interview with Matt Cherry, Free Inquiry Magazine, Volume 19, No. 2, Spring 1999.

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Unrestrained automobility, hedonism, individualism, and conspicuous consumption cannot be sustained because they take more than they give back. A spiritually impoverished world cannot be sustained because meaninglessness, anomie, and despair will corrode the desire to be sustained and the belief that humanity is worth sustaining. But these are the very things that distinguish the modern age from its predecessors, Genuine sustainability, in other words, will come not from superficial changes but from a deeper process akin to humankind growing up to a fuller stature.

David W. Orr

Growing Up, Giving, Humanity

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And the desire to own property, to take for ourselves things which in no way belong to us, does not stop short at the sun. The air is already bought and sold as a commodity, by health resorts. And what of water? Or waterpower? Why should the earth be parceled out into private hands? Is it any different from the sun? No; the earth belongs to the people who live on it. God intended it for them, but it has been taken over by private individuals. Privare means to steal. Thus private property is stolen property - property stolen from God and from humankind!

Eberhard Arnold

Taken, Mean, Air

Eberhard Arnold, Johann Christoph Arnold (2000). “Eberhard Arnold: Writings Selected with an Introduction”, p.94, The Plough Publishing House

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If human beings are able to take a fresh look at themselves as well as the universe and change their rigid mentalities, humankind will make a leap forward.

Li Hongzhi

Looks, Able, Leap

"Falun Gong (English Version)". Book by Li Hongzhi, 2002.

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Many researchers do feel that humankind may have to face another Great Cleansing, such as the Great Flood of world mythology. Again, numerous UFO contactees and abductees feel that it is their mission to alert their fellow humans that some kind of apocalypse will soon be visited upon Earth.

Brad Steiger

World, Earth, May

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Men are like plants; the goodness and flavor of the fruit proceeds from the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow. We are nothing but what we derive from the air we breathe, the climate we inhabit, the government we obey, the system of religion we profess, and the nature of our employment.

J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

Inspirational, Men, Air

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United with the angels and saints of the heavenly Church, let us adore the most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist. Prostrate, we adore this great mystery that contains God's new and definitive covenant with humankind in Christ.

Pope John Paul II

Angel, Holy Eucharist, Church

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Compared with men, it is probable that brutes neither attend to abstract characters, nor have associations by similarity. Their thoughts probably pass from one concrete object to its habitual concrete successor far more uniformly than is the case with us. In other words, their associations of ideas are almost exclusively by contiguity. So far, however, as any brute might think by abstract characters instead of by association of con cretes, he would have to be admitted to be a reasoner in the true human sense. How far this may take place is quite uncertain.

William James

Character, Men, Thinking

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Careless of books, yet having felt the power
Of Nature, by the gentle agency
Of natural objects, led me on to feel
For passions that were not my own, and think
(At random and imperfectly indeed)
On man, the heart of man, and human life.

William Wordsworth

Nature, Book, Passion

William Wordsworth (1994). “The Collected Poems of William Wordsworth”, p.131, Wordsworth Editions

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the Mind of Man--
My haunt, and the main region of my song.

William Wordsworth

Song, Thoughtful, Men

'The Excursion' (1814) preface, l. 40

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in the mind of man,
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

William Wordsworth

Thoughtful, Men, Thinking

William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Michael Mason (2007). “Lyrical Ballads”, p.212, Pearson Education

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Brutes gaze on sights, they are arrested by sounds; and what they see and what they hear are sights and sounds only. The intellectof man, on the contrary, energises as well as his eye or ear, and perceives in sights or sounds something beyond them. It seizes and unites what the senses present to it; it grasps and forms what need not be seen or heard except in detail. It discerns in lines and colors, or in tones, what is beautiful and what is not. It gives them a meaning, and invests them with an idea.

John Henry Newman

Beautiful, Eye, Men

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I think writers are a lot like lawyers. We feed off the misfortunes of people, even ourselves.

Gail Anderson-Dargatz

Thinking, People, Lawyer

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While scholars are comparing and contrasting theories, debating intellectual questions, and dividing humankind into categories, the world is changed by persons with faith, spirit, emotion, compassion, intuition, and irrational thinking.

Grey Owl

Faith, Thinking, Compassion

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... the ecological problem of our times demands a radical reevaluation of how we see the entire world; it demands a different interpretation of matter and the world, a new attitude of humankind toward nature, and a new understanding of how we acquire and make use of our material goods.

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople

Attitude, Understanding, World

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One would wonder to hear skeptical men disputing for the reason of animals, and telling us it is only our pride and prejudices that will not allow them the use of that faculty. Reason shows itself in all occurrences of life; whereas the brute makes no discovery of such a talent, but in what immediately regards his own preservation, or the continuance of his species. Animals in their generation are wiser than the sons of men; but their wisdom is confined to a few particulars, and lies in a very narrow compass. Take a brute out of his instinct, and you find him wholly deprived of understanding.

Joseph Addison

Lying, Pride, Son

Joseph Addison, Sir Richard Steel (1858). “The Spectator”, p.169

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Organized religion is sane and not silly when read as myth and poetry rather than science and law. Religion speaks nonsense when taken literally, but reveals some of the deepest truths of humankind when understood mythically, poetically, and even allegorically-that is when it is read with an active and creative imagination.

Rami M. Shapiro

Taken, Silly, Law

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According to a recent study, depression is described as being the disease most destructive to humankind, largely because of the devastation it wreaks on our lives.... Yes, we could set up our minds to ignore our feelings and barricade ourselves from the winds and dust of the brain pattern. And we could become like robots, refusing to consider the passion and joys that could be ours. But then, we also might as well be dead.

G. Frank Lawlis

Passion, Dust, Wind

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All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people desire those things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can only be refuted by science: Humankind has become so much one family that we cannot ensure our own prosperity except by ensuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.

Bertrand Russell

People, Enemy, Suffering

"The Science to Save Us from Science". The New York Times Magazine, March 19, 1950.

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Those who feel like they can intimidate our fellow citizens to take out their anger don't represent the best of America, they represent the worst of humankind, and they should be ashamed of that kind of behavior.

George W. Bush

America, Citizens, Kind

Address at Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., delivered 17 September 2001, Washington, D.C.

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In China's thousands of years of civilization, the conflict between humankind and nature has never been as serious as it is today.

Zhou Shengxian

Years, Civilization, Today

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A mouth that has no moisture and no breath
Breathless mouths may summon;
I hail the superhuman;
I call it death-in-life and life-in-death.

William Butler Yeats

Greatness, Moisture, Mouths

"Byzantium" l. 15 (1933)

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Alpha waves in the human brain are between 6 and 8 hertz. The wave frequency of the human cavity resonates between 6 and 8 hertz. All biological systems operate in the same frequency range. The human brain's alpha waves function in this range and the electrical resonance of the earth is between 6 and 8 hertz. Thus, our entire biological system - the brain and the earth itself - work on the same frequencies. If we can control that resonate system electronically, we can directly control the entire mental system of humankind.

Nikola Tesla

Brain, Earth, Wave

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Humankind, which discovers its capacity to transform and in a certain sense create the world through its own work, forgets that this is always based on God's prior and original gift of things that are. People think that they can make arbitrary use of the earth, subjecting it without restraint to their wills, as though the earth did not have its own requisites and a prior God-given purpose, which human beings can indeed develop but must not betray.

Pope John Paul II

Thinking, People, Purpose

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That whatever a man says, promises, or resolves in passion he must stick to later on when he is cold and sober--this demand is among the heaviest burdens that weigh on humankind.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Passion, Responsibility, Men

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