Humanity

"The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel to foreign parts."

"Gratitude is like the stem of the flower"

"I write poetry, worry, smile,laughsleepcontinue for a whilejust like most of usjust like all of us;sometimes I want to hug all Mankind on earthand say,god damn all this that they've brought down on us,we are brave and goodeven though we are selfishand kill each other andkill ourselves,we are the peopleborn to kill and die and weep in dark roomsand love in dark rooms,and wait, andwait and wait and wait.we are the people.we are nothingmore."

"I write poetry, worry, smile,laughsleepcontinue for a whilejust like most of usjust like all of us;sometimes I want to hug all Mankind on earthand say,god damn all this that they've brought down upon us,we are brave and goodeven though we are selfishand kill each other andkill ourselves,we are the peopleborn to kill and die and weep in dark roomsand love in dark rooms,and wait, andwait and wait and wait.we are the people.we are nothingmore."

"We each contribute our own book to the great library of humanity."

"Where's your church"We're standing in it."But this is a bookstore and it's a Friday."Yes, but you might also choose to see it as a cathedral of the human spirit-a storehouse consecrated to the full spectrum of human experience. Just about every idea we've ever had is in here somewhere. A place containing great thinking is a sacred space."

"You are hierarchical. That's the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones. It's a terrestrial characteristic. When human intelligence served it instead of guiding it, when human intelligence did not even acknowledge it as a problem, but took pride in it or did not notice it at all... That was like ignoring cancer."

"...a large segment of our population appears to have moved, in its cultural beliefs, to the use of an "ideal" measuring implement, based particularly on the individual's self-assessment of what "one's life should be like," e.g., essentially symptom free. This has moved us radically away from the reality of the human condition in which most of us have some nagging physical and mental symptoms for much of our lives. If one looks at history, developing countries, the poor, or soldiers (engaged in a highly stressful, physically and psychologically demanding and always potentially dangerous profession), this reality is clear. One recognizes that such culturally espoused ideal states of health are at best illusory. Life is filled with traumas, fears, apprehensions, hunger, aches, pains, illnesses, failures, unfulfilling work, and memories of pain. It is balanced by moments of happiness and pleasure, memories of positive events, doing one's duty, and enduring. The evolutionary history of our species is one in which those individuals who have survived to continue the human line have done so in the face of extreme violence, hunger, drought, flood, diseases, and war."

"Our planet is not fragile at its own timescale and we, pitiful latecomers in the last microsecond of our planetary year, are stewards of nothing in the long run."

"What separates man from animal is not the things we build or the ideas we stand behind. Its our ability to kill from a distance that makes us different"

"My simple explanation of why we human beings, the most advanced species on earth, cannot find happiness, is this: as we evolve up the ladder of being, we find three things: the first, that the tension between the range of opposites in our lives and society widens dramatically and often painfully as we evolve; the second, that the better informed and more intelligent we are, the more humble we have to become about our ability to live meaningful lives and to change anything, even ourselves; and consequently, thirdly, that the cost of gaining the simplicity the other side of complexity can rise very steeply if we do not align ourselves and our lives well."

"Evolution is true, but does that make it right?"

"The last Bible I looked at contained over 2000 pages, and you humans managed to get yourself kicked out Paradise by page 5. That has to be some kind of record."

"And what would we be, we sinful creatures, without fear, perhaps the most foresighted, the most loving of the divine gifts?"

"You stupid cow!” He laughed at her behind those icicle eyes. “You really think anyone is better than you? Everyone’s a thief, woman! Waiting for the next terrible thing to do to get ahead of their neighbor. Forty of us around a table weren’t enough to convince you of that?"

"Timshel - thou mayest"

"Positive mind set fuels positive action."

"Savage and unpredictable, a woman, like the sea, takes what she wants and spits the remains back into the boiling cauldron of humanity ..."

"The only way to rise above is to rise above. The only way to respond to wrong is with right. The only way to deal with injustice is to be just."

"Visit the Navy-Yard, and behold a marine, such a man as an American government can make, or such as it can make a man with its black arts, -a mere shadow and reminiscence of humanity, a man laid out alive and standing, and already, as one may say, buried under arms with funeral accompaniments, though it may be, -"Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,As his corse to the rampart were hurried;Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot,O'er the grave where our hero we buried."