Humanity and Solidarity

It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.

Recognize yourself in he and she who are not like you and me.

We cannot trample upon the humanity of others without devaluing our own. The Igbo, always practical, put it concretely in their proverb Onye ji onye n’ani ji onwe ya : ‘He who will hold another down in the mud must stay in the mud to keep him down.’

The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

If decade after decade the truth cannot be told, each person’s mind begins to roam irretrievably. One’s fellow countrymen become harder to understand than Martians.

Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm.

The only proper intoxication is conversation.

Ah, good conversation—there’s nothing like it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.

or the qualifications for a good companion, is a certain self-control, which now holds the subject, now lets it go.

The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn’t being said.

The human baby . . . is a mosaic of animal and angel.

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

Although tact is a virtue, it is very closely allied to certain vices; the line between tact and hypocrisy is a very narrow one. I think the distinction comes in the motive.

it is the universal or divine blood that flows through us all.

Men have an extraordinarily erroneous opinion of their position in nature; and the error is ineradicable.

Man is a knot, a web, a mesh into which relationships are tied.

The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one’s key to the experience of others.

The greatest compliment that was ever paid me was when one asked me what I thought , and attended to my answer.

All of man’s life among his kind is nothing other than a battle to seize the ears of others.

So many gods, so many creeds, So many paths that wind and wind, While just the art of being kind Is all the sad world needs.

When large numbers of people share their joy in common, the happiness of each is greater because each adds fuel to the other’s flame.

The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow.

There is a loftier ambition than merely to stand high in the world. It is to stoop down and lift mankind a little higher.

Those who have never been ill are incapable of real sympathy for a great many misfortunes.