Quotes about Humanity

Memory feeds a culture, nourishes hope and makes a human, human.

There may be times when we are powerless to prevent injustice, but there must never be a time when we fail to protest.

For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.

We must not see any person as an abstraction. Instead, we must see in every person a universe with its own secrets, with its own treasures, with its own sources of anguish, and with some measure of triumph.

When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly.112 They are like this because they can't tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own—not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.

I think one of my best qualities is my ability to empathize with people. Perhaps it's because my journey has been so bumpy.

We're not separate races. There's only one human race.

All human beings are inherently good, so when someone goes off the rails, there must be some mitigating factor - he was bullied, was a loner, had an abusive father, or a domineering mother, etc.

It is impossible to deny that Christians and Muslims have a common agenda here: both faiths have at their heart the living image of a community raised up by God's call to reveal to the world what God's purpose is for humanity.

My story is important not because it is mine, God knows, but because if I tell it anything like right, the chances are you will recognize that in many ways it is also yours… it is precisely through these stories in all their particularity, as I have long believed and often said, that God makes himself known to each of us more powerfully and personally. If this is true, it means that to lose track of our stories is to be profoundly impoverished not only humanly but also spiritually.

You can survive on your own; you can grow strong on your own; you can prevail on your own; but you cannot become human on your own.

The story of any one of us is in some measure the story of us all.