Great Throughts Treasury

"The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter." -

"The institution of Royalty in any form is an insult to the human race." -

"God sends children for another purpose than merely to keep up the race - to enlarge our hearts, to make us unselfish, and full of kindly sympathies and affections; to give our souls higher aims, and to call out all our faculties to extended enterprise and exertion; to bring round our fireside bright faces and happy smiles, and loving, tender hearts. My soul blesses the Great Father every day, that He has gladdened the earth with little children." - Mary Howitt

"Religion, the greatest and most important of the efforts by which the human race has manifested its impulse to perfect itself." - Matthew Arnold

"The future of poetry is immense, because in poetry, where it is worthy of its high destinies, our race, as time goes on, will find an ever surer and surer stay. There is not a creed which is not shaken, not an accredited dogma which is not shown to be questionable, not a received tradition which does not threaten to dissolve. Our religion has materialized itself in the fact, in the supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact, and now the fact is failing it. But for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion today is its unconscious poetry... More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us. Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry." - Matthew Arnold

"The human race has today the means for annihilating itself - either in a fit of complete lunacy, in a big war, by a brief fit of destruction, or by careless handling of atomic technology, through a slow process of poisoning and of deterioration in its genetic structure." - Max Born

"The human race is governed by its imagination." - Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I

"We have to make big decisions about how to produce energy, for one thing - because if we continue to produce energy by combustion, the human race is not going to survive very much longer." - Noam Chomsky, fully Avram Noam Chomsky

"Go out and get interested in the human problems that are everywhere around us. Help to improve the human lot. This service of love is perhaps the healthiest attitude in this world. It puts one into the main stream of the human race, where the profound problems re, and as one participates and gets involved and learns to know people and they him, one is loving and being loved and life becomes good - very good. Love is never a soft, genial attitude, indeed it is far from it. For example, when you really love the poor and underprivileged, you will get and fight for better conditions for all men. The fight is often against prejudice and entrenched greed, and it is no easy struggle to overcome these. But love is tough and never gives up as long as one of God’s children is the victim of injustice and mistreatment." - Norman Vincent Peale

"Diversity of worship has divided the human race into seventy-two nations. From among all their dogmas, I have selected one, Divine Love." - Omar Khayyám

"Learn to see God in all persons, of whatever race or creed. You will know what divine love is when you begin to feel your oneness with every human being, not before. In mutual service we forget the little self and glimpse the one measureless self, the spirit that unifies all men." - Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh

"There is no real wealth but the labor of man. Were the mountains of gold and the valleys of silver, the world would not be one grain of corn the richer; no one comfort would be added to the human race." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"The noble art of losing face may one day save the human race and turn into eternal merit what weaker minds would call disgrace." - Piet Hein

"Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He who would inspire and lead his race must be defended from traveling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily time-worn yoke of their opinions." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where molt the wings which bear it farther than suns and stars. He who would inspire and lead his race must be defended from traveling with the souls of their men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time worn yoke of their opinions." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth." -

"How can I adequately express my contempt for the assertion that all things occur for the best, for a wise and beneficent end, and are ordered by a human intelligence! It is the most utter falsehood and a crime against the human race." - Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies

"I believe all manner of asceticism to be the vilest blasphemy - blasphemy towards the whole of the human race. I believe in the flesh and the body, which is worthy of worship." - Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies

"It is impossible to win the race unless you venture to run, impossible to win the victory unless you dare to battle." - Richard M. DeVos, Sr.

"Three ideas stand out above all others in the influenced they have exerted and are destined to exert upon the development of the human race: The idea of the Golden Rule; the idea of natural law; the idea of age-long growth or evolution." -

"I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot. Men are not superior by reason of the accidents of race or color. They are superior who have the best heart - the best brain. The superior man is the providence of the inferior. He is the eyes for the blind, strength for the weak, and a shield for the defenseless. He stands erect by bending above the fallen. He rises by lifting others." - Robert Ingersoll, fully Robert Green "Bob" Ingersoll

"I see that everywhere among the race of men it is the tongue that wins and not the deed." - Sophocles NULL

"The truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Marx, Balanchine ballet et al., don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history, it is the white race, and it alone - its ideologies and inventions - which eradicates autonomous civilizations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself." - Susan Sontag

"Charity knows no race or creed." - Talmud or The Talmud NULL

"The reason why the race of man moves slowly is because it must move all together." - Thomas Brackett Reed, aka Czar Reed

"The question of questions for mankind - the problem which underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other - is the ascertainment of the placed which man occupies in nature and of his relations to the universe of things. Whence our race has come; what are the limits of our power over nature, and of nature’s power over us; to what goal we are tending; are the problems which present themselves anew and with undiminished interest to every man born into the world." - Thomas Henry Huxley, aka T.H. Huxley and Darwin's Bulldog

"Race prejudice decreases values, both real estate and human." - W. E. B. Du Bois, fully William Edward Burghardt Du Bois

"Freedom is an indivisible word. If we want to enjoy it, and fight for it, we must be prepared to extend it to everyone, whether they are rich or poor, whether they agree with us or not, no matter what their race or the color of their skin." - Wendell Lewis Willkie

"To live anywhere in the world today and be against equality because of race or color, is like living in Alaska and being against snow." - William Faulkner, fully William Cuthbert Faulkner

"The Human Race is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for they are the only animal that is struck by the difference between what things are and what they might have been." - William Hazlitt

"No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem." - Booker T. Washington, fully Booker Taliaferro Washington

"We cannot expect to have an honest horse race until we have an honest human race." - Charles Evans Hughes, Sr.

"Whoever walks a mile full of false sympathy walks to the funeral of the whole human race." - D. H. Lawrence, fully David Herbert "D.H." Lawrence

" The faculty of imagination is the great spring of human activity, and the principal source of human improvement. As it delights in presenting to the mind scenes and characters more perfect than those which we are acquainted with, it prevents us from ever being completely satisfied with our present condition or with our past attainments, and engages us continually in the pursuit of some untried enjoyment, or of some ideal excellence. Hence the ardour of the selfish to better their fortunes, and to add to their personal accomplishments; and hence the zeal of the patriot and philosopher to advance the virtue and the happiness of the human race. Destroy this faculty, and the condition of man will become as stationary as that of the brutes." - Dugald Stewart

"No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them. " -

"Akon says to Elizabeth: “We found the pyramidal type of construction most suitable for Earth and Mars where many earthquakes plagued us and radiations remained a hazard. The pyramids were constructed by us and used by later civilizations for places of worship and for burial. They are cosmic libraries, and in time, will point the way to the stars. The human race of Earth will find an escape route to the stars and away from the violence within the Sun’s system created by its variable nature.”" - Elizabeth Klarer

"For the first time in history the physical survival of the human race depends on a radical change of the human heart. " - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm

"I consider it extremely doubtful whether the happiness of the human race has been enhanced by the technical and industrial developments that followed in the wake of rapidly progressing natural science." - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

"When we are in partnership and have stopped clutching each other's throats, when we have stopped enslaving each other, we will stand together, hands clasped, and be friends. we will be comrades, we will be brothers, and we will begin the march to the grandest civilization the human race has ever known" - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"The young watch television twenty-four hours a day, they don't read and they rarely listen. This incessant bombardment of images has developed a hypertrophied eye condition that's turning them into a race of mutants. They should pass a law for a total reeducation of the young, making children visit the Galleria Borgese on a daily basis." - Federico Fellini

"The most revolutionary aspect of technology is its mobility. Anybody can learn it. It jumps easily over barriers of race and language. … The new technology of microchips and computer software is learned much faster than the old technology of coal and iron. It took three generations of misery for the older industrial countries to master the technology of coal and iron. The new industrial countries of East Asia, South Korea, and Singapore and Taiwan, mastered the new technology and made the jump from poverty to wealth in a single generation. " - Freeman John Dyson

"The race of children possesses magically sagacious powers. " - Gail Godwin, fully Gail Kathleen Godwin

"The only thing that has kept the race of men from the mad extremes of the convent and the pirate-galley, the night-club and the lethal chamber, has been mysticism — the belief that logic is misleading, and that things are not what they seem." - Gilbert Keith "G.K." Chesteron

"It is notable how little empathy is cultivated or valued in our society. I put this down to our traditional racism and obsessive sectarianism. Even so, one would think that we would be encouraged to project ourselves into the character of someone of a different race or class, if only to be able to control him. But no effort is made." -

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe... Yet, clumsily or smoothly, the world, it seems, progresses and will progress." - H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells

"Civilization is a race between disaster and education" - H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells

"Civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have." - H. G. Wells, fully Herbert George Wells

"If minds are truly alive they will seek out books, for books are the human race recounting its memorable experiences, confronting its problems, searching for solutions, drawing the blueprints of it futures."" - Harry Allen Overstreet

"Upon books the collective education of the race depends; they are the sole instruments of registering, perpetuating and transmitting thought. " - Harry S. Truman