This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"We're all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress." - Tennessee Williams, fully Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams
"The fundamental delusion of humanity is to supposed that I am here and you are out there." - Haku'un Ryoko Yasutani, aka Yasutani Roshi
"Beneath the yoke of barbarism one must not keep silence; one must fight. Whoever is silent at such a time is a traitor to humanity." - Stefan Zweig
"In the atomic age, each individual, each party, each state, must feel itself responsible to humanity in its entirety and not merely to its own group or ideal." - Raymond Aron, fully Raymond-Claude-Ferdinand Aron
"To be free is . . . the interior certainty that every person is responsible for humanity, and not just before it." - Claude Aveline, pen name Evgen Avsine
"Belief in God is belief in the highest Truth and Right, exalted above the wrongness of the world. But this Truth demands the creative participation of man and the world. But this Truth demands the creative participation of man and the world. It is divine-human; in it the ideal humanity operates." - Nikolai Berdyaev, fully Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev, also spelled Nichlas Berdiaev
"Whoever hesitates while waiting for ideas to triumph among the masses before initiating revolutionary action will never be a revolutionary. Humanity will, of course, change. Human society will, of course, continue to develop – in spite of men and the errors of men. But that is not a revolutionary attitude." - Fidel Castro, fully Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz
"There do remain dispersed in the soil of human nature diverse seeds of goodness, of benignity, of ingenuity, which being cherished, excited, and quickened by good culture, do by common experience thrust out flowers very lovely, and yield fruits very pleasant of virtue and goodness." - Lydia Maria Child
"Man has arrived at a view of the world in which his own presence is not essential… This is the blindness behind the eyes… Man has grown blind to himself; therefore, as far as he is concerned, life is void of meaning. That is the peril humanity is in." - L. Francis Edmunds
"A human being is part of the whole called by us 'universe', a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self [ego]. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive." - Albert Einstein
"The real religious problem of our society is to secure the general acceptance of a religion adapted to the requirements of continuous progress towards an ideal, consisting of all humanity." - Charles A. Ellwood
"Every soul develops itself only by means of other souls, and there are no longer individual men, but only one humanity." - Johann Gottlieb Fichte
"In their unrestrained eagerness to possess, the oppressors develop the conviction that it is possible for them to transform everything into objects of their purchasing power; hence their strictly materialistic concept of existence. Money is the measure of all things, and profit the primary goal… To the oppressor consciousness, the humanization of the “others,” of the people, appears not as the pursuit of full humanity, but as subversion." - Paulo Freire
"God is no dictator. He leaves us the freedom to master ourselves." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"I believe in the absolute oneness of God and therefore of humanity. What though we have many bodies? We have but one soul... I know god is neither in heaven nor down below, but in everyone." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"Of all the evils for which man has made himself responsible, none is so degrading, so shocking, or so brutal as his abuse of the better half of humanity; to me, the female sex is not the weaker sex." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"When it is said and done, life’s journey isn’t about humanity in general, or even the person next door. It’s about you and me. Our individual lives are the focus, a picture framed by our birth and death. Our personal goals and principles are under scrutiny; our personal success or failure is in the balance." - Os Guiness
"[A] remarkably close relation… exists between humanity’s dreams and humanity’s religions." - Emil Gutheil, fully Emil Arthur Gutheil
"If one starts out to dominate the natural world, one cannot stop short at that reputedly “rational animal” who, however rational, is also animal - and by all accounts creation’s most problematic animal. “Man against nature” becomes “man against humanity” in this sense too, that it contains the obvious directive that what is “natural” within the human species must be brought under control." - John Douglas Hall
"The spiritual development of humanity as a whole is like a pyramid, or a mountain peak, where all angles of ascent tend to converge the higher they climb." - B. H. Liddell Hart, fully Captain B. H. Liddell
"If the instinctual and repressed kindness of mankind were suddenly let loose upon the earth, sooner than we think would we be members one of another, sitting around one family hearth-stone, and singing the song of the new humanity." - George D. Herron
"Death is the radical refutation of man’s power and a stark reminder of the necessity to relate to a meaning which lies beyond the dimension of human time. Humanity without death would be arrogance without end. Nobility has its root in humanity, and humanity derived much of its power from the thought of death." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"Our existence seesaws between animality and divinity, between that which is more and that which is less than humanity." - Abraham Joshua Heschel
"God always interior to man, and unyielding, He, the true conscience to the false; a prohibition to the spark to extinguish itself; an order to the ray to remember the sun; an injunction to the soul to recognize the real absolute when it is confronted with the fictitious absolute; humanity imperishable; that splendid phenomenon, the most beautiful perhaps of our interior wonders." - Victor Hugo
"`Mind’ and `matter’ appear as two aspects of our unitary mind-bodies. There is no separate supernatural realm: all phenomena are part of one natural process of evolution. There is no basic cleavage between science and religion; they are both organs of evolving humanity… This earth is one of the rare spots in the cosmos where mind has flowered. Man is a product of nearly three billion years of evolution, in whose person the evolutionary process has at last become conscious of itself and its possibilities. Whether he likes it or not, he is responsible for the whole further evolution of our planet." - Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley
"The human species can, if it wishes, transcend itself… not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new belief. Perhaps trans-humanism will serve: man remaining man, but transcending himself, by realizing new possibilities of and for his human nature… I believe in trans-humanism: once there are enough people who can truly say that, the human species will be on the threshold of a new kind of existence, as different from ours as ours is from that of Peking man. It will at last be consciously fulfilling its real destiny." - Julian Huxley, fully Sir Julian Sorell Huxley
"The belief in progress, not as an ideal but as an indisputable fact, not as a task for humanity but as a law of Nature, has been the working faith of the West for about a hundred and fifty years." - William Ralph Inge
"It would be a pious act to share our clothes and food even with the wicked. For it is to the humanity in a man that we give, and not to his moral character." - Julian, aka Julian the Apostate, or Emperor Julian, fully Flavius Claudius Julianus Augustus NULL
"Prayer is a way of increasing our sensitivity to the spiritual aspects of life. From this point of view, it is very much like exercise. A man’s muscles become responsive by training... The soul is stretched and enlarged by prayer just as the body is stretched and enlarged by physical exercise... Prayer is a way of aspiration. It is a way of lifting ourselves, of getting a higher look, of transcending self. For when a man looks at life only from inside himself, or only from within the walls of his home, or profession, seeing the world as though it were all in terms of his special interests, then he is “too full of himself to have any room for God.” But in prayer, he... relates his own little life and his own little needs and life of humanity. He lifts himself up by prayer, and achieves a high spiritual stature." - Robert I. Kahn
"If God truly is the Absolute, then he is all these in one: Nirvana, insofar as he is the goal of the path of liberation; Dharma, insofar as he is described as the law of the cosmos and humanity; Emptiness, insofar as he constantly escapes all affirmative specifications; Primordial Buddha, insofar as he is the origin of all that is. Could one not, after all the explanations of emptiness, nirvana and dharmakaya in comparison with the Christian understanding of the Absoulte, despite all the divergences, also speak of convergence between Christianity and Buddhism?" -
"In resentment there is no chance of release but only imprisonment in a painful past and the gradual stifling of all serenity, indeed, of all humanity." - Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham
"Banish wisdom, throw away knowledge, and the people will benefit a hundredfold! Banish “humanity,” throw away righteousness, and the people will become conscientious and full of love! Banish skill, throw away profit and thieves and robbers will disappear!" - Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
"Would you like to liberate yourself from the lower realms of life? Would you like to save the world from degradation and destruction it seems destined for? Then step away from the shallow mass movements and quietly go to work on your own self-awareness. If you want to awaken all of humanity, then awaken all of yourself... Truly, the greatest gift you have to give is that of your own self-transformation." - Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
"The wake of Moses, of Buddha, of Confucius, of Lao Tse, of Christ, probably exert a greater influence over humanity today than when these men were pondering over its fate and happiness. No man ever disappears completely if he strives to do good and expects no reward outside of the joy of having contributed to the progress of mankind." - Pierre Lecomte du Noüy
"In Totalitaria, jails and concentration camps by the score are built in order to provoke fear and awe among the population… In these centers of fear, nobody is really corrected; he is, as it were, expelled from humanity, wasted, killed – but too quickly, lest the terrorizing influence be diminished. The truth of the matter is that these jails are built not for real criminals, but rather for their terrorizing effect on the bystanders, the citizens of Totalitaria." - Joost Meerloo. fully Joost Abraham Maurits Meerlo
"In all ages, literature aims at the interpretation of the universe and a deep perception of humanity by means of language." - Yukio Mishima
"Any industrial technology that dramatically extends our capabilities also makes us uneasy by challenging our concept of humanity itself." - Janet H. Murray
"Conservation is humanity caring for the future." - Nancy Newhall, fully Nancy Wynne Newhall
"Authentic humanity evolves to the extent that blind egotism erodes. To expand the heart and mind in ever-wider circles of empathy so that, starting with oneself, those circles embrace one’s family, one’s community, one’s nation, and finally humanity - this is the Confucian aim." - Philip Novak
"Education is nothing more than the polishing of each single link in the great chain that binds humanity together and gives it unity." - Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi
"How are we to bring children to the spirit of citizenship and humanity which is postulated by democratic societies? By the actual practice of democracy at school. It is unbelievable that at a time when democratic ideas enter into every phase of life, they should have been so little utilized as instruments of education." - Jean Piaget
"All the great things of humanity have been accomplished in the name of absolute principles." - Ernest Renan, aka Joseph Ernest Renan
"Man is but a short, critical stage between the animal and the spiritual. His state is one of constant wavering, of soaring and descending. Undeviating humanity is nonexistent. The emancipated man is yet to emerge." - Fritz A. Rothschild
"Man is strong when he contents himself with being what he is: he is weak when he desires to raise himself above humanity." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"Open your eyes and look for some man, or some work for the sake of men, which needs a little time, a little friendship, a little sympathy, a little sociability, a little human toil. Perhaps it is a lonely person, or an invalid - or some unfortunate inefficient, to whom you can be something. It may be an old man or it may be a child. Or some good work is in want of volunteers who will devote a free evening to it or will run on errands for it. Who can reckon up all the ways in which the priceless fund of impulse, man, is capable of exploitation! He is needed in every nook and corner. Therefore search and see if there is not some play where you may invest your humanity." - Albert Schweitzer
"The meaning and purpose of the world remain to a large extent inexplicable. But one thing is clear: the purpose of all events is spiritual. The purpose of existence is that we human beings, all nations and the whole of humanity, should constantly progress toward perfection. If we do this, our finite spirit will be in harmony with the infinite." - Albert Schweitzer