Great Throughts Treasury

"Religion is the supreme art of humanity." -

"If matter and energy and chance are all there is, it takes a man of most unusual courage to build an unselfish love for humanity on such foundations." - Edmund Ware Sinnot

"Every human being, simply by virtue of his or her humanity, is a child of God and therefore in possession of rights that even kings must respect." -

"Love is the supreme value around which all moral values can be integrated into one ethical system valid for the whole of humanity." -

"Each man’s nature in one way and another is vitally associated with the life and well-being of every other individual in the world and what affects one must in some degree affect the rest of humanity." - Baird T. Spalding

"Humanity is in a precarious balance between the forces of violence and the forces of peace. It is by no means clear at this time which of these forces will prevail. We do not ask, however, whether religion will not become an aid to the forces of peace or cooperation." - Obert C. Tanner, fully Obert Clark Tanner

"Tired of humanity and its heritage laden with a tiny heart emptied of its contents, we wander each in his own way, purposeless and helpless." - Shaul Tchernichovsky

"To speak of the love for humanity is meaningless. There is no such thing as humanity. What we call humanity has a name, was born, lives on a street, gets hungry, needs all the particular things we need. As an abstract, it has no reality whatsoever." -

"The historic ascent of humanity, taken as a whole, may be summarized as a succession of victories of consciousness over blind forces – in nature, in society, in man himself." -

"It does not seem as if knowledge has done the best thing for humanity. In the time of wisdom, I respected my brother’s dream and he respected mine." - John Trudell

"My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together." - Desmond Tutu, fully Desmond Mpilo Tutu

"I do not understand how people declare themselves to be believers in God, and at the same time think that God has handed over to a little body of man all truth, and that they are guardians of the rest of humanity." - Vivekananda, fully Sri or Swami Vivekananda, born Narendra Nath Datta NULL

"A historian without any theological bias whatever… cannot portray the progress of humanity honestly without giving a foremost place to a penniless teacher from Nazareth." -

"Today the greatest divide within humanity is not between races, or religions, or even, as widely believed, between the literate and illiterate. It is the chasm that separates scientific from pre-scientific cultures." -

"Liberty, equality - bad principles! The only true principle for humanity is justice; and justice to the feeble is protection and kindness." -

"We believe that humanity stands at the threshold of its next great leap. However, our success in making this transition depends on our willingness to develop a greater vision and a clearer sense of responsibility for one another. Understanding and articulating the nature and dynamics of consciousness is key to achieving this new vision." - Barbara Fields Bernstein

"The stream of time sweeps away errors, and leaves the truth for the inheritance of humanity." -

"Now that the United States and the rest of humanity have begun to confront the natural limits to our resources, we are in need of a new vision - a vision of a sustainable economy." - Herman E. Daly

"It is appallingly obvious that our technology exceeds our humanity." - Albert Einstein

"There are seven things that will destroy us: Wealth without work; Pleasure without conscience; Knowledge without character; Religion without sacrifice; Politics without principle; Science without humanity; Business without ethics." -

"The maltreatment of the natural world and its impoverishment leads to the impoverishment of the human soul. It is related to the outburst of violence in human society. To save the natural world today means to save what is human in humanity." - Raisa Gorbachev, fully Raisa Maximovna Gorbachova née Titarenko

"Julian the Apostate - It is to the humanity in a man that we give, and not to his moral character." - Raúl Juliá, aka Raul Rafael Carlos Julia y Arceley

"What is called sympathy, kindness, mercy, goodness, pity, compassion, gentleness, humanity, appreciation, gratefulness, and service - in reality, it is love." - Inayat Khan, aka Hazrat Inayat Khan, fully Pir-O-Murshid Hazrat Inayat Khan

"Altruists have a particular perspective in which all mankind is connected through a common humanity, in which each individual is linked to all others and to a world in which all living beings are entitled to a certain humane treatment merely by virtue of being alive." - Kristen Renwick Monroe

"I have often asked myself whether I am not more heavily obligated to the hardest years of my life than to any others. As my inmost nature teaches me, whatever is necessary as seen from the heights and in the sense of a great economy is also the useful par excellence: one should not only bear it, one should love it. Amor fati: that is my inmost nature. And as for my long sickness, do I not owe it indescribably more than I owe to my health? I owe it a higher health, one which is made stronger by whatever does not kill it. I also owe my philosophy to it. Only great pain is the ultimate liberator of the spirit... Only great pain, that long, slow pain in which we are burned with green wood, as it were - pain which takes its time - only this forces us philosophers to descend into our ultimate depths and to put away all trust, all good-naturedness, all that would veil, all mildness, all that is medium - things in which formerly we may have found our humanity. I doubt that such pain makes us "better," but I know that it makes us more profound." -

"All the progress humanity has made appears to be endangered by the very technological skills that humans have achieved. We live in an age in which the evils that humans inflict on others have reached unparalleled extremes of barbarism." - P. D. Premasiri, fully Pahalawattage Don Premasiri

"Liberalism was never a straight line to progress. Yet, every step of the way it is liberalism that is open to the human possibility, believing as it does in this invariable moral sense, turning the "ought" into the "is" for all of humanity. Human freedom and dignity can be more than a dream for the few." - Marcus G. Raskin

"Where love, trust, mutual aid, equality, and empathy are not linked, the boot, whip, warring, modern inquisitors, and their epigones will supply a rhetoric that accepts humanity's fate as tragic while doing everything to perpetuate that tragedy." - Marcus G. Raskin

"If humanity, or life in general, was created to serve a particular purpose beyond itself, our being would be analogous to a manufactured artifact. There seems to be little in this state of affairs to justify the exultation that religious people sometimes feel in thinking that God's plan reveals the purpose and the meaning of all reality." - Irving Singer

"Will it ever be possible to assess the ongoing loss of biological diversity? I cannot imagine a scientific problem of greater immediate importance to humanity." -

"Environmental problems are essentially ethical because the solutions we attempt depend on our self-perception as a species, and on the future we envision for ourselves and our descendants. And from these considerations flow our prescription of what is good for humanity and for the environment." -

"The only way in which one can make endurable man's inhumanity to man, and a man's destruction of his own environment, is to exemplify in your own lives man's humanity to man and man's reverence for the place in which he lives." - Alan Stewart Paton

"There is only one way in which one can endure man's inhumanity to man and that is to try, in one's own life, to exemplify man's humanity to man." - Alan Stewart Paton

"The only way in which one can make endurable man's inhumanity to man, and a man's destruction of his own environment, is to exemplify in your own lives man's humanity to man and man's reverence for the place in which he lives." -

"There is only one way in which one can endure man's inhumanity to man and that is to try, in one's own life, to exemplify man's humanity to man." -

"Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice." - Alexander Solzhenitsyn, fully Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn

"Justice is conscience, not a personal conscience but the conscience of the whole of humanity. Those who clearly recognize the voice of their own conscience usually recognize also the voice of justice." -

"The feeling of inferiority rules the mental life and can be clearly recognized as the sense of incompleteness and unfulfillment... both of individuals and of humanity." - Alfred Adler

"The feeling of inferiority rules the mental life and can be clearly recognized as the sense of incompleteness and unfulfillment, and in the uninterrupted struggle both of individuals and of humanity." - Alfred Adler

"Modern science has imposed on humanity the necessity of wandering." - Alfred North Whitehead

"It is better to be a beggar than ignorant; for a beggar only wants money, but an ignorant person wants humanity." - Aristippus NULL

"Man perfected by society is the best of all animals; he is the most terrible of all when he lives without law and without justice. If he finds himself an individual who cannot live in society, or who pretends he has need of only his own resources, do not consider him as a member of humanity; he is a savage beast or a god." - Aristotle NULL

"Neither race nor environment, taken by itself, can be the positive factor which, within the last six thousand years, has shaken humanity out of its static repose on the level of primitive society and started it on the hazardous quest of civilization." - Arnold J. Toynbee, fully Arnold Joseph Toynbee

"My life has been a long pilgrimage to the highest goal of total service to humanity... Life is lived once and must be lived fully to justify one’s creation." - Benazir Bhutto

"Fear makes us feel our humanity." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield

"The artist, depicting man disdainful of the storm and stress of life, is no less reconciling and healing than the poet who, while endowing Nature and Humanity, rejoices in its measureless superiority to human passions and human sorrows." - Bernard Berenson

"Humanity is not an accident, and life has profound meaning... We discover the true meaning of life only when we turn to God in faith and commitment." - Billy Graham, formally William Franklin "Billy" Graham

"To go beyond the bounds of moderation is to outrage humanity." - Blaise Pascal

"To go beyond the bounds of moderation is to outrage humanity. The greatness of the human soul is shown by knowing how to keep within proper bounds. So far from greatness consisting in going beyond its limits, it really consists in keeping within it." - Blaise Pascal

"There is no cruelty so inexorable and unrelenting as that which proceeds from a bigoted and presumptuous supposition of doing service to God. The victim of the fanatical persecutor will find that the stronger the motives he can urge for mercy are, the weaker will be his chance for obtaining it, for the merit of his destruction will be supposed to rise in value in proportion as it is effected at the expense of every feeling both of justice and of humanity." - Charles Caleb Colton