Human Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Socialism proposes no adequate substitute for the motive of enlightened selfishness that today is at the basis of all human labor and effort, enterprise and new activity.

William Howard Taft

Language is an archaeological vehicle... the language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.

Nature uses human imagination to lift her work of creation to even higher levels.

Luigi Pirandello

Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.

He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.

As anyone who has ever been around a cat for any length of time well knows, cats have enormous patience with the limitations of the human mind.

Cleveland Amory

There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world.

Call for the grandest of all earthly spectacles, what is that? It is the sun going to his rest. Call for the grandest of all human sentiments, what is that? It is that man should forget his anger before he lies down to sleep.

Thomas De Quincey

We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We're a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don't really have an explanation for.

Malcolm Gladwell

In Harvest of Stars, there is this notion, not original with me of course, that it will become possible to download at least the basic aspects of a human personality into a machine program...

Women are not inherently passive or peaceful. We're not inherently anything but human.

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be 'meetings.'

In comparison with a loving human being, everything else is worthless.

Science, like art, religion, commerce, warfare, and even sleep, is based on presuppositions. It differs, however, from most other branches of human activity in that not only are the pathways of scientific thought determined by the presuppositions of the scientists but their goals are the testing and revision of old presuppositions and the creation of new.

Gregory Bateson

My creed is that public service must be more than doing a job efficiently and honestly. It must be a complete dedication to the people and to the nation with full recognition that every human being is entitled to courtesy and consideration, that constructive criticism is not only to be expected but sought, that smears are not only to be expected but fought, that honor is to be earned but not bought.

Margaret Chase Smith

Being human signifies, for each one of us, belonging to a class, a society, a country, a continent and a civilization.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

The human animal differs from the lesser primates in his passion for lists.

Human life is driven forward by its dim apprehension of notions too general for its existing language.

Alfred North Whitehead

Who knows for what we live, and struggle, and die?... Wise men write many books, in words too hard to understand. But this, the purpose of our lives, the end of all our struggle, is beyond all human wisdom.

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

To shoot a man because one disagrees with his interpretation of Darwin or Hegel is a sinister tribute to the supremacy of ideas in human affairs — but a tribute nevertheless.

Modern medicine is a negation of health. It isn't organised to serve human health, but only itself, as an institution. It makes more people sick than it heals.

I do, indeed, close my door at times and surrender myself to a book, but only because I can open the door again and see a human face looking at me.

Worrying is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions.

I say to you that the price of liberty is and always has been blood, human blood, and if our liberties are lost, we shall never regain them except at the price of blood. They must not be lost.

J. Reuben Clark