Humanity and Solidarity

Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!

Genius all over the world stands hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.

You cannot imagine the kindness I’ve received at the hands of perfect strangers.

If nothing else is left, one must scream. Silence is the real crime against humanity.

Out of the experience of an extraordinary human disaster that lasted too long, must be born a society of which all humanity will be proud. . . . Never, never, and never again shall it be that this beautiful land will again experience the oppression of one by another.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant, they too have their story.

I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people.

People don't care how much you know until they know how much you care.

The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.

I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead.

Compassion is the basis of morality.

Thousands of candles can be lit from a single candle, and the life of the candle will not be shortened. Happiness never decreases by being shared.

How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people.

To devote your life to the good of all and to the happiness of all is religion. Whatever you do for your own sake is not religion.

I love you when you bow in your mosque, kneel in your temple, pray in your church. For you and I are sons of one religion, and it is the spirit.

The government is us; we are the government, you and I.

Is man one of God's blunders? Or is God one of man's blunders?

Wherever I found a living creature there I found the will to power.

Man alone suffers so excruciatingly in the world that he was compelled to invent laughter.

The abdomen is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a god.

When a hundred men stand together each of them loses his mind and gets another one.

I praise, I do not reproach, [nihilism's] arrival. I believe it is one of the greatest crises, a moment of the deepest self-reflection of humanity. Whether man recovers from it, whether he becomes master of this crisis, is a question of his strength.

Even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

The crowd of influences streaming on the young soul is so great, the clods of barbarism and violence flung at him so strange and overwhelming, that an assumed stupidity is his only refuge.