We can work together for a better world with men and women of goodwill, those who radiate the intrinsic goodness of humankind.
Man is harder than rock and more fragile than an egg.
Yugoslav Proverb
The horror of wedlock, the most appalling, the most loathsome of all the bonds humankind has devised for its own discomfort and degradation.
That in man which cannot be domesticated is not his evil but his goodness.
Antonio Porchia, Voces
If the gods listened to the prayers of men, all humankind would quickly perish since they constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.
Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
Albert Camus
A human being: an ingenious assembly of portable plumbing.
Christopher Morley
Play is the only way the highest intelligence of humankind can unfold.
The universe may have a purpose, but nothing we know suggests that, if so, this purpose has any similarity to ours.
Bertrand Russell
Man is rated the highest animal, at least among all animals who returned the questionnaire.
Robert Brault
Ocean: A body of water occupying two-thirds of a world made for man – who has no gills.
Ambrose Bierce
Man is harder than iron, stronger than stone and more fragile than a rose.
Turkish Proverb
Man is the only kind of varmint sets his own trap, baits it, then steps in it.
John Steinbeck
Man was created a little lower than the angels, and has been getting lower ever since.
Josh Billings
Human beings invent just as many ways to sabotage their lives as to improve them.
Mark Goulston
As I know more of mankind I expect less of them, and am ready now to call a man a good man upon easier terms than I was formerly.
Samuel Johnson
A little kindness from person to person is better than a vast love for all humankind.
Man is an intelligence in servitude to his organs.
Aldous Huxley
We are perverse creatures and never satisfied.
Nan Fairbrother
Modern man is the missing link between apes and human beings.
Such is the human race, often it seems a pity that Noah… didn’t miss the boat.
Mark Twain
There are too many people, and too few human beings.
Robert Zend
It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of the human race proved to be nothing more than the story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump.
David Ormsby Gore
Only on paper has humanity yet achieved glory, beauty, truth, knowledge, virtue, and abiding love.
George Bernard Shaw
Humankind has not woven the web of life. We are but one thread within it. Whatever we do to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.
Men! The only animal in the world to fear.
D.H. Lawrence
The chief obstacle to the progress of the human race is the human race.
Don Marquis
Man embraces in his makeup all the natural orders; he’s a squid, a mollusk, a sucker and a buzzard; sometimes he’s a cerebrate.
Martin H. Fischer
Men are cruel, but Man is kind.
Rabindranath Tagore
Humanity is on the march, earth itself is left behind.
David Ehrenfel
Cabbage: a familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man’s head.
Ambrose Bierce
And Marx spoke of the fact that socialism will be the kingdom of freedom, where man realizes himself in a way that humankind has never seen before. This was an inspiring body of literature to read.
Albert Maltz
Monkeys are superior to men in this: When a monkey looks into a mirror, he sees a monkey.
Malcolm de Chazal
A great revolution in just one single individual will help achieve a change in the destiny of a society and, further, will enable a change in the destiny of humankind.
Daisaku Ikeda
It is human nature to stand in the middle of a thing.
Mariane Moore
As I watch what is happening in the Middle East and the carnage that comes over our television screens every evening, I cannot help but ask myself, what is wrong with humankind that we cannot stop the killing?
Marcy Kaptur
The human race is a race of cowards; and I am not only marching in that procession but carrying a banner.
Mark Twain
Adam ate the apple, and our teeth still ache.
Hungarian Proverb
Why was man created on the last day? So that he can be told, when pride possesses him: God created the gnat before thee.
The Talmud
Man – a creature made at the end of the week’s work when God was tired.
Mark Twain
Emphasis on the common emotive or affective origins of music and words in the first cries of humankind undermines words.
Jean Philippe Rameau
I sometimes think that God in creating man somewhat overestimated His ability.
Oscar Wilde
O poor mortals, how ye make this earth bitter for each other.
Thomas Carlyle
God pulled an all-nighter on the sixth day.
Zoo: An excellent place to study the habits of human beings.
Evan Esar
For the first time in history all the major countries in the world are pushing together to reach this goal… building something in space that is really for all humankind.
Umberto Guidoni
The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant [is] alone enough to upset Darwin.
Henry Adams
Man – a being in search of meaning.
Plato
Ultimately, aren’t we all just talking monkeys with an attitude problem?
Jehovah God is truly rich far beyond the imagination of humankind.
Joseph Franklin Rutherford
The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded.
Gustave Flaubert
No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.
Theodore Bikel
Everyone is as God made him, and often a good deal worse.
Miguel de Cervantes
Man is a strange animal, he doesn’t like to read the handwriting on the wall until his back is up against it.
Adlai Stevenson
It is easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man.
Albert Einstein
God doesn’t measure His bounty, but oh how we do!
Mignon McLaughlin
The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.
Joseph Conrad
The human race is governed by its imagination.
Napoleon
Man uses his intelligence less in the care of his own species than he does in his care of anything else he owns or governs.
Abraham Meyerson
Human beings cling to their delicious tyrannies and to their exquisite nonsense, till death stares them in the face.
Sydney Smith
The problem is not simply that the Singularity represents the passing of humankind from center stage, but that it contradicts our most deeply held notions of being.
Vernor Vinge
The small percentage of dogs that bite people is monumental proof that the dog is the most benign, forgiving creature on earth.
W.R. Koehler
When we have all data online it will be great for humanity. It is a prerequisite to solving many problems that humankind faces.
Robert Cailliau
What is man’s greatest bane? His brother man alone.
Bias of Priene
Acedia is not in every dictionary; just in every heart.
Mignon McLaughlin
The study of crime begins with the knowledge of oneself.
Henry Miller
Man, when he is merely what he seems to be, is almost nothing.
Antonio Porchia
Give a man secure possession of a bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him nine years’ lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a desert.
Arthur Young
Our behavior is human with a sliver of animal, our souls animal with a sliver of human.
Carrie Latet
Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps; for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are and what they ought to be.
William Hazlitt
Man talks about everything, and he talks about everything as though the understanding of everything were all inside him.
Antonio Porchia, Voces
My dog is usually pleased with what I do, because she is not infected with the concept of what I “should” be doing.
Lonzo Idolswine
Man will do many things to get himself loved; he will do all things to get himself envied.
Mark Twain
We are all parasites; we humans, the greatest.
Martin H. Fischer
It is the nature of mortals to kick a fallen man.
Aeschylus, Agamemnon
God is less careful than General Motors, for He floods the world with factory rejects.
Mignon McLaughlin
Man’s highest merit always is, as much as possible, to rule external circumstances and as little as possible to let himself be ruled by them.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve.
Erich Fromm
When freedom from want and freedom from fear are achieved, man’s remains will be in rigor mortis.
Martin H. Fischer
Man is nature’s sole mistake.
W.S. Gilbert
The average man’s judgment is so poor, he runs a risk every time he uses it.
E.W. Howe
Man – a reasoning rather than a reasonable animal.
Alexander Hamilton
We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.
Charles Darwin
We’re animals. We’re born like every other mammal and we live our whole lives around disguised animal thoughts.
Barbara Kingsolver
Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment. Be a good animal, true to your animal instincts. The question is this: Is man an ape or an angel? I am on the side of the angels. I viewed my fellow man not as a fallen angel, but as a risen ape. The thief and the murderer follow nature just as much as the philanthropist. Many people believe that they are attracted by God, or by Nature, when they are only repelled by man. People are like birds: on the wing, all beautiful; up close, all beady little eyes. Evolution is individual – devolution is collective. As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities. I demand of you, and of the whole world, that you show me a generic character… by which to distinguish between Man and Ape. I myself most assuredly know of none. In creating the human brain, evolution has wildly overshot the mark. Evolution: that last step was a doozy! We have a world for each one, but we do not have a world for all. Nature does not deceive us; it is we who deceive ourselves. It is not titles that honor men, but men that honor titles. Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better.
R. Buckminister Fuller
David Herbert Lawrence
Benjamin Disraeli
Desmond Morris
T.H. Huxley
William Ralph Inge
Mignon McLaughlin
Martin H. Fischer
Voltaire
Carl Linnaeus
Arthur Koestler
Astrid Alauda
Antonio Porchia
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile
Niccolo Machiavelli