Humanity Quotes

400+ Sourced quotes

Pope John Paul II

Louis Pasteur

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Adam Smith

Rabindranath Tagore

Henry David Thoreau

Leo Tolstoy

Men, be kind to your fellow-men; this is your first duty, kind to every age and station, kind to all that is not foreign to humanity. What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

wars are often the cause of further wars because they fuel deep hatreds, create situations of injustice and trample upon people's dignity and rights. Wars generally do not resolve the problems for which they are fought and therefore, in addition to causing horrendous damage, they prove ultimately futile. War is a defeat for humanity. Only in peace and through peace can respect for human dignity and its inalienable rights be guaranteed.

Pope John Paul II

Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.

My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together.

If I seem to boast more than is becoming, my excuse is that I brag for humanity rather than for myself.

Henry David Thoreau

It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves not to their humanity but their self love, and never talk to them of our necessities but of their advantages.

Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal, aims of humanity.

No civilized society can thrive upon victims, whose humanity has been permanently mutilated.

Rabindranath Tagore

When I meet a new person, I am on the lookout for signs of what he or she is loyal to. It is a preliminary clue to the sense of belonging, and hence of his or her humanity.

The task of leadership is not to put greatness into humanity, but to elicit it, for the greatness is already there.

Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil. The capacity for feelings of pleasure and pain and for the form of life of which animals are capable clearly impose duties of compassion and humanity in their case.

Real education should educate us out of self into something far finer; into a selflessness which links us with all humanity.

France, for example, loves at the same time history and the drama, because the one explores the vast destinies of humanity, and the other the individual lot of man.

Alfred de Vigny

This is not a contest between persons. The humblest citizen in all the land, when clad in the armor of a righteous cause, is stronger than all the hosts of error. I come to speak to you in defence of a cause as holy as the cause of liberty—the cause of humanity.

William Jennings Bryan

A few great minds are enough to endow humanity with monstrous power, but a few great hearts are not enough to make us worthy of using it.

That cry of the soul to be lifted out of the bondage of the narrow circle of life, which carries up to God the protest and yearning of suffering man, never finds a more sublime expression than where humanity is oppressed and religion is corrupt.

Life is to be lived, not controlled, and humanity is won by continuing to play in face of certain defeat.

Whoever is not in the possession of leisure can hardly be said to possess independence. They talk of the dignity of work. Bosh. True Work is the necessity of poor humanity's earthly condition. The dignity is in leisure. Besides, 99 hundreths of all the work done in the world is either foolish and unnecessary, or harmful and wicked.

Herman Melville

Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.

Passion is universal humanity. Without it religion, history, romance and art would be useless.

Honoré de Balzac

To the real artist in humanity, what are called bad manners are often the most picturesque and significant of all.

We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity - romantic love and gunpowder.

If, while I hear the shriek of the slave mother robbed of her little ones, I do not open my mouth for the dumb, am I not guilty? Or should I go from house to house to do it, when I could tell so many more in less time, if they should be gathered in one place? You would not object or think it wrong, for a man to plead the cause of the suffering and the outcast; and surely the moral character of the act is not changed because it is done by a woman. I expect to plead not for the slave only, but for suffering humanity everywhere. Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my sex. I only ask that you will not withhold your consent from my doing anything that I think is my duty to do.

Nuclear war is such an emotional subject that many people see the weapons themselves as the common enemy of humanity.

God has given you your country as cradle, and humanity as mother; you cannot rightly love your brethren of the cradle if you love not the common mother.

Giuseppe Mazzini