Humanity

"We have been trained by a culture of violence and we are all agents of passive violence."

"We have held the peculiar notion that a person or society that is a little different from us, whoever we are, is somehow strange or bizarre, to be distrusted or loathed. Think of the negative connotations of words like alien or outlandish. And yet the monuments and cultures of each of our civilizations merely represent different ways of being human. An extraterrestrial visitor, looking at the differences among human beings and their societies, would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities."

"In its broad sense, civilization means not only comfort in daily necessities but also the refining of knowledge and the cultivation of virtue so as to elevate human life to a higher plane."

"To make the distinction unmistakably clear: Civilization is the vital force in human history; culture is that inert mass of institutions and organizations which accumulate around and tend to drag down the advance of life; Civilization is Giordano Bruno facing death by fire; culture is the Cardinal Bellarmino, after ten years of inquisition, sending Bruno to the stake in the Campo di Fiori..."

"More than any other product of human scientific culture scientific knowledge is the collective property of all mankind."

"The drive behind life has lost none of its power; proof that, impelled by that drive, man can build as well as destroy; that in his nature is more of Vishnu the Creator than of Siva the Destroyer."

"Food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go."

"To talk of humans as 'transcendent' is not to ascribe to them spiritual properties. It is, rather, to recognize that as subjects we have the ability to transform our selves, our natures, our world—an ability denied to any other physical being. In the six million years since the human and chimpanzee lines first diverged on either side of Africa's Great Rift Valley, the behaviour and lifestyles of chimpanzees have barely changed. Human behaviour and lifestyles clearly have. Humans have learnt to learn from previous generations, to improve upon their work, and to establish a momentum to human life and culture that has taken us from cave art to quantum physics and the conquest of space. It is this capacity for constant innovation that distinguishes humans from all other animals. All animals have an evolutionary past. Only humans make history."

"When do you manipulate others for your own advantage? When I notice myself doing it, usually it is when I am feeling insecure."

"We are creatures of habit more than we are creatures of change."

"The ultimate obscenity is not caring, not doing something about what you feel, not feeling! Just drawing back and drawing in, becoming narcissistic."

"In many ways, religion comes from the same place in us that art comes from. The language of the human heart if poetry"

"Lie, illusion, deception, she said--was that it truly, the universal language we all speak?"

"A smile or a tear has not nationality; joy and sorrow speak alike to all nations, and they, above all the confusion of tongues, proclaim the brotherhood of man"

"I was certain about this: In the best new language, there would be no words for me or you. Those words have caused all the trouble started by the old languages. In any new language, there should only be we."

"The buzzard has nothing to fault himself with. Scruples are alien to the black panther. Piranhas do not doubt the rightness of their actions. The rattlesnake approves of himself without reservations. The self-critical jackal does not exist. The locust, alligator, trichina, horseflylive as they live and are glad of it. The killer whale's heart weighs one hundred kilosbut in other respects it is light. There is nothing more animal-likethan a clear conscienceon the third planet of the Sun."

"Spirituality is the poetry of our experience. Science is the gauge of our reality. Together, they create the essence of our humanity."

"when I drive the freeways I see the soul of humanity ofmy city and it's ugly, ugly, ugly: the living have choked theheartaway."

"How—I didn't know anyword for it—how "unlikely". . . How had I come to be here,like them, and overheara cry of pain that could havegot loud and worse but hadn't?"