Great Throughts Treasury

"Supposing a man-hater had desired to render the human race as unhappy as possible, what could he have invented for the purpose better than belief in an incomprehensible being about whom men could never be able to agree?" - Denis Diderot

"All the crimes on earth do not destroy so much of the human race, nor alienate so much property as drunkenness." - Francis Bacon

"The happiness of the human race in this world does not consist in our being devoid of passions, but in our learning to command them." - French Proverbs

"You'll never have a quiet world till you knock the patriotism out of the human race." - George Bernard Shaw

"One's friends are the part of the human race with which one can be human." - George Santayana

"A person remains immature, whatever his age, as long as he thinks of himself as an exception to the human race." -

"I will... venture to assume that as the human race is continually advancing in civilization and culture as its natural purpose, so it is continually making progress for the better in relation to the moral end of its existence, and that this progress although it maybe sometimes interrupted, will never be entirely broken off or stopped." - Immanuel Kant

"We are obligated to respect, defend, and maintain the common bonds of union and fellowship that exist among all members of the human race." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL

"The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter." -

"The institution of Royalty in any form is an insult to the human race." -

"Religion, the greatest and most important of the efforts by which the human race has manifested its impulse to perfect itself." - Matthew Arnold

"The human race has today the means for annihilating itself - either in a fit of complete lunacy, in a big war, by a brief fit of destruction, or by careless handling of atomic technology, through a slow process of poisoning and of deterioration in its genetic structure." - Max Born

"The human race is governed by its imagination." - Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I

"We have to make big decisions about how to produce energy, for one thing - because if we continue to produce energy by combustion, the human race is not going to survive very much longer." - Noam Chomsky, fully Avram Noam Chomsky

"Go out and get interested in the human problems that are everywhere around us. Help to improve the human lot. This service of love is perhaps the healthiest attitude in this world. It puts one into the main stream of the human race, where the profound problems re, and as one participates and gets involved and learns to know people and they him, one is loving and being loved and life becomes good - very good. Love is never a soft, genial attitude, indeed it is far from it. For example, when you really love the poor and underprivileged, you will get and fight for better conditions for all men. The fight is often against prejudice and entrenched greed, and it is no easy struggle to overcome these. But love is tough and never gives up as long as one of God’s children is the victim of injustice and mistreatment." - Norman Vincent Peale

"Diversity of worship has divided the human race into seventy-two nations. From among all their dogmas, I have selected one, Divine Love." - Omar Khayyám

"There is no real wealth but the labor of man. Were the mountains of gold and the valleys of silver, the world would not be one grain of corn the richer; no one comfort would be added to the human race." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"The noble art of losing face may one day save the human race and turn into eternal merit what weaker minds would call disgrace." - Piet Hein

"The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth." -

"How can I adequately express my contempt for the assertion that all things occur for the best, for a wise and beneficent end, and are ordered by a human intelligence! It is the most utter falsehood and a crime against the human race." - Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies

"I believe all manner of asceticism to be the vilest blasphemy - blasphemy towards the whole of the human race. I believe in the flesh and the body, which is worthy of worship." - Richard Jefferies, fully John Richard Jefferies

"Three ideas stand out above all others in the influenced they have exerted and are destined to exert upon the development of the human race: The idea of the Golden Rule; the idea of natural law; the idea of age-long growth or evolution." -

"The Human Race is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for they are the only animal that is struck by the difference between what things are and what they might have been." - William Hazlitt

"We cannot expect to have an honest horse race until we have an honest human race." - Charles Evans Hughes, Sr.

"Whoever walks a mile full of false sympathy walks to the funeral of the whole human race." - D. H. Lawrence, fully David Herbert "D.H." Lawrence

" The faculty of imagination is the great spring of human activity, and the principal source of human improvement. As it delights in presenting to the mind scenes and characters more perfect than those which we are acquainted with, it prevents us from ever being completely satisfied with our present condition or with our past attainments, and engages us continually in the pursuit of some untried enjoyment, or of some ideal excellence. Hence the ardour of the selfish to better their fortunes, and to add to their personal accomplishments; and hence the zeal of the patriot and philosopher to advance the virtue and the happiness of the human race. Destroy this faculty, and the condition of man will become as stationary as that of the brutes." - Dugald Stewart

"No human race is superior; no religious faith is inferior. All collective judgments are wrong. Only racists make them. " -

"Akon says to Elizabeth: “We found the pyramidal type of construction most suitable for Earth and Mars where many earthquakes plagued us and radiations remained a hazard. The pyramids were constructed by us and used by later civilizations for places of worship and for burial. They are cosmic libraries, and in time, will point the way to the stars. The human race of Earth will find an escape route to the stars and away from the violence within the Sun’s system created by its variable nature.”" - Elizabeth Klarer

"For the first time in history the physical survival of the human race depends on a radical change of the human heart. " - Erich Fromm, fully Erich Seligmann Fromm

"I consider it extremely doubtful whether the happiness of the human race has been enhanced by the technical and industrial developments that followed in the wake of rapidly progressing natural science." - Erwin Schrödinger, fully Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger

"When we are in partnership and have stopped clutching each other's throats, when we have stopped enslaving each other, we will stand together, hands clasped, and be friends. we will be comrades, we will be brothers, and we will begin the march to the grandest civilization the human race has ever known" - Eugene V. Debs, fully Eugene Victor Debs

"If minds are truly alive they will seek out books, for books are the human race recounting its memorable experiences, confronting its problems, searching for solutions, drawing the blueprints of it futures."" - Harry Allen Overstreet

"Any man who afflicts the human race with ideas must be prepared to see them misunderstood. " - H. L. Mencken, fully Henry Louis Mencken

"The first person who, having enclosed a plot of land, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him was the true founder of civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human race have been spared, had some one pulled up the stakes or filled in the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: "Do not listen to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and the earth to no one!" -

"There are plenty of problems in the world, many of them interconnected. But there is no problem which compares with this central, universal problem of saving the human race from extinction. " - John Foster Dulles

"How vast is eternity It will swallow up all the human race it will collect all the intelligent universe it will open scenes and prospects wide enough, great enough, and various enough to fix the attention, and absorb the minds of all intelligent beings forever." - Nathanael Emmons, also Nathaniel Emmons

"It's all a matter of ideas, and God is just one idea I don't accept. It's not important. I am not going out and commit crimes or be immoral because I don't believe in God. I don't even think about it. It's just that I get so tired of Him getting credit for all the things the human race achieves through its own stubborn effort. There simply is not God! There is only Man, and it's he who makes miracles!" - Lorraine Hansberry

"The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter." - Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens

"The volumes which record the history of the human race are filled with the deeds and the words of great men... The Twentieth Century Woman ... questions the completeness of the story." - Mary Ritter Beard

"A civilization built on dualism and war within and between persons, one that puts its most creative minds and its best engineers to sadistic work building more and more destructive weapons, is no civilization at all. It needs a radical transformation from the heart outwards. It needs to outgrow and outlaw war just as in the last century it outlawed slavery. The human race has outgrown war, but it hardly knows it yet." - Matthew Fox

"If a Catholic cannot feel confident in a time of globalization, what is the point in bearing the name ‘Catholic,’ which is another name for global? (The imperative for globalization began with the commission ‘Go preach the gospels to all nations,’ which turned Christianity away from being the religion of one tribe or one people only, and commanded it to see the whole human race as one people of God.) Globalization is the natural ecology of the Catholic faith." - Michael Novak

"Those who hope that we shall move away from the socialist path will be greatly disappointed. Every part of our program of perestroika … is fully based on the principle of more socialism and more democracy. ... I would like to be clearly understood ... we, the Soviet people, are for socialism. ... We want more socialism and, therefore, more democracy. ... More socialism means more democracy, openness and collectivism in everyday life. … We will proceed toward better socialism rather than away from it. We are saying this honestly, without trying to fool our own people or the world. Any hopes that we will begin to build a different, non-socialist society and go over to the other camp are unrealistic and futile. Those in the West who expect us to give up socialism will be disappointed. ... It’s my conviction that the human race has entered a stage where we are all dependent on each other. No other country or nation should be regarded in total separation from another, let alone pitted against another. That’s what our communist vocabulary calls internationalism and it means promoting universal human values." - Mikhail Gorbachev, fully Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev

"Music is the voice that tells us that the human race is greater than it knows." - Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I

"In the heart's deepest place, where the burden of ego is dropped and the mystery of soul is penetrated, a man finds the consciousness there not different in any way from what all other men may find. The mutuality of the human race is thus revealed as existing only on a plane where its humanness is transcended. This is why all attempts to express it in political and economic terms, no less than the theosophic attempts to form a universal brotherhood, being premature, must be also artificial. This is why they failed. " - Paul Brunton, born Hermann Hirsch, wrote under various pseudonyms including Brunton Paul, Raphael Meriden and Raphael Delmonte

"When Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge, they were exercising their freedom of choice....Before eating the fruit, they did not know the difference between good and evil; thus they did not possess the knowledge which enables human beings to exercise freedom of choice. By eating the fruit, they acquired this knowledge; and from that moment onwards they were free. Thus the story of their banishment from Eden is in truth the story of how the human race gained its freedom...Adam and Eve became mature human beings, responsible to God for their actions....by defying God, Adam and Eve grew to maturity in his image." - Pelagius NULL

"Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half the human race to misery." - Percy Bysshe Shelley

"The three most charismatic leaders in this century inflicted more suffering on the human race than almost any trio in history: Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. What matters is not the leader's charisma. What matters is the leader's mission. " - Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker

"Please accept the fact that the human race is split three ways: some people can take in information by looking at figures, some by looking at graphs, and a third group only by touching it, feeling it, or writing it. " - Peter F. Drucker, fully Peter Ferdinand Drucker

"All that was an element of progress in the past or an instrument of moral and intellectual improvement of the human race is due to the practice of mutual aid, to the customs that recognized the equality of men and brought them to ally, to unite, to associate for the purpose of producing and consuming, to unite for purpose of defense to federate and to recognize no other judges in fighting out their differences than the arbitrators they took from their own midst." - Peter Kropotkin, fully Prince Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin