Mankind Quotes

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The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown. These facts few psychologists will dispute, and their admitted truth must establish for all time the genuineness and dignity of the weirdly horrible tale as a literary form.

H. P. Lovecraft

The best reason why Monarchy is a strong government is, that it is an intelligible government. The mass of mankind understand it, and they hardly anywhere in the world understand any other.

A religion so cheerless, a philosophy so sorrowful, could never have succeeded with the masses of mankind if presented only as a system of metaphysics. Buddhism owed its success to its catholic spirit and its beautiful morality.

William Winwood Reade

Happiness is spiritual, born of truth and love. It is unselfish; therefore it cannot exist alone, but requires all mankind to share it.

Mary Baker Eddy

That is the consolation of a little mind; you have the fun of changing it without impeding the progress of mankind.

Frank Moore Colby

If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology.

Clifford D. Simak

Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.

Mikhail Gorbachev

The most important American addition to the World Experience was the simple surprising fact of America. We have helped prepare mankind for all its later surprises.

Daniel J. Boorstin

Familiar things happen, and mankind does not bother about them. It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

Alfred North Whitehead

Above all we should not forget that government is an evil, a usurpation upon the private judgement and individual conscience of mankind.

The most important question we have to deal with, is a combination of population control and the control of our environment — how to utilize the world in as effective a way as we can for the future of mankind.

In every human being one or the other of these two instincts is predominant: the active or positive instinct to offer hospitality, the negative or passive instinct to accept it. And either of these instincts is so significant of character that one might as well say that mankind is divisible into two great classes: hosts and guests.

If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.

The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.

Arthur C. Clarke

The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there. Other people can talk about how to expand the destiny of mankind. I just want to talk about how to fix a motorcycle. I think that what I have to say has more lasting value.

Robert M. Pirsig

To despise riches, may, indeed, be philosophic, but to dispense them worthily, must surely be more beneficial to mankind.

No true and permanent fame can be founded, except in labors which promote the happiness of mankind.

If the aristocracy of the whole white race is so to melt in a world of the colored races of the Earth, I for one should only rejoice in such a divine triumph of the sacrificial idea in history; for it would mean the humanization of mankind.

George Edward Woodberry

Real misanthropes are not found in solitude, but in the world; since it is experience of life, and not philosophy, which produces real hatred of mankind.

Giacomo Leopardi

Scientific thought and its creation is the common and shared heritage of mankind.

A bureaucracy is sure to think that its duty is to augment official power, official business, or official members, rather than to leave free the energies of mankind; it overdoes the quantity of government, as well as impairs its quality.

It will be said, however, that protection tends to destroy commerce, the civilizer of mankind. Directly the reverse, however, is the fact.

Henry Charles Carey

I worship impersonal Nature, which is neither "good" or "bad", and who knows neither love nor hatred. I worship Life; the Sun, Sustainer of life. I believe in the Law of everlasting struggle, which is the law of life, and in the duty of the best specimens of our race — the natural élite of mankind — to rule the earth, and evolve out of themselves a caste of supermen, a people 'like unto the Gods'.

Thought is the wind, knowledge the sail, and mankind the vessel.

I certainly feel that the time is not far distant when a knowledge of the principles of diet will be an essential part of one's education. Then mankind will eat to live, be able to do better mental and physical work, and disease will be less frequent.