Human Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The face of globalisation is contradictory. The internet and television can bring knowledge and information, but also offensive sexuality and mindless violence into the home. Trade can bring new wealth and opportunities, but also huge disruptions and change to communities. In all nations - including America - this change can bring fear. Fear that because of modernity we will lose of control over our economic choices, our politics, and most importantly our identities - those things we most cherish about our communities, our families, our traditions, and our faith. But I also know that human progress cannot be denied. There need not be contradictions between development and tradition.

I believe that every human being with a physically normal brain can learn a great deal and can be surprisingly intellectual. I believe that what we badly need is social approval of learning and social rewards for learning.
We can all be members of the intellectual elite and then, and only then, will a phrase like "America's right to know" and, indeed, any true concept of democracy, have any meaning.

A self-willed man obeys a different law, the one law I, too, hold absolutely sacred — the human law in himself, his own individual will.

Subdue your appetites, my dears, and you've conquered human natur'. That is the way to inculcate strength of mind.

Charles Dickens

Could we perfect human nature, we might also expect a perfect state of things.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

All human knowledge begins with intuitions, proceeds from thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.

The world is agreed that labor is the source from which human wants are mainly supplied. There is no dispute upon this point.

Abraham Lincoln

The first progressive step for a mind overwhelmed by the strangeness of things is to realize that this feeling of strangeness is shared with all men and that human reality, in its entirety, suffers from the distance which separates it from the rest of the universe.

If you really come down to any large story that interests people – holds the attention for a considerable time... human stories are practically always about one thing, aren't they? Death. The inevitability of death.

J. R. R. Tolkien

All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are sides, and it is necessary for one side to beat another side.

In every government on earth is some trace of human weakness, some germ of corruption and degeneracy, which cunning will discover, and wickedness insensibly open, cultivate and improve.

Thomas Jefferson

When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else … you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.

Eleanor Roosevelt

There are two different conceptions about the nature of the universe: (1) the world as a unity dependent on humanity; (2) the world as a reality independent of the human factor.

Albert Einstein

The natural rhythm of human life is routine punctuated by orgies.

It is beneath human dignity to lose one's individuality and become a mere cog in the machine.

Truly speech has wonderful strength and power, that through a mere word, proceeding out of the mouth of a poor human creature, the devil, that so proud and powerful spirit, should be driven away, shamed and confounded.

It would be foolish to despise tradition. But with our growing self-consciousness and increasing intelligence we must begin to control tradition and assume a critical attitude toward it, if human relations are ever to change for the better.

Albert Einstein

Different though the sexes are, they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness.

History must be this or it is nothing. Every law which the state enacts indicates a fact in human nature; that is all. We must in ourselves see the necessary reason of every fact, — see how it could and must be.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness. People are just people, and all people have faults and shortcomings, but all of us are born with a basic goodness.

Strike against war, for without you no battles can be fought. Strike against manufacturing shrapnel and gas bombs and all other tools of murder. Strike against preparedness that means death and misery to millions of human beings. Be not dumb, obedient slaves in an army of destruction. Be heroes in an army of construction.

Learn the alchemy true human beings know. The moment you accept what troubles you've been given the door with open.

Of all the endless variety of phenomena which nature presents to our senses, there is none that fills our minds with greater wonder than that inconceivably complex movement which, in its entirety, we designate as human life; Its mysterious origin is veiled in the forever impenetrable mist of the past, its character is rendered incomprehensible by its infinite intricacy, and its destination is hidden in the unfathomable depths of the future....

In me, by myself, without human relationship, there are no visible lies. The limited circle is pure.

I refuse to believe that the tendency of human nature is always downward.