Mankind Quotes - Page 24

• Sometimes I have the feeling that you are not quite aware--and this honors you--of the historical greatness of your position, that you think too modestly about yourself. Everything you do is destined to be of historic significance. One day, your letters, your decisions, will belong to all mankind, like those of Wagner and Brahms.

  Stefan Zweig

  Greatness, Thinking, Decision

  Richard Strauss, Stefan Zweig (1977). “A Confidential Matter: The Letters of Richard Strauss and Stefan Zweig, 1931-1935”, p.67, Univ of California Press

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• Only the tiniest fracton of mankind want freedom. All the rest want someone to tell them theyare free.

  Irving Layton

  Want

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• It is surprising to see what superficial, inconsequential reasonings satisfy the most part of mankind. A piece of wit, a jest, a simile, or a quotation of an Author, passes for a mighty argument.... This weakness and effeminacy of mankind in being persuaded where they are delighted, have made them the sport of orators, poets, and men of wit.

  John Arbuthnot

  Sports, Men, Pieces

  George Atherton Aitken, John Arbuthnot (1892). “The Life and Works of John Arbuthnot, M.D.: Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians”

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• Those who can bring themselves to renounce wealth, position and power accruing from a social system based on violence and putting a premium on acquisitiveness, and to identify themselves in some real fashion with the struggle of the masses toward the light, may help in a measure - more, doubtless, by life than by words - to devise a more excellent way, a technique of social progress less crude, brutal, costly and slow than mankind has yet evolved.

  A. J. Muste

  Fashion, Real, Struggle

  "American Power and the New Mandarins". Book by Noam Chomsky, 1969.

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• Language is mankind’s greatest invention – except, of course, that it was never invented.

  Guy Deutscher

  Language, Invention, Courses

  Guy Deutscher (2006). “The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind's Greatest Invention”, p.1, Macmillan

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• If you trace the history of mankind, our evolution has been mediated by technology, and without technology it's not really obvious where we would be. So I think we have always been cyborgs in this sense.

  Evgeny Morozov

  Technology, Thinking, Would Be

  "Are We Becoming Cyborgs?". Interview with Serge Schmemann, www.nytimes.com. November 30, 2012.

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• What I really want out of life is to discover something new, something mankind didn’t know was possible to do.

  Elizabeth Holmes

  Want, Life Is, Something New

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• To imagine the world without gods and religion is reasonable enough; to imagine mankind without them is an entirely different matter.

  Anthony Marais

  Different, World, Matter

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• The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn't absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is delusion, along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known; that there is nothing good or desirable about scientific knowledge and that mankind, in seeking it, is falling into a trap. It is by no means obvious that this is not how things are.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein

  Believe, Fall, Mean

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• Mankind in Amnesia has to do not only with the past, like my other books -- primarily it has to do with the future, a future not removed by thousands or tens of thousands of years, but the imminent future, on whose threshold we now stand.

  Immanuel Velikovsky

  Book, Past, Years

  Immanuel Velikovsky (2010). “Mankind in Amnesia”, p.11, Paradigma Ltd

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• There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own lives--when the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the tread of an invading army or the dire clash of civil war, and grey fathers know nothing to seek for but the corpses of their blooming sons, and girls forget all vanity to make lint and bandages which may serve for the shattered limbs of their betrothed husbands.

  George Eliot

  Girl, Husband, War

  George Eliot (2009). “Daniel Deronda”, p.689, Oxford Paperbacks

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• Free will appears unfettered, deliberate; it is boundlessly free, wandering, the spirit. But fate is a necessity; unless we believe that world history is a dream-error, the unspeakable sorrows of mankind fantasies, and that we ourselves are but the toys of our fantasies. Fate is the boundless force of opposition against free will. Free will without fate is just as unthinkable as spirit without reality, good without evil. Only antithesis creates the quality.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Dream, Believe, Fate

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• As the cream abandons the milk from which it took its life, and rises to the top and rides there, so men, because they are richer than those around about them, separate themselves, and all mankind below them they regard as skim milk.

  Henry Ward Beecher

  Men, Riches, Milk

  Henry Ward Beecher (1873). “The Sermons of Henry Ward Beecher in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn”, p.381

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• The people will live on.The learning and blundering people will live on.

  Carl Sandburg

  People

  The People, Yes pt. 107 (1936)

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• Mankind likes to think in terms of extreme opposites. It is given to formulating its beliefs in terms of Either/Ors, between which it recognizes no intermediate possibilities.

  John Dewey

  Education, Truth, Thinking

  John Dewey (1998). “Experience and Education, 60th Anniversary Edition”, p.1, Kappa Delta Pi

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• The majority of mankind would seem to be beguiled into error by pleasure, which, not being really a good, yet seems to be so. So that they indiscriminately choose as good whatsoever gives them pleasure, while they avoid all pain alike as evil.

  Aristotle

  Pain, Errors, Evil

  Aristotle (1869). “The Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle”, p.74

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• It may be that there was no reason or purpose, for mankind must always be finding reasons where there are none, and comfort in a purpose that hardly exists.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Comfort, Purpose, May

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• Mankind, I hazard, wherever found, Civilized or Savage, cannot keep to any purpose for much length of time, except the purpose of destroying himself.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Hazards, Savages, Purpose

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• And for an apple damn'd mankind.

  Thomas Otway

  Apples, Damn

  1680 TheOrphan, act 3.

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• We stand today at the threshold of a great event both in the life of the United Nations and in the life of mankind, that is the approval by the General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

  Eleanor Roosevelt

  Rights, Today, Approval

  Eleanor Roosevelt (2009). “The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers”

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• I judge people by what they might be, - not are, nor will be.

  Robert Browning

  People, Judging, Might

  Robert Browning, John Woolford, Daniel Karlin (1991). “The Poems of Browning: 1841-1846”, p.207, Pearson Education

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• O Poverty, thy thousand ills combined Sink not so deep into the generous mind, As the contempt and laughter of mankind.

  Juvenal

  Laughter, Mind, Poverty

  Juvenal (1806). “The satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis, tr. into Engl. verse, by W. Gifford, with notes”, p.84

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• Safe sex, safe music, safe clothing, safe hair spray, safe ozone layer. Too late! Everything that's been achieved in the history of mankind has been achieved by not being safe.

  Lemmy Kilmister

  Sex, Ozone, Hair

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• It is a maxim, founded on the universal experience of mankind, that no nation is to be trusted farther than it is bound by its interest; and no prudent statesman or politician will venture to depart from it.

  George Washington

  Politics, Venture, Prudent

  George Washington (1834). “Correspondence and miscellaneous papers relating to the American revolution. June, 1775, to July, 1776 (v. 3); July, 1776, to July, 1777 (v. 4); July, 1777, to July, 1778 (v. 5); July, 1778, to March, 1780 (v. 6); March, 1780, to April, 1781 (v. 7); April, 1781, to December, 1783 (v. 8)”, p.110

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• The fundamental religion of most of mankind is the faith that God has revealed Himself to us and not to the barbarians. Our tribe is the one God chose and so if we vanquish the other tribes and rain fire and destruction on them, we're only carrying out God's Will.

  Garrison Keillor

  Rain, Fire, Religion

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