Humans Quotes - Page 9

• I am interested in madness. I believe it is the biggest thing in the human race, and the most constant. How do you take away from a man his madness without also taking away his identity? Are we sure it is desirable for a man's spirit not to be at war with itself, or that it is better to be serene and ready to go to dinner than to be excited and unwilling to stop for a cup of coffee, even?

  William Saroyan

  War, Coffee, Believe

  "Short Drive, Sweet Chariot". Book by William Saroyan, 1966.

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• The major western democracies are moving towards corporatism. Democracy has become a business plan, with a bottom line for every human activity, every dream, every decency, every hope. The main parliamentary parties are now devoted to the same economic policies - socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor - and the same foreign policy of servility to endless war. This is not democracy. It is to politics what McDonalds is to food.

  John Pilger

  Dream, War, Party

  "Breaking the great Australian silence". John Pilger's speech at the Sydney Opera House to mark his award of the Sydney Peace Prize, johnpilger.com. November 5, 2009.

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• Body or mind, heart or soul, we're all human, and we're supposed to feel pain. You cut yourself off from it at your own risk.

  Jim Butcher

  Pain, Heart, Cutting

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• Anybody's true nature is bullshit. There is no human soul. Emotion is bullshit. Love is bullshit.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Love Is, Bullshit, Soul

  Chuck Palahniuk (2001). “Choke: A Novel”, Anchor Books

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• We are all substantially flawed, wounded, angry, hurt, here on Earth. But this human condition, so painful to us, and in someways shameful- because we feel we are weak when the reality of ourselves is exposed- is made much more bearable when it is shared, face to face, in words that have expressive human eyes behind them.

  Alice Walker

  Hurt, Eye, Reality

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• Perhaps that is our doom, our human curse, to never really know one another. We erect edifices in our minds about the flimsy framework of word and deed, mere totems of the true person, who, like the gods to whom the temples were built, remains hidden. We understand our own construct; we know our own theory; we love our own fabrication. Still . . . does the artifice of our affection make our love any less real?

  Rick Yancey

  Real, Mind, Temples

  Rick Yancey (2010). “The Monstrumologist: The Terror Beneath”, p.300, Simon and Schuster

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• For most of us, for almost all of us, truth can be attained, if at all, only in silence. It is in silence that the human spirit touches the divine.

  Iris Murdoch

  Silence, Spirit, Divine

  Iris Murdoch (1977). “Under the Net”, p.69, Penguin

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• Sometimes it seemed that the human heart, this side of Eden, feared life more than death, light more than darkness, freedom more than surrender.

  Dean Koontz

  Heart, Light, Eden

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• Because it all derived from Superman. I mean, I love all the characters, but Superman is just this perfect human pop-culture distillation of a really basic idea. He's a good guy. He loves us. He will not stop in defending us. How beautiful is that? He's like a sci-fi Jesus. He'll never let you down. And only in fiction can that guy actually exist, because real guys will always let you down one way or another. We actually made up an idea that beautiful. That's just cool to me. We made a little paper universe where all of the above is true.

  Grant Morrison

  Beautiful, Jesus, Real

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• It is an absurdity to believe that the Deity has human passions, and one of the lowest of human passions, a restless appetite for applause

  David Hume

  Believe, Passion, Deities

  David Hume (1793). “An inquiry concerning human understanding. A dissertation on the passions. An inquiry concerning the principles of morals. The natural history of religion”, p.595

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• The darkest secret of this country, I am afraid, is that too many of its citizens imagine that they belong to a much higher civilization somewhere else. That higher civilization doesn’t have to be another country. It can be the past instead—the United States as it was before it was spoiled by immigrants and the enfranchisement of the blacks. This state of mind allows too many of us to lie and cheat and steal from the rest of us, to sell us junk and addictive poisons and corrupting entertainments. What are the rest of us, after all, but sub-human aborigines?

  Kurt Vonnegut

  Country, Lying, Past

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• Humans were so stupid. They had something so precious, and they barely safeguarded it at all. They threw away their lives for money, for packets of powder, for a stranger's charming smile.

  Cassandra Clare

  Stupid, Charming Smile, Stranger

  Cassandra Clare (2009). “Sample of the CITYs”, p.7, Simon and Schuster

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• School was more than academics; an education prepared you for the humdrum of real life: working with others, tempering one's personality to assimilate with the group but without losing your individual identity, understading the factors of logic, reasoning, and debate. For a person - vampire or human - to succeed in the world, unlocking the mysteries of the universe was insufficient. One would also need to grasp the mysteries of human nature.

  Melissa de la Cruz

  Real, School, Personality

  Melissa de la Cruz (2010). “The Van Alen Legacy: Number 4 in series”, p.165, Hachette UK

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• Human manners are wildly inconsistent; plenty of people have said so. But this one takes the cake: the manner in which we're allowed to steal from future generations, while commanding them not to do that to us, and rolling our eyes at anyone who is tediously PC enough to point that out. The conspicious consumption of limited resources has yet to be accepted widely as a spirtual error, or even bad manners.

  Barbara Kingsolver

  Eye, Errors, Cake

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• Human beings, in their natural state, are unpredictable, erratic, and unhappy. It is only once their animal instincts are controlled that they can be responsible, dependable, and content.

  Lauren Oliver

  Animal, Unhappy, Erratic

  Lauren Oliver (2015). “Delirium Trilogy: Delirium, Pandemonium, Requiem”, p.156, Hachette UK

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• As to the mouth, it delights at times in laughter; it is disposed to impart all that the brain conceives; though I daresay it would be silent on much the heart experiences. Mobile and flexible, it was never intended to be compressed in the eternal silence of solitude: it is a mouth which should speak much and smile often, and have human affection for its interlocutor.

  Charlotte Bronte

  Laughter, Heart, Silence

  Charlotte Bronte, Emily Bronte, Anne Bronte (2009). “The Bronte Sisters: Three Novels: Jane Eyre; Wuthering Heights; and Agnes Grey (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.166, Penguin

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• You are the Protector of the Small. You see real people in the humans and animals overlooked by your peers. There will always be work for you.

  Tamora Pierce

  Real, Animal, People

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• When we deny the spiritual dimension to our existence, we end up living like animals. And when we deny the physical, sexual dimension to our existence, we end up living like angels. And both ways are destructive, because God made us human.

  Rob Bell

  Spiritual, Angel, Animal

  Rob Bell (2010). “Sex God”, p.41, Harper Collins

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• ...the first thing you do at the end is reflect on the beginning. Maybe it's some form of reverse closure, or just the basic human impulse toward sentimentality, or masochism, but as you stand there shell-shocked in the charred ruins of your life, your mind will invariably go back to the time when it all started. And even if you didn't fall in love in the eighties, in your mind it will fee like the eighties, all innocent and airbrushed, with bright colors and shoulder pads and Pat Benatar or The Cure on the soundtrack.

  Jonathan Tropper

  Falling In Love, Color, Mind

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• Day and night she had drudged and struggled and thrown her soul into her work, and there was not much of her left over for anything else. Being human, she suffered from this lack and did what she could to make up for it. If she passed the evening bent over a table in the library and later declared that she had spent that time playing cards, it was as though she had managed to do both those things. Through the lies, she lived vicariously. The lies doubled the little of her existence that was left over from work and augmented the little rag end of her personal life.

  Carson McCullers

  Lying, Night, Soul

  Carson McCullers (1998). “Collected Stories of Carson McCullers”, p.133, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Every death even the cruelest death drowns in the total indifference of Nature Nature herself would watch unmoved if we destroyed the entire human race I hate Nature this passionless spectator this unbreakable iceberg-face that can bear everything this goads us to greater and greater acts

  Peter Weiss

  Hate, Race, Watches

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• [He] understood the people in a new way...The people is not everyone who speaks our language, nor yet the elect marked by the fiery stamp of genius. Not by birth, not by the work of one's hands, not by the wings of education is one elected into the people. But by one's inner self. Everyone forges his inner self year after year. One must try to temper, to cut, to polish one's soul so as to become a human being. And thereby become a tiny particle of one's own people.

  Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

  Cutting, Self, Hands

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• 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. You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Dirty, Ocean, Unique

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• There is no human nature, since there is no god to conceive it.

  Jean-Paul Sartre

  Existentialism, Human Nature, There Is No God

  Martin Heidegger, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre (2016). “The Philosophical Library Existentialism Collection: Essays in Metaphysics, The Ethics of Ambiguity, and The Philosophy of Existentialism”, p.164, Open Road Media

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• So you want me to go to a human orgy, where I will not be welcome, and you want us to leave before I get to enjoy myself? ~Eric Northman

  Charlaine Harris

  Want, Welcome, Enjoy

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